Una persona me hizo llegar su blog, y lo agradezco mucho. Es excelente.
Muchos saludos.

Bueno, ha sido chocante encontrar algo asi despues de dias sin novedades. Ahora solo queda recoger su testigo y que la llama que gente como ella se encendio, siga viva en todos los rincones. Un fuerte abrazo Magda

Jasmina Tesanovic acaba de enviarme este texto:

Nuha al Radi 1941-2004

She used to say: death does not exist, when a beloved of my own dies, I imagine her on a long trip, somewhere around the world...

She was a pagan: after the bombings and the invasion of Iraq, only the natural world could placate her pain. We wrote for four years and made a long book of small talk: numerous questions with obvious answers to which
nobody paid attention.

She used to say she was not a writer... I used to answer: we are women who write...
She promised she would come to Barcelona to meet me, finally, this September, notwithstanding her serious illness, her tiresome battle with therapies, her political struggle and humiliation with visas...

We both understood these things, for my mother died as a belated victim of the sanctions and bombings in Serbia, and a few days ago, Nuha too...
>
The killer has no face, THEY JUST DO IT...
>
I used to say: we should be enemies,
you are a Muslim, I am a Christian,
you are dark, I am blonde...
>
Now you are gone, and I am still alive, defending the name and the space we managed to snatch from the Big Non Face of wars, sanctions,
dictatorships, military globalization.

A small safe place made of words, emotions,
friendships without boundaries, without constructed enemies...

I still remember your laughing voice singing in my
phone: my dear J, where are you J? The only time we spoke...

My dear Nuha, my dear N, we never found a real world in which to meet and talk: we met through internet, and we stayed there...our virtual world was not only possible, but real...and your voice will always be there for us who fight with words for a better world.

El New York Times, sobre Nuha:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/international/middleeast/07alradi.html

September 7, 2004
Nuha al-Radi, Iraqi Artist and Chronicler, Dies at 63
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Nuha al-Radi, the Iraqi artist and diarist whose work depicted her country's tribulations with a wry, impish wit, has died in Beirut. She was 63.

Ms. Radi died on Aug. 30, of pneumonia, her immune system severely weakened as a result of treatment for leukemia, said her sister, Selma al-Radi, speaking by telephone from the Lebanese capital.

Although both a ceramist and a painter, Ms. Radi was best known for her book "Baghdad Diaries," a vivid account of the texture of daily life during the first gulf war and its aftermath, when she found shelter from the bombing in the family orchard in a well-to-do neighborhood.

"The birds have taken the worst beating of all," she wrote. "They have sensitive souls, which cannot take all this hideous noise and vibration. All the caged lovebirds have died from the shock of the blasts, while birds in the wild fly upside down and do crazy somersaults. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the orchard. Lonely survivors fly about in a distracted fashion."

After the book was reissued last year in the wake of the second gulf war, Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review in The New York Times that "the opening sections of these diaries give the reader a tactile and highly personal sense of how the allied bombing of Baghdad in 1991 affected ordinary Iraqi civilians. These descriptions can be read as a harbinger, in some respects, of residents' efforts to cope with the recent war and the continuing postwar upheaval."

While not overtly political, Ms. Radi had no love for either the government controlling Iraq or for the United States for repeatedly causing destruction in Baghdad, her native city.

The book brims with criticism of the United States for making Iraqi civilians bear the brunt of the violence in their efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein, while depicting the grim resignation and black humor Iraqis used to survive under his violent rule.

She relates in matter-of-fact detail how a friend's nanny working in one of the presidential palaces told about what happens to thieves:

"She said that when someone was caught stealing, they gathered the staff together, brought in a doctor, who chopped off this guy's hand, and immediately dunked it into boiling oil to cauterize it."

The work also included jokes like the one about Mr. Hussein asking his cabinet members what time it is, with them responding in unison, "Whatever time you want, sir."

