Does the primal terror of having your city bombed and blasted turn even an intellectual’s brain into a twitchy tribal organism? On the evidence of the Iraqi artist Nuha al-Radi’s “Baghdad Diaries: A Women’s Chronicle of War and Exile” (217 pages. Vintage Books. Paperback, $12), the answers to the questions above would seem to be, A) you don’t; and B) unfortunately, yes.
Excerpted in Granta in 1992, and first published in abbreviated form as a slender volume in England in 1998, “Baghdad Diaries” covers al-Radi’s experiences in Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War of 1991, her sojourn there under sanctions in the mid-’90s and her life in exile, primarily in Beirut, her current home, during the past few years. The American publisher has made frantic attempts to update the book to address the recent war, but the new entries–instantly belated antiwar pleas–add little to the book.
Al-Radi introduces her diaries with the winning acknowledgement that “I am not a writer.” The self-deprecation is an indication of the mostly likeable personality that emerges in these pages, but she is also not a thinker of much moral complexity. For comparison’s sake, her book lacks the harrowing, whirlpool depths and wisdom of the diaries and memoirs similarly composed in a time of steel-toe boots–Nadezhda Mandelstam’s epochal “Hope Against Hope,” Andrei Sinyavsky’s “A Voice from the Chorus” and Nikolay Punin’s “Diaries,” all scratched out in secret inside the Soviet Union during the last century.
That said, the now 62-year-old al-Radi sounds like she would be a lot more fun to hang around with than most of the above, not to mention your average political philosopher. A member of a distinguished Iraqi family and the daughter of a former ambassador to Iran and India, she grew up largely abroad and was educated in private English-speaking schools. Interestingly, her journals were written in English, and they often employ the stiff upper-lip locutions of the British upper class. The unmarried al-Radi jauntily confesses that “I am past chap time, although one never gives up hope.”
She’s certainly no dour self-flagellant of Islam, meek before men and wishing to turn the clock back to the seventh century. In fact, al-Radi comes across as that endangered Middle Eastern species–a secular Muslim, blithely unconcerned about the letter of the law. She likes a party. She drinks beer and Bloody Marys. After the electricity goes out in Baghdad during day seven of the gulf war, al-Radi wryly complains: “The worst has happened–beer without ice.” When the toilets in her house stop working, al-Radi and guests–men and women–troop out into the surrounding orchard to relieve themselves. She eats pork. We witness her ordering it from a horrified supermarket employee in Beirut. “It’s pig! Pig!” the counterman shouts. “Yes,” she tells him.
It is easy to see how al-Radi came by her wartime insouciance–she is cut from the same sturdy antique fabric as her mother, an intrepid, enduring woman of casual hauteur who is perhaps the most beguilingly portrayed of all the book’s characters. As a cure for an aching knee, the old lady sleeps with a cabbage leaf wrapped around the joint. “What do you do with it the next day?” al-Radi asks. “I throw it on the hillside for the chickens,” her mother says, much to her daughter’s relief. When al-Radi tells her to switch on the coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Center, her mother refuses to leave off watching a broadcast of Sherlock Holmes’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
Al-Radi is at least as cosmopolitan. She adores the work of the American philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto. Her rascal of a dog is named Salvador Dali. She equates the spectacle of antiaircraft fire over Baghdad to the experience of “attending a Philip Glass-like opera with an overlay of son et lumiere.” This cultural range, however, does not equal a comparable breadth and disinterested passion when it comes to politics.
And that is one of the more disquieting aspects of “Baghdad Diaries.” Within its pages lurks a profound disassociation between the governed and their leaders. “We didn’t have anything to do with the Kuwaiti takeover,” writes al-Radi rather improbably, “yet we have been paying the price for it.” We didn’t have anything to do with it. This, of course, is the civilian’s eternal lament, the same sort of thing uttered by the innocents attacked by terrorists for the policies of their elected officials. After September 11, many Americans could relate to such sentiment. “Baghdad Diaries” inadvertently suggests that totalitarian states breed passivity, a shrugging off of violence and repression as a force nearly geological in its power and impersonality and therefore not to be contended with by mere mortals.
Information in such a nation is hard to come by. Like everyone else in Iraq–including Saddam Hussein himself, one presumes–al-Radi relies on rumors, whispers, deductions, the bloody apocrypha of prison and torture cell. Word circulates through Baghdad as invisibly as the weather. There is a war in the North, there are revolts in the South. A coup has been attempted, a coup has been put down. Saddam’s brother-in-law has fled the country, Saddam’s brother-in-law has returned under promise of amnesty, Saddam’s brother-in-law and his entire family (Saddam’s grandchildren included) have been slaughtered.
Despite the standard apologia for dictators–that at least there was order under their icy dominion, in contrast to the chaos of their aftermath–the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein is already rife with looting in al-Radi’s testimony. Her book is as stuffed as a robber’s gunnysack with stories of theft–from palaces, hotels, archaeological sites, street intersections and embassies. In perhaps the most noteworthy anecdote, she describes a taxi driver returning to Baghdad from the front after the first gulf war, a dead soldier’s coffin roped to the top of his car. He goes into a house to ask directions to the home of the soldier’s parents. When he comes back out to his taxi, the coffin with its macabre cargo is gone.
There are, however, few mentions of Saddam Hussein in al-Radi’s diaries, and the ones there are tend toward the obliquely jesting: “Meanwhile, Our Leader is alive and well–or, not so well, we do not know.” And there is this: “Latest Saddam joke going around the souq: in a meeting he asks his ministers what the time is; someone answers, ‘Whatever time you say, sir’.” It is possible, of course, that al-Radi feared retribution for herself and her circle had she been more revealing. When the book was scheduled for its American publication, Saddam and the Baathist Party were still firmly in power. She also reveals a foreboding over what might occur after the fall of Our Leader. “History has consistently shown us,” she writes, “that when Iraqis knock off their leaders, what follows is usually much worse.”
Whatever the reason might be for Saddam’s scarcity in “Baghdad Diaries,” there is no question that al-Radi’s pique is reserved primarily for the West–a fact that suggests America and its allies face a monumental task in establishing a credible new government amid such skepticism, even from an Iraqi cosmopolite. “I don’t think I could set foot in the West again,” she writes during the first gulf war. “If someone like myself who is Western educated feels this way, then what about the rest of the country?” A few more samples: “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it is that Bush and that horrid Rambo Schwarzkopf will be thought of as heroes after all this is over … Their sanctimonious attitude is unbearable, as if we are the only bad guys in the world.” After Clinton launches a missile strike in 1998 in the wake of the United Nations inspectors being ejected from Iraq, she writes, “Are they sick or something, these Americans? I wish someone would bomb them at home.” In regard to what she sees as the discrepancy between the way Israel is treated versus Iraq, al-Radi exclaims: “What a lot of bull this Western justice is.”
There is something about the Middle East that seems to require even of people who should know better a blind, bullheaded partisanship that is obstinately tribal–as if not only two peoples, but two ideas cannot occupy the same space. For all of its considerable charm, al-Radi’s “Baghdad Diaries” lacks nobility–it doesn’t embody the most generous view of one’s adversaries. These journals feel as if they were written (and published) with fear so deeply internalized by the writer that they don’t seem deeply revealing about the intersection of politics and the soul. Is that a failure of al-Radi’s? Or is it also the consequence of living under a regime that tended to abridge not just books but lives?
