> But I do think
> there's more to it than that; all colonising forces have always known
> they have to destroy a culture if they wish to dominate. Hence
> repression of indigenous languages in Ireland and Wales, not teaching
> Indian literature in Indian schools, the slaughter of the East
> Timorese story keepers by the Indonesians, and so on.
The Welsh have some stories along those lines, too.
What I find I miss, and thirst for like water, in all the reportage is the
direct, rather than reported, speech of Iraqis: writings where it is Iraqis
who hold the pen and shape the narrative. There is the voice of the "Baghdad
Blogger", which excoriates *very gently* whilst holding out in the long run
for reason and sanity, but it's one among very many voices that need to be
heard. One of the weirdest things is the way you get accounts of the most
unbearable grief and suffering on one page, and accounts of children sitting
on the rooftops watching the fireworks elsewhere in the city, puzzled and
perhaps angered but also unfrightened and unscathed, on another. The horror
stories are like ice, they burn and numb, but it is sadder in a way to be
presented with the unscathed humanity of the survivors, to realise what
kinds of people these things have happened to.
Dominic
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