momentum going to address an issue that is affecting us all. gerald tan, al jazeera catch up with the news and sport by checking our web so-called. aljazeera.com. click on the "watch now" icon. ♪ this week okay talk to al jazeera. molly crabapple. >> i didn't come to journalism with the sort of bias towards objectivity. i deeply believe in having an extreme bias toward reality. >> in her youth, she traveled europe and the near east and worked as a nude model and

danced ber lesk. >> so much of women is maintaining this sort of pearly innocent purity. i hated that idea. i hated it. >> crapapple has drawn migrant labor camps, illustrated the conflicts in palestine and syria. and she's taken her sketch pad to the u.s. prison in guantanamo cuba. >> a place where when i went, they were force feeding, torturing really dozens of men and there was a gift shop saying it didn't getmo better than this. >> she used art work to draw attention to problems in the criminal justice system. >> they takesed, hit men with electrified clothing. >> following the release of her memoir, drawing blood, crapapple has been called a new model for this century's young woman an

irreverent guide. i spoke to her at hertude yes in new york. >> you write in the memoir, cope, to draw was trouble and safety, adventure and freedom. it was an outlet for you not just a form of expression? >> art saved my life. it was my addiction. i think i could be locked inside a room and draw over the walls. i can't imagine life without art. sometimes think that there is literally nothing else i could do on this earth but be an artist. >> it was an escape for you as a child? >> i think like many kids, i had that sort of age dismorphy i can't thing where in the head, i was ready for and ventures but in the world i had to ask for permission to borrow a book. i could live as i pleased. >> you had grown up around art because your mother was and is san it straighter? >> an amazing illustrator.

i think it was an advantage because so many kids, they think of art as something that you will never make a living at, something very, very distant. a lot of parents encourage that. but for me, i was like, no. my mom puts food on the table by drawing cabbage patch kids. this is a total way to make a living. i can do this. >> your dad is is a political science professor. so your work in some ways, this million dollarsing that you talk about of politics and art,eldin politics and art,. >> it was. i never thought of it like that. my father was a huge influence on me. he was a huge influence on me. he is marx isn't. t he would buy me copies of emma goldman's autobiography, constantly going to cuba. i knew all about chiy guerra my dad's were confronts authority and be interesting. >> confront authority and be

interesting. and did he encourage rebellion? >> i think -- i think even the most rebellious of parents never really wants a rebellious child but he definitely taught me to think about the world in this very sharp and skeptical way. >> so many it's in the blood and that sort of leads me back to the title of your book, "drawing blood," this sense of rebellion. after high school, you go to europe and you do what i think for a lot of would-be bow hemmians is a dream. you find al book in shakespeare & company? >> i had known. it's a legend area english parisian book stop where basically n e'er-do-wells would sleep on bufrningsz there. the only other price for our accomodation was we were supposed read lots and lots and lots. i would keep returning back to shake spears & company throughout my later teens.

it was a imagine cal place, a place where all of the sort of imperatives of the modern world, the idea we must have lots and lots of rules, we must make lots and lots of money and everything must be done in this controlled and capitalist way were turned on their heads. the owner, george, he called it the little socialist utopia that could. but other like other experiments, they are alive. it never collapsed. it's been around for i want to say nearly 60 years now and george's daughter runs it magnificently. >> one stand outline and so many in this memoir opens chapter 7 of your book, quote, babies are cute so you don't kill them. young artists must be arrogant so they don't kill themselves. can you explain what you meant by that? >> you love great art. i was bad at the start.

there are years, decades where the gulf between what you love and the gulf between what you are is so yawningly huge and if you are not almost dilutionally air gants, you would realize, god, i am never going to be like this person that got me in to this. and you would just either give up or as i put it hyper bolcally, kill yourself. so you have to have that sort of dye lucienal mono mania to you. sometimes i look at my work from in my early 20s and think how did i ever get a start in this profession? who would have hired me. >> you make your 20s sound like they are far away. you are 31? >> i am 32. it's a decade. >> you have done a lot in that time. and one of those things is you have worked collat really at least in the sex business. you call it the naked girl business. another huge chunk of your memoir deals with that time. you worked as a nude model to begin with. what drew you to that? >> well, a few things. faultied, i am with a too dysfunctional to have an

ordinary job and it was a way to qualified, what some peopleblied, the world is not filled with lucrative job offers for fashion technology dropouts. i wanted something that would pay $100 an hour when i was 19, and so i worked as a really low rent naked model for all sorts of rather hilarious places and fun giggs. i got to pose next to an old car. i liked it because it was a trade that was a slightly outlawed trade and so much of women, so much of our what our virtue is supposed to consist of is maintaining this pearly, notices heurty. i that i had idea. >> it was part of that arc of trans guess that started when you were four years old? >> yeah. >> i was curious because at some point, you changed your name, and i think it was in that period. >> jennifer kaban and you changed it to molly crabapple. you described in a part of the book this physical trans pormentation.

