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The first portion of Nuha al-Radi's "Baghdad Diaries," which recounts her family's experience of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, documents an incongruous mixture of wartime hardship and dogged ordinariness; it is a testament to the perseverance of the banal in the face of 42 consecutive nights of allied bombardment. There are barbecues and picnics and family get-togethers during air raids, and worries about termite and caterpillar infestations in the midst of trying to make do without electricity and water. It is the aftermath of the war, with the debilitating effects of United Nations sanctions and shortages of everything from food to paper, that causes Ms. Radi's family and friends the greatest anxiety and adversity. Ms. Radi is a painter and sculptor not a writer, but she has an artist's eye for the telling detail: the birds flying upside down after an air raid, people gathering mementos from a rocket that has fallen into the garden of the Rashid Hotel, bicycles becoming the transport mode of choice as gasoline supplies dry up. Although the second half of the book, which deals with the author's exile in Lebanon and her travels as an artist, devolves into a bitter and repetitious rant against the United States and Israel, the opening sections of these diaries give the reader a tactile and highly personal sense of how the allied bombing of Baghdad in 1991 affected ordinary Iraqi civilians. These descriptions can be read as a harbinger, in some respects, of residents' efforts to cope with the recent war and the continuing postwar upheaval. In this volume (parts were first published in Britain in 1998) the author points out that the air raids quickly turned Baghdad into a series of village neighborhoods cut off from one another, and her portraits of family members and friends often feel like the small-town portraits R. K. Narayan drew in his Malgudi novels: people in the thrall of their own obsessions and problems, even as they try to grapple with the exigencies of history's convulsions. We're introduced to someone called M. A. W., whose stomach growls so loudly that Ms. Radi's mother thinks another air raid is on the way, and Amal, who wears high heels to clear out the garden. Assia dreams of writing a book about sex and Islam so she can become famous and seek asylum in Sweden; and Adiba tries to cope during the bombings with being locked up with her "horror of a husband." Ms. Radi and her friends lament the lack of men during the war, and her mother compares their wartime plight to that of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind." Despite such homespun Westernized descriptions, there is a deep undercurrent of hostility toward the United States running through the book. Though the author and her friends clearly have no love for the regime of Saddam Hussein, they clearly do not appreciate being bombed by a foreign country. "If there's one thing I can't stand," she writes, "it is that Bush and that horrid Rambo Schwarzkopf will be thought of as heroes after all this is over. Will they take responsibility for the destruction and bloodshed? Their sanctimonious attitude is unbearable, as if we are the only bad guys in the world." A couple of pages later, she says of the first President Bush: "We are a third world country, well known for not having too much common sense. Why could he not have negotiated a peace instead of an annihilation?" If the consequences were not so tragic, she observes, the whole situation "would be quite funny." "We didn't have anything to do with the Kuwaiti takeover, yet we have been paying the price for it," she writes. "Meanwhile Our Leader is alive and well — or not so well, we do not know. We're living in an Indian movie, or rather like Peter Sellers in `The Party,' refusing to die and rising up again and again, another last gasp on the bugle." The crippling sanctions bring even more resentment, to the point where one of the author's friends says she wishes for "a catastrophe to envelop the U.S.A. and swallow the whole continent." In the aftermath of the war schools run out of pencils and paper for their students, who write on the backs of "receipts, pharmacy bills, account books, anything that has a blank side to it," and doctors begin reusing disposable gloves and syringes. "Anyone over 50 years old is told that there are no medicines," Ms. Radi writes. "Doctors want to keep what little there is for younger patients." Burglaries, kidnappings and thefts snowball in the wake of the war, and it becomes increasingly hard for many people to make a living. More and more of the author's friends begin to think about leaving Baghdad, as she herself does in the mid-1990's. Interestingly enough, there are few direct comments about Saddam Hussein, a reflection perhaps that as the book went to press the author still had family and friends living in Iraq. Instead she recounts jokes about him making the rounds of Baghdad ("In a meeting he asks his ministers what the time is; someone answers, `whatever time you say, sir' ") and chronicles the absurdities of daily life there. Of the people fleeing Baghdad at the onset of the war, with freezers loaded on their trucks, she writes: "Only we would escape from a war carrying freezers full of goodies. Iraqis have been hoarders for centuries. It's a national habit. Since one never knows when anything will be available on the market, one buys when one sees, and in great quantities. Most people automatically queue up when they see a line forming, not caring what's at the other end; boot polish, soap, tomatoes or a useless gadget." The picture of Iraq that emerges is that of a bumbling, incompetent country: misguided, inept and charging full speed from the 20th century back into the past. Ms. Radi mocks the national radio broadcasts hailing an Iraqi victory when the country is clearly on the ropes, and she describes the military's efforts as childishly pathetic: heaving Scud missiles into the sky in response to a barrage of devastating air raids, burning tires to try to confuse an enemy armed with computer technology. "Air-raid sirens sound only after the planes have already come," she writes. "White streaks across the sky, the sound of bombs falling and then the siren goes. I don't know why they even bother. I'm glad that this ineptitude of ours has not been publicized yet. Our ratings as the laughing stock of the world might rise even higher." Ms. Radi grew up in a prominent and well-to-do Iraqi family: her father, who died in exile in Beirut in 1971, was an ambassador to Iran and India in the 1940's and 50's, and she and her siblings were educated in India and England. It's hard to know just how representative the sentiments and experiences she recounts in this book may be. "I don't think I could set foot in the West again," she writes on Day 10 of the first gulf war. "If someone like myself who is Western educated feels this way, then what about the rest of the country?" Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
