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Dancing in the No-Fly Zone
A Woman's Journey Through Iraq
By Hadani Ditmars
234 x 156 mm • 256 pages • Black and white Photography
ISBN 1844370631 • paperback • £9.99 • Purchase From Amazon
Not just another batch of war stories, Ditmars fine reports from Iraq reveal aspects of the country - both pre and post-invasion - that the battlefield junkies overlook. From the comic actor who adores Mr Bean and the conductor who brings Berlioz to Baghdad, to the artists and cabaret stars, she seeks out Iraq's dogged creative spirits and touches places in the nation's soul that horror-headlines never reach. — The Independent
Hadani Ditmars knows Iraq well. The writer and Wallpaper* contributor has made numerous journeys to the country in the past decade, seeking out the stories that have slipped behind the sizeable headlines. Before sanctions, Iraq's biggest health problem was obesity, but the multibillion-dollar blow-out was the first Gulf War put paid to key infrastructure and ensured that only the ruling elite could afford to get fat. Half a million infant deaths later came the bloody blank cheque of the war's sequel, bigger, brasher and seemingly never-ending. Before the B1s let rip a second time, Ditmars wrote extensively about Iraq, be it the role of women in the once-liberal soceity, or its hidden modernist gems (a Le Corbusier gymnasium, for example). — Wallpaper
If you enjoy the first-person accounts of BBC Radio Four's From Our Own Correspondent then you'll enjoy this book. Ditmars offers a sidelight on an Iraq that few except Iraqis and foreign correspondents know about. She thus helps the importatnt political task of building our knowledge of a country that tragically few people understand well enough. — Morning Star
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When Hadani Ditmars first went to Iraq in 1997 for the New York Times, she was shocked at what she saw. Six years of the worst sanctions ever inflicted on a modern nation had brought the people to their knees. Yet there was so much more to the "cradle of civilization" than misery and suffering. In the midst of despair she found art, beauty, architecture, music. She discovered orchestras who played impassioned symphonies on wrecked instruments, playwrights who pushed the limits of censorship, artists who spent their last dinars on paint and canvas, families who still celebrated weddings by dancing to makam--traditional love songs.
Ditmars travelled to Iraq again and again, reporting on every aspect of life. In September 2003, she returned to Baghdad to find the people she had met over the years and see what had become of them since the U.S. "liberation." Dancing In The No-Fly Zone is the story of that trip, interwoven with tales from her earlier visits and of the people she met along the way: actors and artists, mercenaries and businessmen, street kids and sufis, even the "king in waiting." It includes a visit to Abu Ghraib prison, in which Ditmars is given a tour of the Saddam-era execution chamber by the U.S.general who was later dismissed after the abuse scandal broke.
As the situation worsens and the violence intensifies, Ditmars spends a miraculous evening with a group of Iraqis who sing and dance along to a performance of makam. A people who have suffered so much yet maintain such resilience deserve to have the full depth of their humanity portrayed. Hadani Ditmars captures this spirit in Dancing in the No-Fly Zone.
As Iraq continues to weather violent occupation, theocratic thuggism and civil strife, Ditmarsí book serves as an eerily prescient tribute to a culture and a people at the breaking point.
Hadani Ditmars is an international journalist based in Canada whose work has been published in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Independent, The Globe and Mail, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, and broadcast on the BBC and CBC radio and television. Her Ms. Magazine essay on Iraqi women has been adopted for many university courses. She has been reporting from the Middle East since 1992 and has been on assignment to Iraq six times since 1997.
Ditmars, an independent reporter whose mixed European and Middle Eastern ancestry often allowed her to pass as an Iraqi, dared to traverse the distance that separates most Western journalists from their subjects, traveling between two cultural worlds in sometimes dangerous and revealing ways. Unlike her male colleagues, her gender also allowed her a connection with Iraqi women, whose struggle she continues to voice.
Arris Publishing
Excellent, this book gives important insight into the Iraq that the author remembers, knows and dreams of emerging from a long nightmare. — Denis Halliday (Former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq)
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