Fassihi, Farnaz, Waiting for an Ordinary Day, The Unraveling Of Life In Iraq, Public Affairs, 2008
Farnas Fassihi was a journalist for the Wall Street Journal who reported from Iraq from before the 2003 invasion to the start of 2006. In her book Waiting for an Ordinary Day, The Unraveling Of Life In Iraq she attempts to tell the stories of regular Iraqis who were swept up in the changes and violence that enveloped their country and how the growing insecurity took a toll upon her. It is one of the few Western books from this time that put Iraqis in the forefront
Fassihi focused upon a group of Iraqis that she met before the invasion. One of them was the Nasser family who were Christians in Baghdad. They were impoverished like the majority of Iraqis during the 1990s due to sanctions. There were two brothers in the family who graduated with engineering degrees from the University of Baghdad but rather than going to work for the government which was what most college educated workers did they opened a business because public wages were so low. When the civil war began in 2005 they stopped taking to their Muslim friends and neighbors. The husband hadn’t talked to his best friend for instance in months while the wife said she was afraid she would say something wrong and offend someone because people were so on edge with the growing violence. This highlighted the atomization of Iraqi society in the mid-2000s. People withdrew into their own communities and families and cut off contact with many people especially if they were a different sect or in a different neighborhood because of the fear of violence.
Three of her Iraqi staff members were also highlighted. Two were Sunnis who said they supported the insurgency not because they were anti-Americans since they were around them all the time at work but because the U.S. occupation had struck a nationalist chord with them. Fassihi believed that the Americans would never be able to overcome this nationalist reaction and defeat the insurgency. She was wrong about that as the nationalists were superseded by the Islamists which eventually split the militants with the latter coming out on top and leading to the Islamic State.
The author conducted many interviews with Iraqis as part of her work which showed how much society had changed because of the increasing instability. One of the most touching was about the children of a Newsweek staff member who shared the offices with the Wall Street Journal. His 9 year old son was teased at school for being a Sunni by his friend and one day on the bus ride home he was shoved by a kid who said he wouldn’t sit next to a Sunni. His youngest son said he no longer wanted to go to school because he was so traumatized by the constant bombings and killings. When his dad tried to coax him to go back the son said that the family should tell the school that he was kidnapped by the insurgency and never seen again. The book captured how the insecurity and divisions in the country had seeped down to even pre-pubescent children.
Another interesting part was how the January 2005 elections for an interim government increased the sectarian divide in Iraq rather than leading to the birth of democracy as the Americans claimed. The author interviewed two Shiite clerics who were empowered by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to organize the community to vote so that Shiites could take control of the new government. They had voter information meetings, ran a newspaper, and other activities that were financed by Sistani’s office. Fassihi met some women who said that they would vote for whoever Sistani told them to because they believed it was their religious duty. The Sunnis on the other hand boycotted the election. On the election day many of the voting centers in Baghdad’s Sunni neighborhoods were closed and barely anyone turned out. It was a stark contrast between the Shiites who were empowered and the Sunnis who felt marginalized by the new political system. This would lead to all the subsequent governments where Sunnis would always be a junior partner with minimal power over major decisions.
Waiting for an Ordinary Day is a must read to understand the start of the American occupation of Iraq. It’s an exploration into how Iraqi society collapsed under the weight of the civil war that began after the U.S. invasion. People went from trepidation before the war to outrage over how the Americans were running the country to fear that they might be killed at any time. All the stories she collected from Iraqis are interesting and the author felt the weight of events as well as violence struck her too. It provides Iraqi voices to this period which are usually neglected for American ones.
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