Middle Eastern Life Term Paper

Total Length: 1747 words ( 6 double-spaced pages)

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Baghdad Diaries Persepolis

Nuha al-Radi's Baghdad Diaries: A Woman's Chronicle of War and Exile and Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, and Marjane Satrapi's illustrated story, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, reveal profound insights about the impact of war. These novels examine how Iraqis and Iranians cope with the profound uncertainty, political repression, deprivation, and war that have impacted their homelands in recent years. Ultimately, al-Radi's novel gives an intimate portrait of the effect of war on the ordinary Iraqi, but fails to provide a larger ideological or political context. In contrast, Satrapi's Persepolis provides a complex understanding of war's effect on personal freedoms and ideology, but is less adapt than al-Radi's work in describing the lives of the average citizen. Taken together, these two works provide a complex portrayal of how war has impacted the lives of the ordinary person, as well as how war has shredded the personal freedom and ideology of many others.

In her novel, Baghdad Diaries: A Woman's Chronicle of War and Exile, Nuha al-Radi reveals ten years of her life that begin with the 1991 Gulf War, continue through the Western embargo, and end with her years of exile in Lebanon and the United States.
Essentially, Baghdad Diaries is an intimate portrait of the war's effects on al-Radi and her friends and neighbors.

In Baghdad Diaries, al-Radi writes of the many deprivations that she endures in Baghdad; some of these are shocking to Westerners who would never even consider the possibility of doing without certain basics in life. The list of things that Iraqis must do without that al-Radi recounts is long, and often include necessities like water, telephones, gasoline, and electricity. Writes al-Radi, "On the eve of the war I went to the Rashid Hotel to pick up a letter that Bob Simpson had brought from Charlie in Cyprus. He also sent me some seed packets of Italian vegetables, a tiny leak in the U.S. embargo. They will come in handy when we have water again" (p. 9)......

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https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/middle-eastern-life-171595