Annia Ciezadlo Quotes

#1. The problem is that so many of them are not getting told. This is a massive problem, not just in the Middle East but for places from Africa to Afghanistan. There are millions of stories out there, millions of potential Booksellers of Kabul or Valentino Achak Dengs.

Annia Ciezadlo

#2. As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects.

Annia Ciezadlo

#3. But being an American woman married to an Arab guy - and a Muslim to boot! - put me in a different category. People would open up, and tell me things that they would never tell another journalist, no matter how persistent.

Annia Ciezadlo

#4. Part of the reason you see so little about this in the Western media is that Iraq was closed off from the outside world for so long under Saddam. But I think there's a deeper reason, which is that it messes with our assumptions - not just about Iraq, but about culture and human nature.

Annia Ciezadlo

#5. I don't have a problem with the media focusing on bad things happening. That's our job, after all. But I think it's incomplete, and I would even say it's inaccurate, to only portray a place through its tragedies.

Annia Ciezadlo

#6. We're taught that domestic life is not a "serious" political topic, like war and peace, but the fact is that we spend most of our lives doing everyday things: at the dinner table, in the kitchen, washing dishes, grocery-shopping, commuting. These things make up the fabric of our lives.

Annia Ciezadlo

#7. Which is one of the dangers of immersion journalism: you can find yourself getting sucked into battles you have nothing to do with, in this case an ongoing battle between Muslims.

Annia Ciezadlo

#8. But how can you understand a war without any knowledge of the society where it happens? It's like trying to understand birth without knowing anything about pregnancy or conception. Or like trying to understand our current economic collapse without knowing what a derivative is.

Annia Ciezadlo

#9. There is a feminist proverb I learned from my mother: The personal is political. There's a powerful literary stereotype that men write about war and politics and public life, while women confine themselves to family and food and personal life.

Annia Ciezadlo

#10. Luckily, just at the world's outer limit, right where a wandering soul needs it most, is a bar where he can get a beer.

Annia Ciezadlo

#11. The Middle East is the only region in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa where rates of malnutrition actually rose over the past decade or two, instead of falling.

Annia Ciezadlo

#12. There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad was always known as a famously bookish, intellectual city. There's an old saying that Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.

Annia Ciezadlo