Baghdad Diaries

Nuha al-Radi

A set of four diaries set over the course of about 15 years. The author is a Iraqi artist who was in Baghdad during the initial US bombing after the Kuwaiti invasion. She found that writing short snippets of thoughts and chronology was all she could manage creatively for awhile and it turned into a discipline she continued for the next decade. I love the descriptions of life in Iraq. It is not a description that is place based, although place is clearly important. Instead, it is relational. These are the people who lived in my house during the bombing, these are the people we checked on every week, these are the people we corresponded with, etc. And the little hints about what it means to be Iraqi (apparently Iraq is a dog country, while Lebanon tends to favor cats). Al-Radi has a section on war, embargo, exile, and identity. Each is revealing of the stresses and idiosyncrasies that come with being the recipient of bombs and missiles. While she is not blind to the wrong-doings of Iraq and its political leaders, she does legitimately call out the hypocrisy of the west, in particular the US and UK in the decade long sustained war. And continually asks the question about the justice of bombing the people of Iraq. Overall, while I enjoyed reading her first hand account of this now "old" war, the main effect was just to make me mad all over again. Frustrated with the political leadership of my country, both then and now.

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note: this book is part of a Reading Lolita in Tehran project, which you can read more about here.