Every once in awhile, I will look up from my computer and marvel at the wonderful, endless and paperless chase that is the internet. You hand off from link to link, like flying between branches, possessing the instinctual glee of an untamed chimpanzee, wild within a jungle of information.
On boingboing.net, an extremely joyful and diverse portal to incredible sites worldwide, I stumbled upon a family in Baghdad, who keeps a daily diary. It begins at the start of the war on Iraq. It has photographs of gardens, the markets on Ramadan St., the cafés and crowded petrol stations. The posts are monumental in their normalcy, a kind of rude awakening for me.
Prior to reading their blog, I didn’t view the Iraqi people as the exact same as us. I was compassionate and sad for the entire mess in the Middle East and I mourned in a general way about the casualties on all sides, but the tragedy was about the Americans who lost their lives to the senselessness of this war, not the families and homes and neighborhoods that would suffer every day in the actual presence of war.
The depth of my sorrow has increased exponentially, because now I see my own dull and unwitting prejudice in not acknowledging the immense awfulness of the whole war. I still, somewhat snobby about my breadth of knowledge and ‘keen’ awareness, had managed to dismiss the pain of a nation, merely because I didn’t understand them. The news that I dutifully watched never captured the Iraqi voices. They remained foreign and lost in translation because translation was never attempted.
We see Iraq all the time, but we rarely change our perspective. In the writings from different family members, there are a mother’s musings about her intense and constant worry, whether the soldiers in the streets will ever go home, if they will survive the bullets and the explosions, that they are too young for her to think about being injured or dying. She wonders if she will see her house and be able to feel safe in it again, as heavy shelling forced them out and they fled from their neighborhood, carrying nothing, unable to look back.
Her sons are teenagers, one a student who will stare out the window of a classroom, in the vague hopes that there will be a carbomb on the street, so that the upcoming test he has not studied enough for might be cancelled. Another son has an animated dialogue with a friend in Iran, about the nature of Islam, the subtlety and great beauty in the identity of a non-secular Muslim. His feelings about the war are moderate, as he boldly exclaims that neither Bush nor Bin Laden will hijack his history, his heritage.
Mom can teach you Arabic online, and there are recipes to try, and links to write back to them if you like. I tried to, but the mail program on my laptop is faulty. I want to write to them soon, and ask them if they are okay. The family all have a hopeful optimism to them, even as they live in the midst of Armageddon.
The message is clear in every update. We are Iraq. We are human. We are a family. We do not want to live this way, but life goes on, no matter what you want. We are sad today because our best American friend has died. She was born in Chicago. God bless her family. They laugh and dub a street the boulevard of broken glass, as all the windows have been shattered, and the night is too quiet to be safe.
It seems incomprehensible, but modern technology has made it possible to be even more human than ever before. When we get to cross language and cultural barriers, what happens is we get to the home that is our universality, which is a place that war could never erupt, fighting would cease, disagreements would be easily settled. To keep on arguing would only be hurting ourselves.
Seeing their words in my mind as I write about them, I am overcome with the realization that I have flown straight into a mirror, but one that is broken and lies in shards all over the ground, yet they, a reflection of me and all humanity, are the ones that can laugh in the suspicious silence. I am unable to.