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“With passion and commitment,” an exiled Iraqi woman recounts her time organizing resistance to Saddam Hussein and imprisonment in Abu Ghraib (Nawal El Saadawi, author of Zeina).
In 1970s Iraq, the Ba’ath Party was at the height of its influence in the Middle East and popularity throughout the West. But a group of activists recognized the disastrous potential of the regime as its charismatic leader, Saddam Hussein, came to power. Haifa Zangana was among those who resisted Saddam’s rule, a small group of whom were captured and imprisoned at Abu Ghraib.
Now, from a distance of time and place, Zangana writes about her incarceration, the agonizing loss of comrades to torture and death in prison, her safe yet haunted life so far away from friends, family, and her beloved country, and the ways memory conspires to make us forget.
In this poetic, emotionally-tinged memoir, the author of Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London “drags politics down from the realm of the abstract into the mud, fear, and loneliness of personal experience and psychological ruin that is life under dictatorship” (Christian Parenti, author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq).
"If you are interested in what goes on beneath the burka in the minds of Iraqis struggling to sustain personal equilibrium amidst decades-long oppression, then I think you can add this book to your list of tomes that might help in accumulating a body of understanding for a distant society—if not for another distanced human being." —Internet Review of Books
“Written with passion and commitment, Dreaming of Baghdad invoked my own dreams, and the joys and pain that memory can bring. A must-read.”—Nawal El Saadawi
“Haifa Zangana illuminates the dark realities of Saddam Hussein's Iraq while remembering what she misses from that complex place and time.”—Sharnush Parsipur
“Haifa Zangana proves once again that the act of writing can be truly liberating.”—Dalia Said Mostafa
“How poorer the world would have been without Haifa Zangana's courageous testimony. Drop anything you are reading and grab hold of a copy of this magnificent book.”—Hamid Dabashi
Praise for City of Widows:
"Zangana writes with indignation of the recent hijacking of her country." —Time Out New York
"This angry, unforgiving and powerful book is as vital as it is hard to swallow." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"What left me quaking was the power of internal perspective and history that she offers, and her informed explanations of both policy and practice." —Feminist Review
"The book is an extraordinary and well-written criticism of the occupation of Iraq."—Adventures in Reading