So, Allyson Hennessy is dead! R.I.P, Allyson. This country can't forget you - you were too much a part of our lives. As Sparrow might have sung in Memories, "Yes, Alli, we'll always remember, jumpin when a steelban pass, playin mas......Yes, Alli, wherever you are, macomere, yuh come out wit real fire this year!"
Memories - Allyson covering the shows in the Savannah, just this Carnival; enjoying the pan, as usual, with every fibre of her being. Allyson, playing mas on a truck, last Carnival. Allyson on Dateline, Allyson laughing, dancing, passionate. She didn't just cover the passing parade - Allyson jumped in and became part of it.
It is often said that journalists should be objective, unbiased. Conventional truth is that they should report the news, not make it. But what happens when the work of the person concerned is so much stronger for that person's being able to enter fully into the lives of the people she interviewed, and of those whose stories she told? What happens when an interview sings because the person who did the interview was not at all objective, but became fully immersed in the experience she was finding out about?
Allyson was able to capture the truth of a person, or an event because she was able to enter the space that others occupy and show viewers what it was like to live there, sometimes through the eyes of the persons who first occupied that space, and sometimes through her own.
And when a person can make that happen by being as passionate, as involved in the reality they're capturing for their audience as Allyson Hennessy was, then how valuable is our much-exalted objectivity, really? Is it anything more than a consolation prize?
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