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Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq

REVIEW

Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq By Riverbend The Feminist Press, 2005

Reviewed by Carol Anne Douglas

What is it like to be young woman in Iraq? If you want to know, this is the book to read.

Riverbend is the pseudonym of an Iraqi Muslim woman who launched a blog in August 2003, when she was 24, to tell what was happening in her country. Riverbend is a computer programmer/network administrator who went to school in the United States. Hence her excellent English, which has led blog readers who don't like her politics to claim that she couldn't be Iraqi.

Riverbend tells what it's like to swelter in her home during Iraq's broiling summers because Baghdad's electricity since the war has been greatly reduced, sometimes to a few hours a day. And to have no running water. (And the U.S. government now has no plans to restore all the utilities it destroyed.) Worse, she often wakes up to loud noises and has to wonder whether they are gunshots, a bomb, an explosion, fighting, looters, or an American raid on one of her neighbors.

She anticipates that some Americans will say that she's ungrateful, that the raids are for her benefit. She responds: "But the truth is, the raids only accomplish one thing: they act as a constant reminder that we are under occupation."

Wearied of the occupation, she writes, "I wish they would just take the oil and go home."

But Riverbend says, "I don't hate Americans, contrary to what many people believe. Not because I love Americans, but simply because I don't hate Americans like I don't hate the French, Canadians, Brits, Saudis, Jordanians, Micronesians, etc."

"Although I hate the American military presence in Iraq I don't ever hate the American troops, or wait, sometimes I do." She says she hated them when they were bombing Baghdad, when her car was pulled over and she and her family were searched, when her cousin's house was raided, and so forth.

She suggests that United Nations peacekeeping forces, rather than U.S. troops, should be sent to Iraq.

Riverbend tells how the war, occupation, and resulting rise of fundamentalism in Iraq have affected women.

"Females can no longer leave their homes alone. Each time I go out, E. [her brother] and either a father, uncle, or cousin has to accompany me. It feels like we've gone back 50 years."

"Before the war, around 50% of the college students were females, and over 50%" of the paid workforce. "Not anymore."

She lost her job, and many girls have had to quit school because going out is so dangerous. After the war, she tried to go back to her workplace, but she found that many of her co-workers had left and the new bosses didn't want a woman worker because they couldn't "protect" her from violence on her way to work.

She even has to dress differently. "Before the occupation, I more or less dressed the way I wanted to. I lived in jeans and cotton pants and comfortable shirts. Now I don't dare leave the house in pants. A long skirt and loose shirt (preferably with long sleeves) has become necessary." Fundamentalist groups have issued fatwas (decrees) saying that all women have to cover their heads. Even Christian women cover their heads to keep from being harassed by men.

Some Iraqi women are raising their voices against fundamentalism. But, Riverbend says, at one women's conference, all the Iraqi participants were selected by L. Paul Bremer, the initial head of the U.S. occupation.

"Iraq is full of moderate Muslims who simply believe in 'live and let live,'" Riverbend writes. "We get along with each other-Sunnis and Shi'a, Muslim and Christian, and Jews and Sabi'a. We intermarry we mix and mingle. We live." But that is changing since the war, she writes with great regret. And it appears to have changed even more, perhaps irretrievably, since she wrote.

She gives many details about frightening experiences she and the people she knows have gone through. "There's a sense of collective exhaustion," she writes. Everyone is overwhelmed with the long strain of living in an atmosphere of uncertainty, surrounded by violence.

In September 2004, when Americans observed the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Riverbend wrote. "We have 9/11s every month....I've attended more wakes and funerals this last year than in my whole life."

If you want to read eyewitness testimony, read this book. And the Feminist Press has just published another book on the next year of Riverbend's blog.

Copyright Off Our Backs, Inc. 2006
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