‘Postcolonial women writers are searching for new cultural forms and hybrid languages that better represent the particularisms of the communities about which they write ‘ (François Lionnet , 1995. p.19).
Innovative literary forms are appearing from the margins opening new spaces for cross-cultural agency and self-expression during times of conflict and war. One of these mediums popularised in the Twenty First century is the online blog. Authors of these blogs are diverse and live in various continents across the world. Riverbend is one such author who is utilising this medium to share aspects of her daily life in Iraq during the invasion in 2003. Through her adopted online persona, Riverbend adopts an assertive voice that challenges dominant Western discourses promoting the discourse of ‘liberation’. ‘Riverbend’ adopts this pseudonym and uses her blog to question particular Western stereotypes of Iraqi women and Iraqi life. She uses an overtly political charged tone to give testimony to a life under siege. Riverbend is using her voice to engage in a discourse with her ‘oppressor’ both real and imagined. Below is extract from River bend’s post titled ‘ A New Talent’ that attempts to re-situate outdated perceptions of Iraqi identity:
‘You know what really bugs me about posting on the Internet, chat rooms or message boards? The first reaction (usually from Americans) is "You're lying, you're not Iraqi". Why am I not Iraqi, well because a. I have Internet access (Iraqis have no internet), b. I know how to use the internet (Iraqis don't know what computers are) and c. Iraqis doesn’t know how to speak English (I must be a Liberal). All that shouldn't bother me, but it does. I see the troops in the streets and think, "So that's what they thought of us before they occupied us... that may be what they think of us now." How is it that we're seen as another Afghanistan?’ (Riverbend, 2003).
Whitlock suggests that Rivebend’s blog reflects an ‘autobiography in transit: on the move in unpredictable passages across cultures, vital to the imaginative work of modern subjectivity ad struggle to speak in the public sphere' (2007, p.4) Whitlock continues that Riverbend's text is also indicative of the ‘synchronic connections between the virtual and the material worlds that can be wired through online blog spaces’ (Whitlock, 2007, p. 4). In Baghdad Burning Riverbend actively engages the performative ‘I’. She writes unapologetically assuming this virtual ‘I’ utilising the online forum as a space where she can access a sense of self-empowerment through testimony. Mark Poster tentatively suggests that ‘new media does not merely reinforce existing cultural figures of the self, rather it is a space that encourages practices that construct some new possibilities for political action’ (2001b, p.11). As online readers of Riverbends’s blog all we know about her 'true' identity is what she decides to reveal in the fragments of her daily posts. She introduces herself in her first blog and offers the only substantial information of ‘self’. She writes – ‘ A little bit about myself: I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway (Riverbend, post. 1. 2003).
Riverbend’s daily life is a tentative one that is always under threat of violence. Thus her writing is fuelled with a fire to burn virtual pathways, reaching out and attacking her foreign occupiers. These virtual pathways offer a direct challeng to claims of universal human rights, as we the reader, read about her rights and those of Iraqi civilians be striped away. Riverbend also speaks back to the hideous term that was used throughout the war - ‘collateral damage’. This was term used by the Bush Administration to cover up the atrocities and violence’s that occurred to Iraqi citizens during the invasion. Riverbend’s voice is both personal and emotional as she engages with these discourses. Readers of this online blog are compelled to follow her day to day reports as she offers critical personal insight in Iraqi life, as well as an alternative to the information produced by mainstream media. According to Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan ‘war-blogging possesses the capacity to bring to bear alternative perspectives, contexts and ideological diversity to war reporting, providing users with the means to connect with distant voices otherwise being marginalised, if not silenced altogether, from across the globe’ (2007, p. 80). In the words of US journalist Paul Andrews (2003), ‘media coverage of the war that most Americans saw was so jingoistic and administration-friendly as to proscribe any sense of impartiality or balance, hence the importance of the insights provided by the likes of Riverbend’ (2003, p. 64).
The popular embracing of new literary forms such as the online blog and the graphic novel challenges what as been previously categorised as autobiographical literature thus far. Texts such as Baghdad Burning and Persepolis evade highbrow literary categorisation and sit uncomfortably in any definitive literary framework. These innovative stylistic mediums employed by women such as Riverbend and Satrapi operate simultaneously as sites of protest and dissent, as well as seeking a conscious dialogue with an intended Western readership. These texts engage a post- modern discourse that decentres claims to absolute truth, calling for new and diverse spaces for expression, ways of reading and response. Whitlock elaborates that ‘texts such as Persepolis and Baghdad Burning require new mythographies, new imaginaries, and different ways of thinking about the volatile networks of consumption, pleasure, and agency that carry life narratives in the here and now’ (2007,p. 4). Mary Louise Pratt extends a flexible category to these new literary forms offering the term auto- ethnography. She defines auto-ethnography with ‘political intent’ (Pratt, 1992, p. 7). Pratt claims that 'these texts are testimonies constructed in response to, or in dialogue with metropolitan representations, where colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonisers in their own terms’ (Pratt, 1992 p. 7). Caren Kaplan elaborates that ‘ethnic autobiography ‘is the privileged mode for the exploration of fractured postcolonial subjectivity and that the burden on ethnic autobiographic writing is to participate in at least two different registers at all times, even two different temporalities’ (Kaplan, 1996, p. 148). Marjane Satrapi speaks to this fractured postcolonial identity, one that is dually bound to her birth country of Iran and secondly to her disaporic home in France. Satrapi’s ability to engage both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ discourses and meanings throughout Persepolis is indicative of her ability to participate in different temporalities simultaneously. This dual identity infuses the retelling of her experiences as a child with added complexity, insight and a post-modern subjectivity. Satrapi uses her illustrations and written text to expresses a diverse emotional response to this hybrid identity as well as the confusion and loss that attends it. Below is an extract from an interview with Satrapi that elucidates these complexities and the associated burden that her ethno- autobiographical subjectivity inhabits:
Satrapi: "In order to be integrated into host county you have to forget about your own culture first. You know, because culture takes all of the space inside you. If you want to have another culture come into you, it’s like you have to take out the first one, and then choose what you want from the two and swallow them again. But it’s the moment you look at everything that it’s this lack of identity. You don’t know anymore who you are. You want so badly to be integrated, but at the same time you have a whole thing that is inside you. It’s the problem that when you leave and then come back, you are a foreigner anywhere. I am a foreigner in Iran. I don’t take the risk to go back to my country anymore, but at the same time, it’s a good feeling not to belong to any place anymore, at the same time it’s a hard feeling" (Tully, 2004).
