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Waiting for an Ordinary Day: The Unraveling of Life in Iraq

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In her book, Waiting for an Ordinary Day: The Unraveling of Life in Iraq, Farnaz Fassihi presents a heart-wrenching portrait of the Iraqi people as they come to terms with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the rebuilding of their war-torn country. Drawing on her experiences as a Wall Street Journal senior correspondent living in Iraq, Fassihi portrays a compelling story of the struggles of the regular citizens and their families. At first they cheer the Americans for tumbling a brutal dictator, but then weep in despair as the free life they dreamed about becomes a nightmare.

This book is not a discourse on military tactics and political blunders, but readers need to know that many of the Iraqi people interviewed relate disturbing stories with heavy overtones of anti-Americanism and criticism of the President, and at times, Fassihi finds herself voicing her agreement. Descriptions and conversations, framed by the author's own pain and compassion, focus on the lives of people she has befriended. Many are affected by the overthrow, occupation and subsequent collapse of an Iraqi society that blames not only the two major ruling religious sects (Sunni and Shi'ite), but also the foreign occupiers. In Fassihi's words, "Sometimes I find myself wanting to cry while I'm interviewing people and other times I feel detached, like a machine recording misery and death."

During all this turmoil, Fassihi finds love with a fellow correspondent in this war-torn land. When they are on separate assignments, she is tormented by fears of separation. Her family begs her to come home and give up her position as head of the Baghdad bureau of the Wall Street Journal, but she is drawn in by the plight of the Iraqi people and was even accused of being addicted to the job's constant threats of bombings, shootings and bloodshed. She is persecuted as a woman, shunned for being American, but loved because of her compassion for the people. Under threats of kidnapping, murder, torture, Farnaz attempts to take care of her workers and friends while dodging bullets and car bombs.

The Iraqi people dedicate their lives to regaining their dignity, preserving their art and culture, sustaining their religious beliefs and most of all hoping that some day they will indeed see an ordinary day. Their homes are bombed and searched while loved ones are forcefully detained and spirited away at the slightest rumor. Those detained often don't return, leaving families desparate to know their fate. If they do return, months later, the tales of torture, persecution and deprivations are horrendous. Fassihi's employee, Munaf, sums up their daily lives with the comment, "We are like animals in the wild. We eat, sleep and try not to get killed each day."

This powerful account of life in Iraq helps us understand why stability has been so elusive to the people of a beleaguered country. The details are rich, the story well written, and throughout the book, the true voices of the Iraqi people are heard because of the an empathetic, insightful woman who is not afraid to put herself into the middle of the story.

by Rhonda Esakov
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Farnaz's account of events are heart breaking. I have been following the incredible sad story of Iraq before the war started. No news of the war over the years have brought the sadness and misery of the war home so clearly. Farnaze's understanding of the culture, traditions and religion particularly makes her account of the events easier to understand. The fundamental factors which the war architects have so badly overlooked and foolishly underestimated and as foolishly they continue the rhetoric's for an even worst war with Iran.

Everyone should read this book for a beautifully written--vivid and nuanced--account of the situation in Iraq. It will break your heart, but it's essential reading for thinking Americans.

...you knew everything about the shameful war in Iraq, along comes this beautiful book about the war's impact on ordinary citizens. We are fortunate in the US that we have never seen occupiers. Not so in Iraq, and this book makes us realize just how we are perceived. The Bush administration, in all its customary arrogance, thinks that we are 'heroes'. Just read this book to realize just how wrong they were, as usual.