After her book's publication Ms. Radi, uncertain of the reaction from the government, chose to live in exile in Beirut, following something of a family tradition. She was born in 1941 in Baghdad. Her father was an Iraqi diplomat who served as the country's ambassador to Iran and India until the monarchy was overthrown in 1958.

The family later moved to Beirut, where her survivors still live periodically. They include her mother, Suad Munir Abbas; a brother, Abbad, of Abu Dhabi and Toronto, and her sister, Selma, a renowned archaeologist who has done extensive work on preserving historic buildings in Yemen.

In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Ms. Radi studied pottery at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London before moving to Beirut and teaching for a short period at the American University there. With the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon, she returned to Baghdad, where her work included several government commissions for large ceramic tableaus.

Ms. Radi used to joke that even the attempt to see her work was a perfect reflection of the turmoil in her country: one massive piece showing a magic carpet flight from "1,001 Nights" hung on a government building facing the Iranian Embassy while the other graced a presidential palace and was therefore off limits.

Taking visitors around the Iraqi capital in 1989 in the immediate aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war, she would nod toward the work near the embassy and tell them not to point and not to take pictures and that stopping to look was certainly out of the question.

Her work often combined a certain whimsy with the darker aspects of life in the Middle East. One exhibition, titled "Embargo Art," held in Amman during the late 1990's, a period of Western sanctions against Iraq, consisted of "found objects" like old mufflers from cars, the kind of things Iraqis had to use to get by, she said.

Ms. Radi was especially trenchant in describing the growing divide between the West and the Arab world, one to which she was particularly attuned, given her ease at working in both cultures.

In her diary, she tells of an encounter in Baghdad during which a woman wishes that some great catastrophe would "envelop the U.S. and swallow the whole continent." When someone else in the conversation protests that his brothers living there would perish, the woman responds, "They can go down with it."

Last year, weeks after Mr. Hussein was overthrown, Ms. Radi went back to Baghdad to spend several weeks with her mother, who had refused to leave, comparing herself to Scarlett O'Hara after having survived so many wars in Iraq.

Ms. Radi, who usually managed to find a flower to tuck behind her ear every day no matter what war-ravaged city she was in, scampered through the wreckage of Mr. Hussein's compound and found happily that much of her large ceramic tableau of Iraq had survived the bombing unscathed.

She was somewhat less than enchanted with Iraq's latest overseers for failing to provide basic security and services, however, describing the new tenants of the presidential compound in an interview with The Times last year in her typically caustically droll manner:

"America is in its ivory tower palace," she said, "We are used to having coups and revolutions. But usually people who stage them take over the country afterward."

Caption for accompanying illustration (attached):
Nuha al-Radi wrote with wry wit. (Shamyl Khurho/Vintage Books)

Artículo publicado el 9 de septiembre en The Washington Post:

Iraqi Artist Chronicled Suffering In Baghdad With Optimism, Wit

By Nora Boustany

In so many ways, Nuha al-Radi, a renowned Iraqi artist and diarist, was ageless. Her quick quips offered running commentaries on all matters
political and absurd, and her art was rendered with whimsy and wit.

"It was her optimism as she bore witness to others' suffering," said Wasma a Chorbachi, a noted Iraqi-born art historian who lives in Boston.

Al-Radi's humor declared itself through her sparkling dark eyes. Tucked behind her ear, a fresh flower -- which she never failed to find, even in the most desolate places -- reminded everyone that she had come from afar, from some perfumed garden in Mesopotamia. It was her signature protest against the turbulence of war and exile in what she liked to call the "Muddled East."

Al-Radi, 63, died of pneumonia in Beirut on Aug. 31, a complication of leukemia. She had been diagnosed with a rare form of the disease late last
year but had kept it a secret. >

Last weekend, her family and friends laid her to rest, lowering her body on a bed of jasmine into a grave in a shady forest of pines in the heart of
Beirut, one of her favorite adopted homes in a journey that took her from Iraq to Lebanon, Britain, the United States and Yemen, among other places.

