Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq

By Riverbend and James Ridgeway

In August 2003, the world gained access to a remarkable new voice: a blog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad, whose identity remained concealed for her own protection. Calling herself Riverbend, she offered searing eyewitness accounts of the everyday realities on the ground, punctuated by astute analysis on the politics behind these events.

In a voice in turn eloquent, angry, reflective and darkly comic, Riverbend recounts stories of life in an occupied city—of neighbors whose homes are raided by US troops, whose relatives disappear into prisons and whose children are kidnapped by money-hungry militias. At times, the tragic blends into the absurd, as she tells of her family jumping out of bed to wash clothes and send e-mails in the middle of the night when the electricity is briefly restored, or of their quest to bury an elderly aunt when the mosques are all overbooked for wakes and the cemeteries are all full. The only Iraqi blogger writing from a woman’s perspective, she also describes a once-secular city where women are now afraid to leave their homes without head covering and a male escort.

Interspersed with these vivid snapshots from daily life are Riverbend’s analyses of everything from the elusive workings of the Iraqi Governing Council to the torture in Abu Ghraib, from the coverage provided by American media and by Al-Jazeera to Bush’s State of the Union speech. Here again, she focuses especially on the fate of women, whose rights and freedoms have fallen victim to rising fundamentalisms in a chaotic postwar society.

With thousands of loyal readers worldwide, the Riverbend blog is widely recognized around the world as a crucial source of information not available through the mainstream media. The book version of this blog will have “value-added” features: an introduction and timeline of events by veteran journalist James Ridgeway, excerpts from Riverbend’s links and an epilogue by Riverbend herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Release date: Apr 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781558616165

Reviews for Baghdad Burning

[janey47 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This purports to be the publication of an anonymous blog by a 24 year old Iraqi woman and I wouldn't have even picked it up except that the introduction is by Adhaf Soueif, whose work I admire tremendously. Soueif thinks that Riverbend is real, but I confess that I don't. I'm maybe a third or so into the book and I just keep thinking, "No way." Maybe it's because most of what I read on line is not well organized or thought out or well phrased, but this does not hold the ring of truth for me, particularly as she's blogging in English. She claims to be bilingual and "average," but there's just a big disconnect between what she writes about and what Anthony Shadid ("Night Draws Near") saw. Not necessarily even in terms of events and politics. Just in terms of how wealthy her family seems to be, and how unaffected by the sanctions they apparently were, and so forth. I actually suspect that she's an American who has spent a lot of time in the middle east or who is married to someone from the middle east, but I think I'm going to drop this one.

[kgriffith-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read for class, but will likely get second volume out of curiosity. While not always superbly eloquent, Riverbend is certainly engaging, and forces us to revisit our perception of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Recommended for current event buffs and those who, like me, need a first-person account to make history make sense.

[cestovatela · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reviewing someone's life story is nearly impossible, especially if, as in this case, the writer is an ordinary person living through extraordinary hardship and desperate to tell the world something it needs to hear. Riverbend is the internet alias of a twenty-something Iraqi girl blogging through the war and subsequent American invasion. The first year of blog posts have been compiled to make this book. Each page is saturated with pain, anger, frustration and passion. She is not the downtrodden Muslim woman many Americans imagine exist, nor was she a victim of Saddam Hussein's regime. She is politically savvy, articulate, proud of her culture and religion and tolerant of others -- even Americans. Each post is well-reasoned and well-written, appealing to logic as much as emotion. She tells the stories that didn't make it into the American news media, contributing irreplaceable insight into the politics and economics of the war as well as its human cost. Whether you're for or against the war, you need to know how it shaped, altered, shattered and ended the lives of millions of Iraqi people. Read this book.