Farnaz Fassihi is a great reporter with an eye for all the details that transform an ordinary narrative into something superb. She tells the story of a "cursed ambulance", whose driver laments that since the American invasion, people die in his vehicle regularly. It only takes her a few carefully chosen words to describe how Iraqi shoulders seem more relaxed in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, or how the exhiliration of one of her Iraqi co-workers at voting in Iraq's first "free" elections fades and he wraps his purple-stained finger (the sign that he has voted) in a bandaid so that Sunnis in his neighborhood won't kill him for collaborating. She also deftly draws attention to the more familiar issues -- reported everywhere from her own contributions to the Wall Street Journal to the New Yorker -- such as the different definitions of "security" and "democracy" held by American administrators and the Iraqis themselves.
For all those reasons -- and many more, including Fassihi's ability to chronicle not just what she sees around her but also be a memoirist, writing about her own life and its gradual deterioration (from restaurant outings and parties to life under siege in a hotel suite ultimately destroyed in a bombing) -- this should have been an extraordinary book. The author has the reporting skills, the insight and the courage to step outside the boundaries imposed by North American journalism -- the rule of objectivity at all costs -- to call it as she sees it, a trait first noticed publicly when an e-mail decrying the real state of affairs in Iraq to friends and family became public in the fall of 2004. Perhaps it is unrealistic in view of her youth and relative inexperience compared to this veteran, but I had hoped I would find something as powerfully moving as Robert Fisk's recent opus, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. I didn't.
Fassihi has been badly let down by her editors at Public Affairs on a number of fronts. At the most basic level, very obvious and jarring errors in spelling and grammar have crept into the narrative repeatedly. Husayn and his "aids" (rather than aides) are slaughtered by Sunnis, people have an opinon "on" Saddam (rather than of), she "diffuses" a compliment. Even more frequent are awkward phrases that jar or sometimes simply don't make sense, from "electronic-mailing websites" to her description of the words "jihad" and "resistance" as being, simultaneously wobbly ideas and profound words. (It's hard to imagine those descriptions coexisting.) She gives a "smiley explanation", while "palm groves swish". (Well, the fronds of palm trees may do that, but swishing groves eludes my imagination.) These aren't occasional; they are omnipresent.
I don't lay these problems at Fassihi's door -- many great reporters are less-than-great editors. (And while Fassihi learned English while a child, her first language is Farsi.) Which is why the Wall Street Journal has at least three editors and one copy editor read, if not thoroughly review, every bylined story by any staff reporter that is published in the paper. That level of care wasn't taken here, with the result that anyone who is conscious of these spelling, style and grammatical issues will find their level of irritation growing.
Another problem is the structure. Fassihi doesn't get into her stride until about a third of the way into the book, after the American invasion. A good editor would have caught that and found a way to incorporate the earlier material -- which serves as a great contrast to the crumbling lives of ordinary Iraqis -- within the rest of the narrative, rather than adhere to a strictly chronological approach. It's a tried and tested strategy for just this kind of writing problem in narrative non-fiction.
Finally, there is the vignette approach. While we get to know some characters throughout the book (mostly Fassihi, her staff and her partner, although also one Iraqi Christian family), each chapter reads like dressed-up material from her reporter's notebook. One literary agent I know would describe this as being too "episodic", meaning that while each of the chapters individually is compelling, they don't contribute as much as each needs to to the overall narrative arc.
I feel like Scrooge or the Grinch mentioning these issues in this review. But they felt all the more jarring because of the overall merit of this book and Fassihi's reporting skills. This could have been a great book -- should have been a great book. It's not. That does not mean that you shouldn't read it, however, because the experiences she recounts will drive home to you as few others have managed, what it is like to live, day by day, in a war zone as a civilian -- those who, in modern warfare, tend to suffer disproportionately with little or no control over the horrifying events with which they must cope.
Fassihi concludes by wondering, as so many others who have experienced war have done, what can possibly be accomplished by so much carnage? For anyone interested in delving further into that perennial question, I strongly recommend a book that appeared immediately prior to the invasion of Iraq by another war correspondent, Chris Hedges. War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

I just read all of what the 7 other reviews said, and they were all very informative and well descriptive of this book. Therefore, I am not going to repeat their reviews, but to add this...I had just finished President George W. Bush's Memoirs, then picked up this book on the war in Iraq from a different type of war correspondent.
As many of us did not want this war, we still needed to support our military people in harms way. But there was still one question on many Iraqi's minds about our liberation/invasion, and that was..."What did we do to deserve this?"