Tonight in Beirut, seven cantors accompanied by percussionists will chant happy verses from the Koran, an old Baghdad tradition observed 10 days into mourning, at her mother's apartment by the sea in a celebration of her life.

Her sister, Selma, an archaeologist who lives in New York, traveled to Beirut when al-Radi told her she was coming down with a cold, three days
before she died. "She was so inventive -- I have been looking at catalogues of her art. It is incredible," she said, adding that she planned to track down all her sister's pieces in the United States, India, Pakistan, Europe and the Middle East to have them photographed for a book.

I first met al-Radi in the fall of 1990, just after Iraq invaded Kuwait but before U.S.-led forces retaliated. I was trying to learn the sentiments
of Iraqi artists and intellectuals, and met her through an Iraqi architect.

Over tea in her living room, she talked about her fear that Iraqi civilians would face reprisals, and about her exhibitions in London, New York and
Washington. One hour into the visit, my eyes fell on a brochure on her coffee table.

I suddenly realized that I owned one of her works. It had been a housewarming gift, a green ceramic tray inlaid with saffron, mauve and
tangerine, the hues of Iraqi sunsets, with yellow-orange braided-serpent handles. I made an instant connection with a woman who had intimately
experienced two cultures and whose experiences had become a study in the art of survival.

In 1992, the British literary magazine Granta published her wartime journal about the daily travails of family and friends as they struggled
through power cuts, fuel shortages and other privations. The chronicle describes the resentment that built up against the United States, even among
privileged Baghdad residents, who joined the rest of the population in its aversion to the punitive consequences of sanctions and bombings. The journal was published as a book in 1998, and a revised edition was reissued in the
United States in 2003.

Last year, she again found her way to Baghdad after a seven-year absence. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in April, she kept a journal for 28 days, excerpts of which were also printed in Granta. She described people digging up mass graves in their sad searches for their lost relatives, and U.S. soldiers kicking up dust. The only "shiny things are the hundreds of new
mosques -- huge, bulbous growths," she wrote.

Al-Radi was relieved to find her 83-year-old mother and her frail aunt Naera still in fighting spirits at their riverside house. They had left the
safety of their home in Beirut to spend the days of combat in Baghdad, out of solidarity with its people. (Her mother walked into a bank during a
robbery, and one day, she blurted out to an American officer, "We don't want you.")

Her writings were sometimes droll. Umm Hussein, the caretaker of al-Radi's property in Baghdad, kept walking into swarms of honeybees in the long grass. "It's a good thing she's covered from head to toe," she wrote.

But al-Radi's impressions were also sadly prophetic: "If Iraq is going to be the showcase for the democracy that's going to hit the muddled east,
miracles have to happen."

Al-Radi was born in Baghdad in 1941 and spent 10 of her formative years in India, where her father was the Iraqi ambassador. When the British-backed monarchy that had ruled Iraq was overthrown in 1958, he retired from the diplomatic corps and the family returned to Baghdad. Al-Radi moved to London, where she studied ceramics at the Byam Shaw School of Art. When the Baath Party took over Iraq in 1969, the al-Radis moved to Beirut, where she enrolled at the American University of Beirut, where she eventually taught
art.

Childhood friends such as Wassim Tchourbachi, a relative of art historian Chorbachi, suspected al-Radi knew she was dying. In her diary, she wrote
about taking a tour of Baghdad to see her artwork, which was scattered in hotels and banks. With an American television crew, she entered a Hussein
palace where one of her murals adorned a wall. "It was a forbidden area then as it is now for us Iraqi mortals," she said about the place.

