More praise for Dreaming of Baghdad
A poetic rendition of survival under the conditions of war and occupation, this inspiring and passionate memoir is a reminder of the inseparability of the personal and political, and the local and global.
Shahrzad Mojab, co-editor of Violence in the Name of Honor: Theoretical and Political Challenges
Haifa Zangana proves once again that the act of writing can be truly liberating.
Dalia Said Mostafa, research fellow, The University of Manchester
In this powerful narrative, Haifa Zangana weaves a rich tapestry that portrays the repression, torture, and resistance in Saddams Iraq against a complex social landscape. A must read for anyone who wants to understand Iraq today.
Jacqueline S. Ismael, coeditor of the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies
Praise for City of Widows: An Iraqi Womans Account of War and Resistance
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
DREAMING OF BAGHDAD
HAIFA ZANGANA
Translated from Arabic by the author, with Paul Hammond
The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
Feministpress.org
First Feminist Press edition
Translation 2009 by Haifa Zangana
Foreword 2009 by Hamid Dabashi
Afterword 2009 by Ferial J. Ghazoul
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
An earlier version of this work was published in English in 1990.
The Big Brother chapter was translated by Dr. Wen-Chin Ouyang.
Cover design by Faith Hutchinson
Text design by Drew Stevens
13 12 11 10 095 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zangana, Haifa, 1950
[Fi arwiqat al-dhakirah. English]
Dreaming of Baghdad / Haifa Zangana ; translated from Arabic by Paul Hammond and the author.
p. cm.
Translated from the 1995 Arabic edition by Dar al-Hikma; originally published in English in 1990 in France, under title Through the vast halls of memory.
ISBN 978-1-55861-605-9
1. Political activistsIraqNonfiction. 2. Women political prisonersIraqNonfiction. 3. Torture victimsIraqNonfiction. 4. WomenIraqNonfiction. 5. IraqHistory1958Nonfiction. 6. Baghdad (Iraq)Nonfiction. 7. Zangana, Haifa, 1950 8. Authors, IraqiBiography. I. Zangana, Haifa, 1950 Through the vast halls of memory. II. Title.
PJ7876.A647F513 2009
892.736dc22
2009003278
CONTENTS
by Hamid Dabashi
by Ferial J. Ghazoul
FOREWORD
H aifa Zanganas Dreaming of Baghdad reads, sounds, and feels like drops of merciful rain. How many more books like this revelatory testimonial will we have, will we need, before the record is set straightbefore we know what was Baghdad, whence Iraq, and who the Iraqis were before they were brutalized by the combined malignancies of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush? Zanganas voice is at once elegiac and defiant, memorial and revelatory, sad but surreal in its visionary recital of what was and what might have been.
As a revolutionary activist Zangana was imprisoned and tortured by a tyrant, forced into exile, and made to watch in desperation as her homeland as she knew it was wiped off the map by George W. Bush. In these dark days, as she witnesses the destruction of her country, her prose is politically punctilious, an act of moral redemptionabout a people she proudly calls hers and a homeland she inhabits with pride and poise. If the dastardly legacy of the Bush administration were to succeed in wiping out the entire collective conscience of the Iraqi peoplealong with monumental archives of their cultural heritage (in which resides the very alphabet of our humanity)and all that remained was this beautiful rhapsody, the revolutionary defiance and the cosmopolitan culture she once lived could be deduced from it.
Zangana and I are almost the same age. She was born in 1950 and I in 1951, on two sides of Shat Al-Arab carrying our mutual memories of the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. I read her and I relive the history of our two peoples (Iranians and Iraqis) through the loving reminiscences of my Iraqi sister. She speaks for both of our nations, brutalized, cut to pieces in body and soul. When I first met her in New York in November 2007, both of us were grayer than our green memories of the river that separated and united us in our youth. We both grew up under dictatorships, suffered the indignities of a democracy delayed, celebrated the aspirations we held sacred, and then saw the inferno of our two nations slaughtering each other to the delight of our enemies. When I read Dreaming of Baghdad, I couldnt help but wonder: why is it that Iran has not produced a Haifa Zangana in exile, but instead a platoon of self-sexualizing memoirists infantilizing a nation, whitewashing the harsh struggles of a people? My consolation: in Zanganas voice, there is a reverberation of her sisters in Iran, there is ample space for mine and ours. She speaks for both Iraqis and Iranians of her generation, men and women, and of a dream that was shared on both sides of that magnificent and generous river.
This book will teach you many things that the combined terror of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush has forced an entire world to forget. It is impossible to imagine a timelier context for the publication of Dreaming of Baghdad. Against the backdrop of a self-promoting memoir industry Zangana stands out as a voice of a revolutionary Iraqi womantested, wise, and confident. She is the nightmare of Paul Bremer and his company, who have divided a deeply cultivated culture along sectarian lines to rule it better.
But erstwhile military governors or strategists are not the only arbiters of public debate about Iraq who will be deeply troubled by what Zangana writes in her book. In conjunction with the US-imperial apparatus that has invaded and conquered Iraq, an army of embedded anthropologists has now cornered the market of writing about Iraqi women. Haifa Zangana does not write about Iraqi women. She is an Iraqi woman. And her voiceclear, compelling, confident, and rebelliousspeaks more voluminously and eloquently than libraries of ethnographic monographs and their prosaic theories. With the stroke of one magnificent act of literary courage and imagination she exposes the embedded anthropologists and their shameless mutation of a people into objects of ethnographic curiosity for their conquerors. Ever since the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, Iraqis have been robbed not just of their life, liberty, and national sovereignty, but above all of their right to represent themselves. In one travesty after another, US- and EU-trained anthropologists (especially those who don an Arab name or a distant Iraqi lineage) dismiss the experience of Iraqi women who have suffered under the military occupation as inauthentic and have the audacity to claim that right of representation for themselves. In
