Deborah Campbell.

profile by Joe Wiebe
posted October 12, 2005

The prospect of writing a book about Israel and Palestine would leave me in a proverbial cold sweat. How would one untangle the convoluted web of facts, opinions, half-truths and propaganda in a land beset by suicide bombers, soldiers and submachine-gun-toting settlers? Before I even opened Deborah Campbell’s This Heated Place (Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95), which was published in 2002, I admired her for taking on this virtually insurmountable task. After reading it, I admired her even more for the virtuousity and insight it showcases.

This Heated Place is an exceptional book which manages to inform its readers about the Israeli-Palestinian quandary without preaching or taking sides. Campbell accomplishes this simply by describing her experiences while travelling there in the days immediately following 9-11.

Campbell‘s bio describes her as being “of Scottish and Mennonite descent.” When I ask her how her Mennonite heritage contributes to her life, she responds, “My father's side of the family is from the Scottish Campbell clan. A few hundred years ago the Campbells were brutal, unapologetic warriors, the Americans of their day. And my mother's side is Russian Mennonite, which has an anti-war heritage. I think my character has in some ways been formed by these contradictions.”

“I am interested in social change,” she elaborates, “which is part of the Mennonite philosophy. I believe in the power of words to ignite social change and to present a new way of seeing, but I am also a person who has a good grasp of human nature, and I believe good writing engages readers, knocks them out somehow.”

Campbell offers up her own share of knock-out writing in This Heated Place, as exemplified by this sample from the chapter on Jerusalem: “Once inside the Old City, I feel instantly calmed. The ancient walls of milky Jerusalem stone stand impervious to time and to the streams of humanity who live out their lives within these confines. The walls do not complain, nor do they suffer complaints. They will see this generation and the next as they have seen the many who came before them. The knowledge is oddly comforting.”

To research the book, Campbell visited several cities within Israel, including Tel Aviv, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Haifa, and a kibbutz on the Mediterranean coastline. She spent time in the West Bank, encountering people in Hebron, Efrat, Bethlehem and Ramallah. She even hitchhiked into Gaza, one of the most dangerous places in the world on a good day. The man who dropped her off a few minutes from the border crossing said, “Give me your parents’ number so I can inform them when you don’t come back.”

She felt she had to risk her life in order to see the whole story. “I strive to be open to other ways of seeing without letting them blur my own perspective—rather, letting them enhance it,” she explains. “This allows me to enter other worlds and inhabit them and, ultimately, I hope, reflect them back to my readers. I want to affect people, to break down the walls of familiarity and dullness and present them with something new, something urgent or funny or beautiful or startling.”

She definitely achieved her goals in This Heated Place. And what is she doing for an encore? It turns out that when I contact her to arrange this interview, she is about to leave for Iran, where she will research “a book about the clash between modernity and tradition in contemporary Iran. It's going to be a literary book full of stories of life, discussions of sex and God and evil and goodness, all of which are frothing around in this society.”

On her first day in Tehran in late February, she emailed me from “an internet cafe packed with teenaged boys playing group video war games and shouting loudly to one another. Outside the window chic Tehrani girls are wearing tight jeans under their miniskirts and talking on cell phones,” not what one might expect to see in this fundamentalist Islamic state where genders are segregated by law. Campbell must wear a hijab over her hair in public at all times. “I wear mine like a pirate,” she says, “because one should be fierce to deal with the fearsome city of Tehran.”

“By necessity,” she continues, “I find myself almost exclusively in the company of women. It is illegal for men and women to so much as shake hands. They can be arrested and imprisoned. I break that rule when I am interviewing men, but most Iranians follow the laws despite their desire for change. Standards are loosening somewhat because there was a baby boom after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and 70 percent of the population is under 30, so there are simply too many young people who want more social freedoms, and they are pushing the boundaries. A bit.”

What drives her to put herself into such risky situations as hitch-hiking into Gaza or immersing herself in one of the most staunchly repressive countries in the world? She has “always been interested in the ‘other,’” she explains, “in cultures and ways of being outside of my own. I like to be in environments in which everything I experience is unfamiliar to me. It attenuates one’s senses and makes it possible to see oneself and one’s own culture and biases more clearly.”

If This Heated Place is any indication, we, her readers, are lucky that Deborah Campbell wants to explore the “other,” and is willing to take us along on her journeys.