The panel, an earthly paradise on a 50-foot wall, "had taken a year of my life. Such a strange feeling. In history, one always reads of such-and-such a work being destroyed by flood, earthquake, war, and here it was. I am part
of history."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/admin/emailfriend?contentId=A9765-2004Sep9&sent=no&referrer=emailarticle

Artículo en The Guardian:

Nuha al-Radi
Versatile artist and diarist committed to her beloved Iraq

Julie Flint
Tuesday September 7, 2004
The Guardian

"I must say that, as occupiers, the US are a most inefficient lot," the Iraqi artist Nuha al-Radi, who has died aged 63, wrote early last year. "Since we are to learn the American way of life, and suing is a hundred per cent of it, we should start suing the US and the coalition for making war under false pretences. I don't think the Americans have a clue about this country or what to do with it."
In recent months, Nuha also talked, semi-seriously, of suing for the leukaemia that killed her - leukaemia that she thought might be connected to the hundreds of tonnes of depleted uranium the allies fired at Iraqi tanks during the 1991 war. She felt she would be speaking for all Iraqis who linked their cancers to the radioactive particles and toxins that were exploded into their environment, and from there, she argued, into the water table and food chain.

As an artist, Nuha was as versatile as she was talented. Over the years, her ceramics, sculptures and paintings were shown throughout the Arab world and in the west, and exhibited in collections, including the British Museum. But it was as a critic of sanctions, war and occupation - "humiliation" - that she found unexpected celebrity, publishing her Baghdad Diary in the literary magazine Granta in 1992 and a book, Baghdad Diaries, in 1998.

Whatever medium she was using, Nuha drew on the people, events and materials around her. She depicted moods and events - in clear, crisp colours in her art, and devastating detail in her diaries. She preferred the personal to the political and humour to ranting, although she could rant with the best of them when the mood took her - not only about the allies but about "the muddled east" and the failure of Arabs "to learn the meaning of 'unity' or 'initiative'".

Thus when Saddam Hussein decreed that graduates could import cars duty free, and intellectuals began driving Mercedes, Nuha held an exhibition of sculpture in Baghdad that had only two components, cars and brains. Model Mercedes had brains oozing from their windows; brains flew Mercedes flags. When the invasion of Iraq began, she exhibited her Embargo Art - rows of figures made from recycled wood, painted and decked out in feathers and other defiant finery. "They look as if they are demonstrating," she wrote. "Hopefully, we will recycle ourselves and survive."

Ian Jack, the current editor of Granta, said that the periodical had no hesitation in publishing Nuha's first manuscript: "Her diaries were direct, witty, humane, so that you saw large things, like wars and occupations, intimately. Good diarists are rarer than many people imagine. The temptation for the diarist is to inflate himself or herself, to over-write, to have Big Thoughts. Nuha persuaded you by her matter-of-factness. Like most good writing, it is beautifully specific - a record of cake-making and flower-tending as well as of a blitz."

Born in Baghdad, Nuha spent most of her childhood in India, where her father was ambassador. He retired when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, and the family returned to Baghdad. In 1961, Nuha moved to London to study ceramics at the Byam Shaw School of Art and work with the Chelsea Pottery.

Her parents moved to Beirut in 1969 after the Ba'ath party seized power in Iraq. She enrolled in liberal arts at the American University of Beirut and, in 1971, began teaching there. When the Lebanese civil war erupted in 1975, she returned to Baghdad. It was the beginning of 30 years spent shuttling, "trying to avoid coups and wars".

Beirut was, for Nuha, "the perfect place for political exiles", a place where "the right to grumble" had not been banned, and where she was happiest. She loved the city's mix of people, the ease of life, the stray cats she nurtured but never attempted to domesticate. Friendship was perhaps her greatest gift, and her house was seldom empty.

Gardening was a passion: when she felt aggressive, she cut and pruned; when she felt hopeful, she planted. But even Nuha could not make flowers bloom on her windy, sea-facing balcony, a narrow strip so different from her beloved palm orchard in Baghdad.

Nuha was buried in Beirut's pine forest, lying in a bed of jasmine and with flowers, her favourite adornment, in her irrepressible hair. She is survived by her mother Suad, brother Abbad, sister Selma and aunt Naira.

Nuha al-Radi, artist and diarist, born January 27 1941; died August 31 2004