Award-winning journalist Hala Gorani was "born in one country" and "raised in another with parents from somewhere else entirely," as she tells us in her new book "But You Don't Look Arab: And Other Tales of Unbelonging." Gorani, who became the first Arab-American to host a primetime cable news show, told me in our recent “Salon Talks” conversation how this unique background has informed both her decades-long career as a journalist — sometimes covering devastating conflicts in the region of her ancestry — and her personal search "to try to figure out who I am."

Gorani, who is Syrian-American, worked at CNN for decades and now reports for NBC News, had recently returned from the Middle East, where she covered an evacuation flight of wounded Palestinian children from Gaza who she describes as "completely traumatized." She said that while previous conflicts between Israel and Hamas have been brutal, “nothing has compared to what we're seeing now.”

She cited the unprecedented scale of death among women and children in Gaza, along with the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure. But Gorani also noted another important — the role of social media. “A lot of younger people, especially who are watching it on their apps, on their phones, are getting another side of the narrative,” one typically not seen from legacy media organizations, she explained.

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Gorani also candidly discussed the emotional toll of covering war zones as a journalist, saying that “a human brain is not designed to be exposed to this much misery and bloodshed every single day.” Because her family comes from Syria, she said, covering the conflict there "did, in the end, take a huge mental health toll on me, in the sense that I started really getting a lot more anxious and panicky.” When she was anchoring coverage about the bloodshed in Syria, Gorani told me, she would take her earpiece out so “I couldn't hear any of the crying anymore.”

Watch the “Salon Talks” interview with Hala Gorani here or read a transcript of our conversation below, lightly edited for length and clarity.

In your book you write about being born in one country but raised in another one, "with parents from somewhere else entirely." Tell us about that journey, and how it all makes sense.

Well, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and it didn't growing up. Now of course, I've come to make peace with my set of overlapping identities. My parents are from Syria, originally. They were born in Aleppo. They moved to Seattle before I was born. My parents split up when I was six years old. My mom moved to France, so I moved with her there. French became my native tongue, even though English is now my strongest language because I've been working in English as a journalist for 25 or 26 years.

And then Arabic, of course, was the language spoken at home — and there was Arabic food and going back to Syria for summers, at least before the war,. I'm married to a German, who's right there sitting off-camera. I live in London. I was partly brought up in Algeria. There is so much going on that it's always been a lifelong search for me to try to figure out who I am. Really it's a natural human impulse, I think, to know what makes us who we are.

And have you figured that out?

Writing this book, I figured out that the journey itself is maybe where I belong. It's what attracted me to journalism. It's what attracted me to being a foreign correspondent, to trying to find my story reflected in other people and the people that I cover. I write in the book about being in Haiti and meeting this shopkeeper, recognizing the pale-skinned man and asking him where he was from. When he said "Syria," I was like, "Brother." In the middle of this post-apocalyptic, miserable situation, recognizing something in a perfect stranger of yourself.

In your book you write about your great-grandmother who was in the Sultan Abdulaziz's harem. I've never met anyone who had a family member in a harem, but I don't think it's exactly what people think. Share a little bit more about that and your great-grandmother.

I did research into my family, and women are very poorly covered in history. We have photos of my male ancestors wearing the fez and the Ottoman military uniform, but women were rarely photographed. Their stories were rarely highlighted because they weren't stories of typical accomplishment, in the male sense. They don't rise in the ranks of the military. They don't become ministers of security.

I went down that path and I learned this story through the female members of my family. My great-great-grandmother, during the Ottoman Empire, had been taken against her will, kidnapped and then inducted into the sultan's harem. This was not uncommon. Women who came from the Slavic areas of the Ottoman Empire, which extended all the way into the Circassian mountains, in what is now Bulgaria, would be taken because of how they looked. This was the effect of colorism at the time, which still exists today. The pale skin, the blue eyes, the high cheekbones, this is where some of my physical features come from.

Being abducted against her will was horrible, obviously. But it's not like in the movies where there's just women in a tent waiting for the sultan. These women are educated , almost to be women of society. I never knew about that part of it.

It's very interesting, because the word slavery has a connotation in this country, which is a little bit different. Obviously these women were the victims of a form of sexual slavery. There's no doubt about that. But they were slaves and at the same time women of society. They were masters of other slaves, but at the same time, they were the toys, the objects of the will of the men, of the sultans and of the higher-ranking women. So there was this constant contradiction in their lives, but ultimately they were not the mistresses of their own destinies. That much is very clear.

You go through the history of Syria and the role that colonization played. Why was that important, to share the real history of a country that doesn't get much press except during the time of the civil war?

"I figured out that the journey itself is maybe where I belong. It's what attracted me to journalism. It's........

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