Reviewed by Mel Huff

Baghdad Burning is an Iraqi civilian’s memoir of the occupation of Iraq published on the Internet as a blog. Riverbend, its anonymous author, began writing her web log in August 2003, when she was twenty-four. The book contains the first year of her postings.

           

River, as she signs her entries, grew up abroad, where she learned fluent, idiomatic English. She returned to Iraq in her early teens and lives in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood with her parents and brother. Before the war, she worked in a small company as a computer programmer and network administrator.

After a slightly shaky start, River finds her voice, narrating her country’s political agony through stories of her extended family and neighbors. She opposes the occupation, but she is not contentious: she expresses sympathy for the American troops in their heavy clothes under the “merciless sun.” Her stance encompasses the complexities and contradictions of the situation she beholds – “mixed feelings in a messed up world.”

We enter life in Baghdad through small details. River and her family sleep in their clothes with money and identification documents stuffed in their pockets in case they have to flee their home in the night. When her mother hears the refrigerator grind to life at two in the morning – a sign that the sporadic electricity has come back on – she gets up to load the washer. River goes shopping for school supplies for her cousin’s children – Barbie notebooks, Smurfs notebooks, and strawberry-shaped erasers. Her cousin walks the girls the two blocks to their school wearing a pistol at his waist.

Baghdad Burning illustrates some unintended, and underreported, consequences of America’s projection of itself into Iraq’s affairs. One is the “liberation” of fundamentalists. River is confronted for not wearing a headscarf. She tells of a female engineer who ignored a warning to stay home and was gunned down in front of her family. We learn that under the occupation, it has become unsafe for women to leave their homes unaccompanied by male relatives. When the company River used to work for reopened and she went back to apply for a job, she was told that women “weren’t welcome right now – especially females who ‘couldn’t be protected.’”

River makes her world present to us through her generous, intelligent and humane voice. Reading her words is like having a late-night conversation with a friend.