i wondered whether the nude work was also part of that sort of physical experimentation. >> it actually, i never thought of it that way. i had broken up with my long-term boyfriend since i was 15 years old, i guess. and i was 19 and living in new york and i need to get a job obviously, and i think that it was just the time when there were so many changes in my life happening all at once. >> it's interesting how you're able to dig deeper into it in your memoir. you wrote, i wanted to see if i could work in a field as fraught and sigmatized as sex and emerge unscathed. toichltd burn off childhood. did you emerge from that experience unscathed? >> who emerges from life unscathed? men, for instance, are always encouraged to go out into the world and get wounds. right? so many men i have known have

joined the military not to defend their country but because they wanted today have an adventure soo many do all sorts of risky things. with women, we are not en kunldz to do that. never encouraged to test ourselves. our unscathedness is considered our most valuable asset. i hate that. >> so what was the outcome of that? did you end up feeling like an empowered strong woman who made that choice, or did you feel disempowered by it? >> i have to admit i hate the word empowered. i feel like it's the zeno's paradox of words. no power? empower? and i don't know what empowered means. the only thing i know i felt empowered by is i felt empowered by making $400 in 4 hours. i found that highly, highly empowering. in terms of my work, i loved it sometimes. i that i had other times. sometimes, it was just really physically awkward and kind of silly. sometimes i like, the community

of women around it, even if the work, itself, was something that i really, really could have taken or left. >> yeah. >> but it's something i am very grateful that i did. i really do believe that people who spend their entire lives being like protypical good boys and girls and going to offices and being patted on the head by authority are the least interesting people in the world. >> did it affect your later work as a professional artist and i will straighter? >> absolutely. >> positively or negativetively? >> i think positively. it affected my reception but in terms of actual work, which is the important thing, i mean it taught me so much because once you have worked on the other side of your field, itthe side your field that will people don't think can talk, i mean that's the most important thing. that's when you realize there isn't like the far end subject you can just objectify and project things on. that's when you realize we are all humans, all watching and being watched. i feel grateful for that. >> still ahead, talking about abortion. why molly crabapple thought it

was important to share her story. that's next on talk to al jazeera.

>> this is talk to al jazeera with me, stephanie sy. i'm speaking this week with the author and artist, molly crabapple. some of what you write about in this book is very, very personal, including your abortion. and you had a really bad infection after the procedure. did you debate, molly, whether or not to include that in the book? and why did you ultimately decide to? >> i actually had written about my abortion before in an essay for vice. and of all the essays i've written, that was the one that i got the most positive and heartfelt feedback from.

so many women wrote to me, women who had had abortions that were illegal wrote to me. older women who had had to have the procedure, you know, by hack doctors pre roe v. wade here wrote to me to thank me. young women who had had bad experiences. young women who had okay experiences. women who were about to have abortions. and the reason i wrote about it before and the reason i included it in my book was that one out of three american women has an abortion. and yet, the only things that we see in the media are these sort of i wanna call them edge cases that people use as justification 'cause they're uncomfortable with abortion. like, women have abortion because they're raped or women have abortion because the fetus is, you know, is severely, severely damaged. or women have an abortion because they're 13 and don't know what sex is. or also on the other hand, you have the ridiculous right wing argument that women have abortion as birth control. but there's very little talk about, you know... >> just ordinary women that have had to make that deciscion. >> yeah, the vast majority. >> exactly.

and i felt, because of that, there's a lot of space for stigma and shame, even amongst people who consider themselves pro-choice. i knew that a lot of people admired me before, a lot of young women did. and i wanted to say, you know, "i had this. you're not stupid because you got pregnant accidentally. you're not stupid. there's nothing wrong with you for having this procedure if it's something that you want or need." and, you know, "don't be hard on yourself." >> you write in the book, "lying sick in that bed, my politics become personal." and indeed, in the memoir, there is sort of a shift. was that a turning point for your work in that it then became more political? >> my work didn't really become more political afterwards. it took me actually a little while to find that. but it was when i felt it, you know what i mean? 'cause i when i was protesting, for instance, again that iraq war, i'm not iraqi. i don't have family in iraq. i didn't have family that was enlisting in the army. it was something that, while i deeply, deeply believed the iraq war was a crime against humanity, it did not

personally affect my life. whereas abortion politics was something that affected me in the most bodily, possible way. >> today, you describe yourself as a journalist. you write for vice. where has that job taken you? >> i have done work in syria, i've done work in gaza, west bank, abu dhabi. i recently was in iraqi kurdistan, guantanamo bay. i've done a lot of american prison stories as well, lebanon, turkish protests. >> so i wanna unpack some of that in a bit. but first, i wanna talk about your politics because you've described yourself as a leftist and you campaigned for president obama back in 2008. what do you think of him today especially given the criticism he's faced over his use of drones, over surveillance and his middle east policy? >> it's a very complicated question. his use of drones is murderous. he is someone who's imprisoned many, many, many whistleblowers.

