The 15-year-old diarist was a singular talent. Let’s stop pretending every young woman tweeting her life under fire is doing the same.

Last summer, as Israeli bombs and rockets exploded outside her home in Gaza, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl named Farah Baker began live-tweeting to document the war unfolding around her. Her communiqués ranged from the sad (“I miss my friends”) to the heartbreaking (“A child martyred and many wounded”). By the time the 50-day conflict subsided, Baker had become an international media sensation, attracting hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when she called herself the Anne Frank of Gaza, her reference was picked up by sources ranging from Salt Lake City’s Deseret News to Al Jazeera.

Thus Baker became the latest in a succession of young women—Zlata Filipovic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ma Yan of China, and Hadiya of Iraq—whose anguished and often incisive dispatches from imperiled regions have inspired comparisons to the Jewish girl who wrote her remarkable journal from the “secret annex” above a spice warehouse in Amsterdam. Doubtless more Anne Franks have arisen in other embattled places in the decades since Frank’s diary was first published in the Netherlands in 1947. And all of these diarists serve an important purpose: They compel readers to remember that somewhere children are living through calamity or, in some cases, not living through it.

The diaries in question were produced under wildly diverse circumstances. Frank remained unknown to the world during her lifetime. By contrast, the discovery of Ma’s diary by a French journalist in 2001 brought the girl publicity and tuition funds for her and other children in her remote village of Zhangjiashu in northern China; Filipovic’s publishers, also French, pulled strings in 1993 to evacuate her and her family to Paris; and Baker helped focus the world’s attention on Gaza’s urgent plight, though she and her family did not receive aid.

The contrast between Baker and Frank is particularly stark: While Frank wrote in hiding, untouched by the gaze of the global media, Baker was engaged with—and responsive to—an interactive, instantaneous international readership. Baker herself has evoked Anne Frank’s name as a form of shorthand to help her Twitter followers understand her mission. But the comparison, whether made by Baker or others, is an inaccurate one.

To put a writer in a category such as “the Anne Frank of” here or there is to deny that writer’s individual voice. No one says he’s “the Shakespeare of Belgian theater” or “the Hemingway of Poughkeepsie” or “the Philip Roth of China” because it is understood that there is only one Hemingway, one Shakespeare, one Roth. But because Anne Frank was a girl, and because she was young, she is everygirl—anygirl who documents suffering. The generic Anne Frank also occupies a particular sexual niche: the virgin martyr, a young romantic, given to crushes.

But Frank was neither a species, a generic person, nor a brand. Whereas Baker wants to become a lawyer and Filipovic is now a film producer, Frank wanted to be a writer. Indeed, her diary is the work of a very particular writer working under very particular circumstances—importantly, under the circumstances best suited to the development of an author. Although the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators were actively killing and rounding up Jews, and though the Franks lived in constant fear, they were not under active siege; they inhabited a sort of prison in which the adults tried to create for the children a simulacrum of normal life. There were household fights and heart-stopping close calls during which the family was nearly discovered, but for stretches of time nothing happened. Instead, there were lessons, and a constant supply of books: Otto Frank made up his daughters’ reading lists, which included everything from Greek myths to Goethe to Dickens, and Anne read whatever else she could find. For a time, she was afforded the structure and intellectual energy that writing demands.

Fortunately, she also possessed a rare gift for dialogue and scenes of action, description, and detail: An Amsterdam sky was “a strip of blue so pale it was almost invisible.” She brought self-awareness and wit to her project: “You’re probably a little surprised to hear me talking about admirers at such a tender age. Unfortunately, or not, as the case may be, this vice seems to be rampant at our school.” With serious attention to her craft, she wrote and then revised during the 25 months she spent in the annex. During the last four months—before she and her family were arrested, before she was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, where she died of typhus—Frank rewrote her entire diary on sheets of colored paper. In this revision, she worked to clarify certain passages: for example, the frantic events that precipitated her family’s going into hiding. For her future readers, she also added the literary device of Kitty, the ideal friend to whom the diary is addressed, and an informative floor plan of the secret annex.

In The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (published in Dutch in 2001 and in English in 2003), readers can compare her first draft with her subsequent revision and with a third version that her father compiled, restoring certain sections, among them, her account of her romance with Peter, the boy upstairs in the annex. Frank had excised these, either because she wanted her book to be seen as important and considered the scenes too frivolous, or because she had gotten over her infatuation. TheRevised Critical Edition is a large-format book—more than 800 pages of sentences that Frank reworked and refined with planning and deliberation. It would be difficult to calculate how many tweets that represents. The tweet is by its nature ephemeral and often unfiltered. Baker reported in real time under conditions ill-suited to the reflection and labor that Frank must have devoted to passages like this: “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too.”

One’s impulse is to encourage and applaud the teenagers scribbling in diaries, endangered innocents attempting to reach the wider world: Anne Frank and Farah Baker share the all-important fact that they are blameless. But out of respect for the singularity, the talent, and the hard work of a true writer, perhaps there should be a permanent moratorium on yet another girl being referred to as the Anne Frank of this hellhole or that. Young women under threat are not interchangeable. To treat them as such is degrading, not just to Anne Frank, but also to the other young writers with their own incomparable stories to tell.

Link:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/15/writing-from-a-war-zone-doesnt-make-you-anne-frank-girl-emulated-farah-baker-zlata-filipovic/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Flashpoints&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign