Double defiance and the diary’s generic boundaries: Nuha al-Radi’s chronicle of war and exile
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract As the US-led coalition forces were bombing Baghdad in 1991, the prominent Iraqi ceramist Nuha al-Radi began writing a diary in English, which now represents, as a book titled Baghdad Diaries ([1998] 2003), a valuable document about what the ordinary civilians went through during a war in which they had no say. While the diary demonstrates the horrible human losses, material damages and environmental degradation inflicted by a savage war, it also reveals the fear of living under an oppressive dictatorial regime. The diary becomes a nuanced, carefully coded message, defying the double tyrannies of a genocidal, rogue regime that brutalizes its people and an arrogant superpower that so callously harms a helpless, hapless population. As well, al-Radi, with the prescience of an artist, anticipates the future horrors that befall Iraq after yet another war in 2003, launched by the same superpower. In this respect, I query Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s argument that ‘literature cannot predict, but it may prefigure’. Moreover, by exposing the hypocrisy and illogic of war and by organically extrapolating her own suffering during the war and in exile with the collective agonies of an entire nation, al-Radi expands the boundaries of the diary by transcending the solipsistic pitfalls with which the genre might tempt the diarist: she politicizes the hardships and emotions of the personal and endows the intimacy of the private with a public significations. The expansive contexts embracing Baghdad Diaries ([1998] 2003) thus demonstrate the genre’s validity, versatility and open possibilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".