his syria policy was confused and tangled and i think the worst of all the worlds in a number of ways. on the other hand, he does face a lot of criticisms because he's black and you can't deny that. and it's also nice to have a president who is intelligent. and i know that that sounds like, such a low bar, but it is nice to have a president who can make the effort to pronounce the names of other countries correctly and read books. and i sometimes wonder if we're going to have that in a long time. but in terms of his actual policies, i mean, he's done so many things that i disagree with or so many things that i think are absolutely horrid. >> your memoir, "drawing blood," starts with a scene of you drawing khalid sheikh mohammed, the man believed to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks. why did you start there? >> i was trying to think of this moment that summarized everything that's kind of paradoxical about art. i was sitting in this kangaroo court in guantanamo bay, drawing the man who probably murdered

2,000 of my neighbors. and while i was drawing him, i was breaking his face down into lines and angles. it sort of summed up everything that my art is about and everything that the book is about, which is taking something that's this moment that really shows the raw edges and raw horrors of the world, and then combining that with the aesthetics. i've been to many places where bad things were happening for lack of a better word. but guantanamo is our thing. i say, "ours," like, that's... that's the american horror. it is the most american place in the world. it's a place where, when i went, they were force feeding and torturing really...dozens of men, while at the same time there was a cheerful gift shop that sold t-shirts that say, "it don't gitmo better than this." it was a place without irony, without self-reflection. a place where terrible crimes against humanity were done with, you know, a chipper smile and a down home accent. and i think that that was why it

struck me as so deeply even though, you know, i obviously, i've been, you know, to azaz where city blocks were being flat bombed by the regime and where isis was car bombing a garage near a refugee camp. but i think guantanamo hit me so closely because it was something to intrinsically related to being american. >> you've also done some work around the criminal justice system. tell me about what you've seen in that regard. >> one of my most recent pieces was a profile of these whistleblowers. they were six black men in long term solitary confinement. and by this, one of them, one of them was, or he has, he's still in for 14 years. and they were giving information to a local human rights group in pennsylvania run by prisoners' families about various abuse and racism and even torture that was being done by guards at sci dallas. and when the group published this report, they sent a copy to the prison. and the guards used it as a

checklist to abuse prisoners. and one night, while they were beating one of the whistleblowers, six of his friends put up... they put up their sheets on their cell windows in solitary cell. and this was an agreed upon symbol in the solitary wing. this is how you get a superior 'cause very often, if you had a complaint, you wouldn't want to give it to the person you were complaining against. and the way that the guards reacted is they came in in riot gear. they filled the cells with tear gas. they beat, they tased, they hit the men with electrified shields. they cut off their clothing, put hoods over their head. and when one of the guys filed a complaint again that d.a., later the d.a., that very same d.a., then charged all of the men with felony rioting. and i've seen videotapes of it. and it's an absolutely fraudulent charge. and also, it's something that ought to have been obvious that it was fraudulent from the start because how do you riot when you're in a solitary cell?

rioting is a group activity. >> yeah. i mean, what is that like for you to sort of have seen conflict overseas and then to see some of these endemic problems that this country faces while the u.s. i think often holds itself up as being sort of a moral compass for the world? you have a unique perspective on that. >> i don't think any one country is the moral compass to the world. i hate the what about-ist argument that happens when the u.s. will be, like, "oh, but russia locked girls up for singing in a church." or russia will be, like, "oh, but the u.s. locked someone up for revealing their war crimes," because ultimately, what they're just trying to lead to is a world where everyone gets locked up for everything. i think that it's important that we don't find our moral compass in nations, but rather in an internationalist and universal belief in human rights. >> the power of merging art and journalism - molly crabapple talks about the melding of her two worlds. stay with us.

>> i can neither confirm nor deny that there's a "dark prison". >> they don't want anyone to know what is going on inside. >> he was not just a person, he was a human being. >> "faultlines". >> what do we want? >> al jazeera america's hard-hitting... >> today the will be arrested. >> ground-breaking... >> they're firing canisters of gas at us. >> emmy award-winning, investigative series.

