Time marches on

I don't think I was under any delusion that life in the U.S. would stop altogether while I was gone. I accepted early on that people would keep going to work, eating and sleeping and ::sigh:: even having fun without me. But I don't remember giving people permission to keep having all these life events while I'm thousands of miles away. And yet, my small circle of loved ones seems to be having a tremendously eventful summer. In the past few weeks:

• A friend got engaged
• A family friend got married
• OFH started his senior year of college
• So did my baby sister -- yikes!
• A close friend moved to DC
• A friend left my company and moved back to NYC
• Another moved to a new apartment in NYC
• At least three friends got their first grown-up jobs
  
• One good friend had a painful breakup
• A friend was officially cured of cancer, six years after I sat in her hospital room
  
• THREE favorite people, including the best friend who was already too far away, moved from NYC to Boston so two of them can get Ph.Ds or some ridiculous thing
• I lost one intolerable coworker from my very small office and gained a wonderful one
  
• One good friend moved to NYC to start law school

Maybe that's the normal rate of life, but it sure feels like the world is on fast-forward back there, and it makes me feel left out! Gchat and phone calls are wonderful, but I would give anything to have been there for any one of these events or these people. Last night one of the new Boston residents was describing a hilarious scene involving four of them hauling stuff into a fourth-floor walkup because the movers weren't going to get it all done, and it actually made my heart ache. I've got all these people describing their new lives -- new homes, jobs, relationship statuses, etc. -- and I just want to be there to lug boxes or hang pictures or buy beers. I want to feel like I'm being a good friend to people who should have good friends around, and it's hard to do that from here. I'm having flashbacks to freshman year, when I had a huge fear of being left out by my older, cooler friends.

So I have a request: can you all start having more boring lives for a couple of weeks? I'll be back soon, and hopefully you'll all be willing to help me play catch-up in person. But honestly: no more moves, no more weddings/engagement/breakups, no more new anything. Just for three weeks, okay?

Love,
Briony

Arrival

I landed in Baghdad today at about 5 p.m. local time (that's 9 a.m. for you East Coasters). The landing, which I have told many of you about, was a bit harrowing. To avoid anti-aircraft fire, the pilot guides the plane in a very tight spiral for the final 8,000 feet. It made me somewhat dizzy, but lunch stayed in my stomach (which you may know is an impressive accomplishment for me!). After I got off the plan, a taxi driver met me at the airport. He took me a few miles out to a parking lot behind a military checkpoint, where I got in an armored vehicle being trailed by a regular vehicle. We got to our residence around 7 p.m., where I met more people than my sleepy brain can remember names of. Since then, I've been hanging out, chatting with our female translator and a driver who decided my name was "veeeeeeery pretty!" I have my own bedroom, which is twice the size of mine in D.C. and is well air-conditioned, so life is good.

I feel like I haven't seen enough of Iraq to describe yet, but I have a few initial impressions. The first is that there are so many guns here. Police and military officials obviously use weapons, but there were also several ordinary citizens wandering around with AKs. Concealed, revealed, it doesn't really matter.

I was told to avoid eye contact with people, especially men, as we drove to the residence, out of modesty. A "good Iraqi woman" would not look a man directly in the eye. It's a difficult thing to avoid, especially when the sight of people riding in the back of pickup trucks is common, since they're at eye level. The result is a weird form of reverse tunnel vision--you can see everything except what's in front of your nose. I don't like being a good Iraqi woman.

Okay, that's enough rambling for the moment--it's 1 a.m. and I think I'll go to bed. Future posts will be a bit more thematic and less train-of-thought, I promise.

About the title

The title of this blog is a reference to a 1921 book by a British artist named Donald Maxwell. Maxwell was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in London shortly after World War I to represent Iraq through sketches and paintings. The result was A Dweller in Mesopotamia: Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden, which is available online in original form through the University of Georgia library.

Although I can find very little information about Maxwell and his travels, my understanding is that he spent most of the time for A Dweller in Mesopotamia in Baghdad, although the title suggests he traveled to other places in the Middle East as well. "Mesopotamia" is generally assumed to refer to the area between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers (literally "between rivers"), of which Baghdad was the major city. Although historians generally agree that the location of the Biblical Garden of Eden, Maxwell, like many in the early 20th century, believed it to have been in Mesopotamia. Since the British had assumed control of Iraq at the end of the Great War, Maxwell was charged with showing people back in London what the historically significant land looked like.

Much of Maxwell's writing is dated and somewhat impenetrable, but his brief introduction speaks passionately about the importance of Baghdad.

To have travelled in the land where Sennacherib held sway, to have walked upon the Sacred Way in Babylon, to have stood in the great banquet hall of Belshazzar's palace when the twilight is raising ghosts ... to wander in the moonlight into narrow streets in Old Baghdad, with its recollections of the Arabian Nights: these things are to make enduring pictures in the Palace of Memory, that ideal collection where only the good ones are hung and all are on the line.

In thinking and writing about Iraq, this history is tremendously important but all too often ignored. Through reading several works of history and taking inspiration from Maxwell, I hope to always remain conscious of it.

The pseudonym I chose has nothing to do with Maxwell or Iraq. Rather, it is the name of a favorite character from a favorite novel: Ian McEwan's Atonement.

Opening thoughts

My goal for this blog is to chronicle the eight weeks I will spend in Baghdad, Iraq during July and August 2007. The content that appears here will not be about the war per se, but rather about my experience living and working in a war-torn country. I am neither a soldier nor a political operative, and for a variety of reasons I do not plan to discuss politics in this forum. Instead, I will write about people I meet, things I see and the impressions such experiences have made on me personally. I don't claim to represent anyone but myself, which is why I will write under an assumed name.

Essentially, this is the most effective way I can come up with of telling people who are interested about my life in Iraq. I will have regular internet access while I am abroad, so I expect to update regularly. I would love to hear from all of you through comments posted here or via e-mail.

p.s. This site cannot be found through a Google search, and I do not intend for it to reach anyone other than my own family and friends. If I have sent you the link, I ask that you be judicious in deciding who to forward it to. I don't expect to be revealing state secrets on this page, but I would prefer not to see my words quoted elsewhere. I don't think anything I will say here will be of any interest to people who don't know me, anyway.