The author, heroically embedded herself interviewing Iraqi people on the streets as well as in their homes. Since our war in Iraq began, I have read countless books about the war by different people i.e. soldiers themselves, journalists and Washington correspondents inside and outside the Washington/Green Zone Bubble. But this correspondent, Farnaz Fassihi, has written the best book of them all because of how she got her information.
This is a must read book because it is raw, actual living, as an Iraqi, throughout this war on their soil.
If you don't know much about how people sustained themselves and if you'd like to learn more about the differences in the Muslim Sunnis and the Muslim Shiites beliefs, the author will explain it all via her communication with these every day, run of the mill citizens.
This book is quite interesting and absolutely informative. I recommend it highly because we generally don't have too many books of this nature available...living in the shoes of an Iraqi.

Title: Waiting for an Ordinary Day: The Unraveling of Life in Iraq
Author: Farnaz Fassihi
Rating: ****1/2
Tags: iraq, war, insurgency, daily life

I wish every American would read this book. It is about the daily life of Iraqis from the time the U.S. invaded into 2006. The author is Farnaz Fassihi, an Iranian American journalist.who covered Iraq for the Wall Street Journal. She traveled around Iraq and told the stories of everyday Iraqis.

If it an't broke, don't fix it. Iraq was broken, but it wasn't our responsibility nor in our power to fix it. Instead we brought death, sectarian violence, poverty, forced migration, loss of basics such as electricity, adequate hospitals and schools... and so on. One particularly effective chapter imagines what New York would be like if it had gone through what Baghdad has.

Fassihi shows the complexities of the situation. There were Iraqis who welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. For the Sunnis, though, Saddam's overthrow meant a loss of power and prestige. After the invasion, Iraqis knew that the U.S. Army protected only the oil ministries, and it led them to conclude the war was for oil. As their lives descended into chaos and terror, hatred for Americans grew.

Here's Fassahi's summary of her time in Iraq:

"I've borne witness as people's lives have unraveled around me. I recall a poignant quote from Martha Gellhorn, a pioneer female war reporter, from her book The Face of War: "War happens to people, one by one." War doesn't just happen to the military, whose soldiers are fighting, or to the government, who wages it. It happens to people, one by one, house by house, and family by family. I have not met a single Iraq whose life hasn't been touched by tthe war or altered because of everyday violence. I have heard this sentence from Iraqis, over and over, "until now, we are waiting". What are they waiting for, I wonder. Perhaps for just an ordinary day." (p. 272-3).

Too much war coverage in Iraq has focused on America, and seems to not consider Iraqis as important. They are. They are human beings who have suffered at our hands. We need to be reminded of that, whenever we thing we know what is best for the world, and whenever we think we have unlimited power to change the world.

Publication PublicAffairs (2008), Edition: illustrated edition, Hardcover, 304 pages
Publication date 2008
ISBN 1586484753 / 9781586484750

The daily life in Iraq as described by Farnaz Fassihi shouldn't surprise those who are disposed to reading this book. I think it would be a surprise to those who only experience the Iraq War through cable TV news.

The overwhelming TV reporting on Iraq has been sound bites on the US troops, individual heroic efforts, sports, smiling people with purple fingers and the effectiveness of "the surge". If there are stories about the total loss suffered by people Amal al-Khudeiry or how people like Fatin cope after a twin sister has been "gunned down" they are drowned out by the frequency of the "experts" who talk about winning, tactics, strategies and politics. We've read about high profile kidnappings but has there been a story about a middle class family who sold everything only to have a dead body returned to them? Has there been a personal follow up story on a released Abu Ghraib inmate? I read in this book and elsewhere that there have been two million refugees, but do not recall one TV media story on any refugee in these past 5 or so years.

The Wall Street Journal has Farnaz Fassihi who faced enormous risks and Daniel Pearl who did not return. They did their part and Fassihi praises her company. On p. 208 another picture emerges. Her editors ask how can she call Iraq a "disaster" with the US election at hand. They tell her she would "validate" the "critics". This is Orwellian logic. A 5 car auto wreck can be called a "disaster", but the destruction of total neighborhoods cannot because there is an election at hand. The news should be cleansed or withheld so criticism will not seem valid. This, for me crystallized the state of our media. It has great technology, courageous reporters and access to support (security, translation, etc.) but its self censorship distorts its accuracy. As long as accurate reporting is considered "validating" "critics" the public will never get a straight story.