Blood, bullets and contraband vodka: female artists on life in Baghdad after the US invasion
Irada al-Jabbouri remembers Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. “It was like a ghost town, under curfew, its streets almost empty by 4pm,” recalls the Iraqi novelist and women’s rights activist. “Day and night were organised according to a mysterious schedule of when car bombs might go off, or mortars or improvised explosive […]Bidisha writes for The Guardian:
Irada al-Jabbouri remembers Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. “It was like a ghost town, under curfew, its streets almost empty by 4pm,” recalls the Iraqi novelist and women’s rights activist. “Day and night were organised according to a mysterious schedule of when car bombs might go off, or mortars or improvised explosive devices or kidnappings. More than once, I escaped from snipers’ bullets passing in front of me. Once, US soldiers went mad and started firing at the houses in my neighbourhood after an explosive device had gone off. All the windows in our house were shattered; the shards of glass were like shrapnel.
Jabbouri had been unable to write fiction since the US tanks rolled in in 2003. “It was like a rent in my soul, a bleeding,” she tells me. “We deserved better than the dictator [Saddam Hussein] and better than the invasion.” But she could record her day-to-day life. Her journal notes now form part of the script of Another Day in Baghdad, a movie in the early stages of filming.
