Baghdad

Baghdad enters the memoir through the news of the Gulf War: a city under bombardment whose reported suffering makes the narrator’s familiar anxiety of waiting feel suddenly different. Its brief appearance connects private experience to a conflict whose consequences cannot be contained by fantasy or imagination.

Baghdad in the War News

On 6 February 1991, the narrator records that the expected conflict between Iraq and the Western coalition has begun. She questions the propagandists’ description of it as a “clean” war, noting a report that Iraq had already received more bombs than Germany during the Second World War. Eyewitness accounts describe children stumbling through Baghdad as if drunk, deafened by explosions. The city is thus present not as a setting the narrator visits, but through reports that convey bombardment’s bodily consequences.

Anxiety and the Limits of Imagination

The news leaves the narrator waiting for disasters that have been forecast but have not yet happened: a land offensive, chemical warfare, or a bomb attack in Paris. That suspended uncertainty recalls the anxiety and frustrated desire for truth she experienced while living through her passion. But the comparison has a boundary. In the face of war, she insists, there is no room for fantasy or imagination. Baghdad marks the point at which uncertainty is no longer an intimate space for desire to inhabit: it is bound to real violence and to the suffering of people far beyond the narrator’s reach.