Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi - Softcover

Pax, Salam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802140440 ISBN 13: 9780802140449

Publisher: Grove Press, 2003

Synopsis

Salam Pax has attracted a huge worldwide readership for the Internet diary he kept dyring the buildup, prosecution, and aftermath of the war in Iraq. Bringing his incisive and sharply funny Web postings together in print for the first time, Salam Pax provides one of the most gripping accounts of the Iraq conflict and will be the subject of global media attention.

In September 2002, a 29-year old Iraqi architect calling himself 'Salam Pax' began posting daily accounts of everyday life in Baghdad onto the Internet. Written in English, these postings contained everything from descriptions of the hardships of life in Saddam Hussein’s paranoid regime, to reviews of the latest (pirate) CDs by Coldplay and Bjork, to gossip about his employers. Salam daily risked retribution from Saddam’s regime, as over 200,000 people went missing under Saddam, many for far lesser crimes than the open criticism of the regime that he voiced in his diary.

Salam Pax’s sharp, candid and often dryly funny articles soon attracted a worldwide readership. In the months that followed, as a huge American-led force gathered to destroy Saddam's hated regime, Salam's internet diary became a unique record of the anticipation, anger, resentment, humor and sheer terror felt by an ordinary man living through the final days of Saddam Hussein's twenty-five year dictatorship, and the aftermath of its destruction.

Salam Pax is an astonishing record of the last days of Saddam and the cleandestine diary of an ordinary Iraqi.

About this title

About the Author

Salam Pax is the pseudonym of a 29-year-old man who lives in Baghdad and writes a column
about life in Iraq for The Guardian.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sunday, March 09, 2003 ::

A BBC reporter walking thru the Mutanabi Friday book market (again) ends his report with : 'It looks like Iraqis are putting on an air of normality'

Look, what are you supposed to do then? Run around in the streets wailing? War is at the door eeeeeeeeeeeee! Besides, this 'normality' doesn’t go very deep. Almost everything is more expensive than it was a couple of months ago, people are digging wells in their gardens, on the radio yesterday after playing a million songs from the time of the war with Iran (these are like cartoon theme songs for people my age, we know them all by heart) they read out instructions on how to make a trench and prepare for war, that is after president saddam advised Iraqis to make these trenches in their gardens.

Other normal stuff we did this week:

* Finished taping all the windows in the house, actually a very relaxing exercise if you forget why you are doing it in the first place.

* installed a manual pump on the well we have dug because up till now we had an electrical pump on it.

* bought 60 liters of gasoline to run the small electricity generator we have, bought two nifty kerosene cookers and stocked loads of kerosene and dug holes in the garden to bury the stuff so that the house doesn’t turn into a bomb.

* prepared one room for emergency nasty attacks and bought 'particle masks'-that’s what it says on the box-for use if they light those oil trenches, the masks just might stop our lungs from becoming tar pits. They are very hot items since the word on the trenches spread, you can buy one for 250 Dinars and they are selling faster than the hot cakes of bab-al-agha.

* got two rooms in our house ready to welcome our first IDPs-internally displaced persons-my youngest aunt who is a single mom with three kids because she lives farthest away from the rest of us and another aunt from Karbala in the south. Hotel Pax is officially open for the season, no need to make reservations but you might need to bring a mattress if you come too late.

:: salam 6:43 PM [+]

From Dear Raed Archive

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0802140440
• ISBN 13: 9780802140449
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288