Anthony Shadid, a reporter for the Washington Post, limns a warm intimate portrait of a bookseller of Baghdad, who was killed in the recent bomb attack on the Mutanbi Street.
Shadid is one of the better journalists reporting from Iraq. His reporting from Iraq shows rare erudition and great care. This particular story, one of the more readable stories, made me think a little more about the reasons behind Western fascination with booksellers in exotic places. For example, Asne Seierstad a few years ago wrote to great success, ‘The Bookseller of Kabul’. Shadid’s story reminded me of a prominent story by NY Times on Baghdad’s theater scene and the sprinkling of stories you get about people behind Iraq’s orchestra etc. Shadid’s, Seierstad’s and others work can be seen as attempts to “humanize” the numerous who die anonymously in war zones across the globe. The way these able journalists “humanize” the “other” is by telling you how similar they are to us. More pointedly, they “humanize” the “other” by endowing them with cultural values that we value and admire – like reading books or going to theater. Of course this particular approach doesn’t bode well for the large numbers of humans who live and die in shanty towns with no or little access to education or for that matter hygiene and food. There are no redeeming cultural qualities in them that we can identify and think of them as our own –magically transform them into people whose loss disturbs us. The sad fact is that it is inconceivable for a lot of Americans to imagine people living in shanty town among mounds of garbage, with tattered clothes and emaciated bodies, to have a fully formed emotional life with their own frustrations and aspirations. It is almost as if these masses are a lower form of life – whose lives are as inconsequential as their deaths are immaterial. In fact why should they matter? Certainly economically their deaths don’t mean much – not for us for sure. The only way their deaths possibly matter is when they become part of cultural discourse and are needed to negotiate our cultural identities as self identified liberals or for that matter, right wing zealots who pooh-pooh these liberal sensitivities. It is this specific calculated role of third world calamities in identity negotiations that turn repeated exhortations, on say Darfur, by pedantic and zealous columnists like Nicholas Kristof, into “sexy” campus issues and not an iota more.