For the past three years or so I have been reading a weblog maintained by a young Iraqi woman whose name is posted as Riverbend. She writes about Iraq and the violence in that country unleashed first by the American troops and now increaingly by the Sunni militias backed by one or the other ethnic or political or sectrian leaders. She is writing from a city where even doing the daily chores of life such as going to get vegetables from the market can literally be life threatening. Yet with a sense of dry irony Riverbend is able to connect with her readers and sometimes even touch them in an almost direct way. Such is her power over the words with which she describes life in Bagdad. She is a witness to the terrible things that are happening around her and like Primo Levi has turned herself into the chronicler of a nighmarish history. The little personal details that i have been able to glean from her web log is that she is a computer scientist and lives with her family consisting of her parents and a brother in a house near the river and that explains her cybername.
The young woman has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and it my sincere hope that she wins the Prize. She writes with a deep sense of outrage and it is not easy to be unaffected by her writings. She tells us for example that there were quite a few dead bodies lying near her house and the description of Bagdad morgue that she pens will make even stones feel thae dread of death. This only goes to show that great literature can come only from experience distilled in the imagination.