Dreaming of Baghdad - Paperback

by Haifa Zangana (Author), Ferial J. Ghazoul (Afterword by)

"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).

Author Biography

In the 1970s, Haifa Zangana was imprisoned and tortured for actively resisting Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. A journalist, artist, and activist, Zangana is the author of The City of Widows and co-founder of Solidarity for an Independent and Unified Iraq. She contributes to the Guardian, Red Pepper, and Al-Ahram Weekly and writes a weekly column for Al Quds.