A note about linking: I can’t figure out how to link to one specific post of Riverbend’s blog, or even link to a certain date. The best I could get was a month’s worth of archived posts, in this case August of 2008. To access the post I analyzed, click here and scroll down to “My New Talent” (from Thursday, August 21st @ 3:15 pm)– it should be near the bottom of the page. If anyone can figure out how to set this up more effectively, let me know!

First off, I highly recommend reading her original post– it’s powerful, descriptive, and in general very well done. For those of you who won’t, though, I will try to summarize (because apparently I haven’t done enough already…). In one of her first posts, Riverbend narrates the course of one sleepless night, and captures along the way how the U.S. Invasion has changed Iraq and Iraqis. I was struck by how well this post managed to convey the messy and very real, everyday consequences of the Iraq War. While reading, she manages to make the events she experiences feel as real as my own life. Riverbend accomplishes this through her combined use of easily-identifiable (to a Western audience) anecdotes and vignettes of violence or despair that are quite far from many (I’m assuming) of our ranges of experience.

She begins: “Suffering a bout of insomnia last night, I found myself in front of the television, channel-surfing.” I have done this myself, countless times, and as I read I picture specific times that it has happened to me… drawing dangerously close to the “they’re just like me!” fallacy that Whitlock described in Soft Weapons. Riverbend continues “Promptly at 2 am, the electricity went off and I was plunged into the pitch black…” Suddenly, quite different from what I am used to, but Riverbend is unfazed: this is a common occurrence in her life. I can easily identify with the first line, as it is part of my grounded reality. The proximity of the unfamiliar parts to the familiar ones makes it impossible for me to exclude the power outage from a grounded, “real” reality.

Riverbend goes on to describe the heat that night as “so hot, it feels like you are cooking gently inside of an oven.” Hyperbole, complaining about the weather: what’s more familiar to us than that? A few lines down: “The silence was shattered a few moments later by the sound of bullets in the distance. It was just loud enough to get your attention, but too far away to be a source of any real anxiety.” The sounds of bullets is, to me, a source of anxiety for sure– regardless of how far away they are. Again, she pairs relatable narrative with intense, unfamiliar, violent detail. I am forced to respect the Occupation as a concrete occurrence rather than a concept. In addition, I am turned away from the urge to put Riverbend and myself in exactly the same category: though we have some similar experiences, her life is fundamentally different than my own.

By placing easily-identified-with anecdotes, e.g. “stubbing my toe on the last step, (which wasn’t supposed to be there)” that will be very real to many Western audiences (because they are often part of our lived experience) next to sensory details about the violence and heartbreaking nature of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Riverbend forces the reader to see the Iraq war as equally real, physical and contemporary as Western everyday life. At first glance, the two kinds of anecdotes appear to be juxtaposed, but in fact they are both equally real parts of her life that happen synchronically.