I chose to write about food: food is inherently political, but it's also an essential part of people's real lives. It's where the public and private spheres connect. I wanted to show readers that the larger politics of war and economics and U.S. foreign policy are inextricably bound to the supposedly trivial details of our everyday lives.
Annia CiezadloFor my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor for so many things: man's inhumanity to man, what Charles Bukowski called "the impossibility of being human." It shaped our perceptions of war and human nature, just as Vietnam did for our parents. We used it to understand how the world works.
Annia CiezadloThere were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The cafรฉ and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.
Annia CiezadloI'm optimistic, though. Now, with the Arab Spring, I think that people in the region are beginning to overturn some of these clichรฉs, and Western editors are starting to catch up. We're seeing some exceptions to the stereotypes, like Elizabeth Rubin's great piecein Newsweek, "The Feminists in the Middle of Tahrir Square." But an article like that shouldn't be the exception. It should be the rule.
Annia CiezadloYou [can] become part of someone else's narrative. Every once in a while I would get people asking me questions like, "If your husband is a Muslim, then why haven't you converted to Islam?" Interestingly enough, almost every person who asked me that was a Sunni, and it was their not-so-subtle way of implying that my Shiite husband was a bad Muslim for letting his infidel wife run around unconverted.
Annia CiezadloAmericans are curious about the texture of everyday life in the Middle East because they rarely get to see it. I wanted readers to feel like they were sitting around the dinner table with me and my friends, hearing what average people really say and really think, [where] the dinner table is the best place to find out.
Annia Ciezadlo