"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).