Background
Haifa grew up in Baghdad and graduated from Baghdad University and the School of pharmacy in 1974.
( Exiled, displaced, tortured, and grieving—each of the f...)
Exiled, displaced, tortured, and grieving—each of the five Iraqi women whose lives and losses come to us through Haifa Zangana's skillfully wrought novel is searching in her own way for peace with a past that continually threatens to swallow up the present. Majda, the widow of a former Ba'ath party official who was killed by the government he served. Adiba, a political dissident tortured under Saddam Hussein's regime. Um Mohammed, a Kurdish refugee who fled her home for political asylum. Iqbal, a divorced mother whose family in Iraq is suffering the effects of Western economic sanctions. And Sahira, the wife of a Communist politician, struggling with his disillusionment and her own isolation. Bound to one another by a common Iraqi identity and a common location in 1990s London, these women come together across differences in politics, ethnic and class background, age, and even language. In narrating the friendship that develops among them, Zangana captures their warmth and humor as well as their sadness, their feelings of despair along with their search for hope, their sense of uprootedness, and their yearnings for home. Weaving between the women's memories of Iraq—nostalgic and nightmarish—and their lives as exiles in London, Zangana's novel gives voice to the richness and complexity of Iraqi women's experiences. Through their stories, the novel represents a powerful critique of the violence done to ordinary people by those who hold power both in Iraq and in the West.
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Haifa grew up in Baghdad and graduated from Baghdad University and the School of pharmacy in 1974.
In the early 1970s, as a young activist in the Iraqi Communist Party Haifa was imprisoned by the Baath regime but she managed to escape execution. When she was released from prison, she stayed in Iraq to continue pursuing her studies. She came to Britain in 1976.
As a painter and writer she participated in the Eighties in various European and American publications and group exhibitions, with one-woman shows in London and Iceland.
( Exiled, displaced, tortured, and grieving—each of the f...)
As a member of the PLO, she was the manager of the pharmaceutical unit, moving between Syria and Lebanon in 1975. She is also a contributor to European and Arabic publications such as The Guardian, Red pepper, First Rate (at Lloyd's) Ahram weekly and First Rate (at Lloyd's) Quds (weekly comment), and is a founding member of the International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Brussel’s Tribunal on Iraq.