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With embedded reporters, blogs and news coverage twenty-four hours a day, the reportage of the Iraq war and the fall of Baghdad has been unprecedented. But Asne Seierstad, a Norwegian journalist, took it to another level. While the bombs were falling and threatening to fall in the days both leading up to and in the early stages of the war, Seierstad sought to find the story of the Iraqi people instead of covering the blitzkrieg of "shock and awe". In her objective, despite all the flash and adrenaline that accompany war coverage, she created her own precedent in the war of words that belied any twenty-first century technology. Her book, "A Hundred and One Days", which is part journalistic and part travelogue, is a story of her time there and what she experienced. Like many of her fellow journalists, Seierstad arrived in Iraq in the ensuing days that led up to the American invasion in March 2003. She accounts the hassle of visas and dealing with Saddam's various ministries, and what it is like to operate within the confines of a dictatorship that purports a veneer of open-mindedness, showing the crazymaking behavior and tenor that is created by this experience. An experienced journalist who covered Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Chechnya, Seierstad is nevertheless challenged by the hoops that she knows she must go through to get to the everyday people that she desires to speak to. She tells of the waiting in words so subtle that the chilliness of the benign permeates the book. For it is like living where everything is an illusion and everything is a mirror concealing something else. Protected by a minder, which is a translator intended by Saddam's Ministry of Information to keep foreigners in check while playing the ruse of a person fluid in Arabic, Seierstad finds that instead of being in the center of it all and a repository of information, she is cut off from everything and is swimming in a sea of disinformation. Seierstad's journey takes her through the American invasion to the fall of Baghdad, watching the smoke of shock and awe and not being at all in awe of it. As a Caucasian European, she is sometimes viewed with suspicion, but as a citizen of a neutral country, she is allowed access to many in the upper echelons who are looking for their stories to be told to someone, anyone, who can get it to the outside. How she comes about these interviews and what she learns from them are part of the adventure that she experiences, for although the events are predetermined in their place of history, how she experiences them and how she is transformed by them is what the real story is. "A Hundred and One Days" is a book that switches from the narrative to the expository, from journalistic to novelistic prose. This weaving back and forth does nothing to distract from the story line, and in fact enhances the surrealistic sense of what it must be like living in a war zone, and to be responsible for information in place where you nothing at all what is going on. Because Seierstad is an independent journalist, her story does not need to fit any media format. The book seems to come across as an honest personal account of what she experienced in the middle of this particular war zone. It is an added perspective that lends a different tone behind the random numbers that bigger media throw out regarding the war, and a reminder that in all wars, there are people involved, no matter what side is on, friend, foe, or neutral. |
