Book Review: Hadani Ditmars, Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman’s Journey through Iraq

by anna battista

With so many books about Iraq, it’s easy to get lost and lose interest in this topic. It may be that most of such books are written in a cold and detached style by war junkies disguised as journalists. This is not the case though for Hadani Ditmars’ book Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman’s Journey through Iraq. Ditmars, a Canadian journalist whose work has been published in many newspapers and magazines from all over the world, from the New York Times to the Independent, from Ms. to Wallpaper*, and broadcast on the BBC and CBC radio and television, has been reporting from the Middle East since 1992 and, since 1997, she has been on assignment in Iraq six times.

Dancing in the No-Fly Zone marks Ditmars’ return to Iraq in September 2003 and opens with the journalist attending a concert in Amman by Kazem al-Saher, Iraq’s most famous pop star, before heading to Baghdad. The lyrics of one song by al-Saher, “Oh Baghdad, Baghdad/You are in my blood”, will forever remain in Ditmars’ heart and mind and inspire her throughout her stay in Iraq.

From the fourth chapter on, the reader follows Ditmars while she looks for stories to report and meets old friends and locals, many of whom seem to be lost “in a cultural and political schizophrenia” caused by the end of Saddam’s regime and the beginning of the American invasion. Interweaving tales from her earlier visits with reports from her 2003 journey, Ditmars takes the reader to places no other journalist has ever explored: she analyses the ‘70s jazz scene and the contemporary theatre scene in Baghdad, meets Iraqi Christians in a Chaldean church, visits the al-Gaylani mosque, joins a Sufi tariqa, and interviews local painters and other artists such as musicians and orchestra members.

The most moving chapters see Ditmars visiting the American-run prison of Abu Ghraib (where she is given a tour of the place by U.S. General Janis Karpinski, later suspended by the Pentagon after the abuse scandal broke), two morgues and a hospital where the situation is desperate and a doctor explains her that depleted uranium poisoning might be behind the rise in leukaemia cases.

Ditmars also analyses the condition of women are now living in: “Iraqi women once enjoyed one of the highest statuses in the Arab world,” she writes, “In the 1980s, they comprised seventy percent of civil servants and played a strong role in public life. But since the Gulf War, their situation had declined dramatically. By the late 1990s, an alarming number of women had turned to prostitution as a means of economic survival, something unheard of a decade earlier.”

Towards the end of her journey in Iraq, Ditmars lives two heartbreaking moments first when she visits an abandoned swimming pool where some of the people displaced by the war are now camping, then when she meets Assem, a twelve-year-old diabetic boy who has to work twelve-hour shifts in a shoe factory to pay for his insulin.

There’s not much difference for Ditmars between the U.S. government and Saddam’s regime, but, rather than launching in political attacks, what she wants to do with her book is mainly to pay tribute to the Iraqi people and “to a culture that invented writing and architecture and survived invasions and conquerors … to a land that deserves a better fate than that offered up by presidential television, spiralling violence, and the missionaries of the petroleum industry.”

Dancing in the No-Fly Zone is an excellent book that will definitely help us regaining some of the humanity that many reports from Iraq managed to erase from our hearts.

{www.arrisbooks.com}