The Narco News School of Authentic Journalism Represents a Point of No Return

Support This Attempt to Move Beyond the Mundane Mass Culture of News

By Kanya D’Almeida
Class of 2011, School of Authentic Journalism

April 13, 2011

“Some are born to sweet delight; some are born to endless night.” – William Blake

Kanya D’Almeida

Though I bawled my way into a dim hospital room in the middle of a city surrounded by war, though I was driven home through streets that had witnessed horrors too gruesome to share, and though my life was dotted with sporadic splattered blood from a civil war that shadowed my days and haunted my nights, I lived a life of sweetest delight.

And through a lifetime of pleasures, lessons and luxuries, I have observed and quietly absorbed the impact of great men, women, ideas, moments and movements sacrificed on the altar of the greedy few. I have seen writers slaughtered, fighters martyred and thinkers muzzled.

On my journey, marred by close and distant losses, I have had one eternal friend: a restless pen that has guided me, in times of cold confusion, passionate sorrow or wild curiosity, unfailingly to the great, deep pool of words that the creature called language swims in.

I have come to adore these words, have drawn strength and power and promise from them, and cannot remove myself from their tangled embrace as I look onwards and outwards to the future. My hands are tied to my pen – we proceed together, or not at all.

It has led me to a newsroom called the Inter Press Service (IPS), a news agency based at the United Nations in New York City. In placing my pen in the service of the inner workings of the world’s largest development bureaucracy, I have turned my head firmly away from a discourse of charity, aid and peace, and toward a new, revolutionary language that smells of the earth of grassroots struggles, indigenous movements and a battle for political and economic justice.

The Narco News School of Authentic Journalism represents a point of no return, a moment in my existence as a writer that allows me to shed a heavy coat of deference to the powers and systems that be and chart a fresh course, amongst like-minded, like-hearted contemporaries, towards a new and radical language of options.

As Sun Ra, the great revolutionary musician and philosopher, pointed out, “Everything possible has been tried and nothing has changed. What we need is the Impossible.”

By attempting to rescue the media from its cancer of corporate sponsorship and sentiment, I believe that the School of Authentic Journalism is striving for this very Impossibility.

At a time when women are struggling to regain control of their own lives and bodies, when farmers are attempting to regain control of their own land, when youth are fighting to regain control of their own minds and while artists are battling to regain control of their own expression, Nacro News represents the writers joining a war to regain control of their words and wrest them from the clutches of those who have made a mockery of our shared, collective means of communication.

Please make a donation today, online, at this link:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Or you can make a check out to:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
PO Box 1446
Easthampton, MA 01027 USA

This is my plea to you, reader of this bulletin, to support the School of Authentic Journalism in its attempt to move beyond the mundane, mass culture of messaging and produce news that is worthy of the human life, joy and suffering that constitutes it. Any donation will be greatly appreciated – as Marx said, “From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs!”

Thank you,
Kanya D’Almeida

Lea Ud. el Artículo en Español

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