>> i'm stephanie sy, you're watching "talk to al jazeera." my guest this week is reporter and artist, molly crabapple. >> let's talk about the fact that you are relatively young and you have done a lot.

not only have you been to conflict zones recently, but you've danced burlesque, you've been a nude model. you have eaten fire. so i guess what is next? if one has goals, is there anything that you wanna check off the list? >> oh my god. i'd like to write another book that's not about me. i wanna just keep traveling and doing journalism and making big paintings and speaking to all of the defiant and brilliant people that i possibly can. and i don't know. i've never had like, the proper five year career plans like that. i'm just an artist. i make things. >> some of your artwork has become part of the permanent collections of not only the museum of modern art, but the barjeel foundation and the new york historical society. have you inadvertently become part of the art establishment? >> it's really funny because in some ways, i have. like, i always hate when people front and they say, "oh, i'm such an outsider," and then

they're saying it from their fancy manhattan loft. it's, it's really terrible when people do that. but on the other hand i am in these fancy collections. but i still wouldn't even know how to get a gallery show and write an artist statement in, like, their proper vocabulary and jargon that they like. >> does that divide even exist anymore between sort of high art and the kind of art that you have spent your life doing? >> oh, absolutely. high art is stuff that sells for $1 million. >> that's true. >> it's stuff that's deliberately scarce that's like a stock certificate or something. i don't do stuff like that i think because i'm just too greedy to make stuff. >> what do you mean by too greedy? >> well, no because it's if you wanna be one of those type of artists, you basically wanna create singular, highly polished, extremely technical, really, really big things that look really, really nice in oligarchs' lofts. that's the type of... that's what high art is. and you really can't make that many of them because not that many people have $1 million for something. so it's this very, like, artificial scarcity. it's like being a faberge egg maker. and i just really like to make

stuff. i like to make stuff-- >> and you like to make a lot of it. >> yeah... >> can you talk a little bit about your technique and about your process? >> oh man. when i'm in the field, i have a sketch book and i always draw. i love to draw in the field. and it's so good for building a rapport with people because a lot of times, like, camera gear's really alienating. you know, you have a big metal object in front of your face. could be used as proof against someone. whereas when you have a sketch book, it's like you're doing a little trick. people can look at you. they can tell you if you're doing bad. so i will sketch a lot in the field. and then when i get home, i take my sketches and i take my really bad iphone photos and i do usually watercolors. and i look at the sketch and i think, like, "what's gonna be the best plane? what's the best angle?" i never wanna draw from good photos because if i'm drawing from a good photo, it's like the photo has done all the art and what's the point of what i'm doing? and i often think about what's something that i can tell that photos can't? for instance, when i was in guantanamo, i was censored from drawing the faces of guards. and so, i would draw these, like, smiley faces with, like-- but with a blank line because i

wanted to make it very explicit that i was being censored. >> how would you sort of like your voice to resonate in the world today? >> i'm so terrible at answering questions like that. i feel like... >> i know it's sort of rhetorical. >> it's like - this is like my kryptonite here. i just wanna make things and then people can take them as they like them. but the one thing with my journalism is i always wanna show people that the world is way bigger and crueler and more beautiful and more complicated than they ever possibly could've imagined. i think if i had one sort of idea, it's the idea of that sort of muchless, that sort of largeness of the world. >> so you were an artist first. and today you're both, you're an artist and a journalist. how have you sort of melded these two worlds? >> one of my frustrations with art was always that artists were supposed to stay in our studios and be, like, these mute, little things that were just creating pretty objects and not thinking really about anything outside of our work. and i thought that was so boring. i wanted an art that was engaged in the world that was engaged

in all the conflicts, all the beauty, all the horror, all of the interesting and terrible and wonderful things. and journalism allowed me to do that with my art. it's something that i'm so grateful to for it. what i think my art brought to my journalism is that i didn't come to journalism with the sort of bias towards faux objectivity that you see a lot in the news. i deeply believe in having an extreme bias towards reality. but that's very different than pretending that you're an all seeing eye that has no internal bias towards yourself. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> grammy award-winning jazz singer cassandra wilson. >> everyone comes into the world with their unique voice. the question is, do you know how to develop it? >> her life, legacy and song-writing secrets. >> tapping into a spirituality inside of the music is very important. >> i lived that character.

>> go one-on-one with america's movers and shakers. >> we will be able to see change. this is al jazeera. ♪ ♪ hello i am lauren taylor, this is the news hour live from london. coming up. turkey identifies the istanbul suicide bomber as a suspected isil member and detains five other people. no let up. desperate refugees continue to brave the dangerous crossing from turkey to greece, despite new e.u. rules to sends them back. a country in crisis, we speak to brazilian who his have lost faith in the political system. hellore