Sirens of Baghdad

When I first started reading the Sirens of Baghdad, I had to put it down ever few pages because I found the story so depressing. Once I got over the fact that the book just was not going to “get any better” for the people living in Iraq, I couldn’t put the book down. The narrator’s story began that he loved his hometown in the Iraqi desert, Kafr Karam, and was angry with anyone who thought differently. After the American soldiers invaded his house, everything changed from there on. It was terrifying to learn about how Sulayman died, and the way his life was just tossed to the side by the Americans when they shot him for “acting out,” ignoring his disabilities. Sulayman’s death was the beginning of the destruction of their town; it mentally tore them all apart, “When you’ve got nothing, that’s what you make do with. It’s  a question of outlook (Khadra, 73).” Another part of the book of the beginning of the book that stands out to me is when the Haitem wedding is bombed and destroyed. 17 innocent civilians were killed, mostly women and children… All because someone reported “suspicious activity.”

It was astonishing to me to look back on how many times changed from the beginning of the book throughout the middle, and then changed back before the very end of the novel for the narrator. In the middle of the book, he reminisces that “War wasn’t my line. I wasn’t born to commit violence –I considered myself a thousand more likely to suffer from it than to practice it one day (Khadra, 99)” After I read another hundred pages, the feelings he had for war and suffrage had taken a full turn, and he was not full of hatred. “I got an eyeful, and my subconscious stored away a maximum load of anger, which (when the time came) would give me enthusiasm for whatever violence I might commit (Khadra, 199).” Within the last few pages, the readers find out that the narrators whole life passes in front of him, and that in the end he really hasn’t even liven a whole life, and that he realizes he has no right killing innocent people. “I was sure you were going to chicken out,” Shakir said, right before “they” came to finish the job…

All in all, Sirens of Baghdad was a terrifying and upsetting book… It was so different, and at times difficult, to be in the mind of a suicide “bomber,” or better yet, “virus.”