Diary kept during the Persian Gulf War, Baghdad, 1991 January-April : photocopy of a typescript, with manuscript additions.

About the diary, as told by Nuha al-Radi to Christine Nelson (a curator at the Morgan Library), in 1997: Iraqi artist Nuha al-Radi was living alone in Baghdad when the 1991 Persian Gulf War began. Before long, sixteen friends and relatives had moved in with her. Although she had never kept a diary before, al-Radi felt compelled to document life during wartime. She wrote almost every day, directly on her typewriter, in English (she grew up in India, speaking English at school). When security forces began to seize undocumented typewriters, she stashed hers away and began to write by hand. At the end of the war she kept this photocopy of the diary and entrusted the original to an Australian friend who was leaving Iraq. At the border, the original diary was destroyed by security forces who were not allowing any written matter out of the country. Al-Radi left Iraq about three months after the war and later made her home in Beirut, Amman, and Baghdad.