Bøger af Haifa Zangana

Salt Journals is a compelling collection of essays by Tunisian women, sharing their personal experiences with dictatorship and oppression. While rooted in the history and culture of Tunisia, these narratives reflect universal feelings of isolation, pain, and the indomitable quest for freedom. Drawn from a variety of different professions, including a lawyer, an engineer, a nurse, a student, and a city council member, among others, these women are contesting the culture of silence surrounding women's prison narratives. Employing words as their weapons of nonviolent resistance, the authors recount the harsh realities of a militarized state and its oppressive prison system. Their creative defiance against state repression emerges not just as a means of survival, but as a profound act of dissidence, reclaiming control from the brutality imposed upon their lives. A testament to the power of self-representation, Salt Journals opens a vital space for dialogue on the necessity of empathy, resilience, and the importance of speaking out in the face of tyranny.

In City of Widows, Haifa Zangana tells the story of her country, from the early twentieth century through the US-UK invasion and the current occupation. She brings to light a sense of Iraq as a society mainly of secularists who have been denied, through years of sanctions, war, and occupation, a systemwithin which to build the country according to their own values. She points to the long history of political activism and social participation of Iraqi women, and the fact that, before the recent invasion, they had been among the most liberated of their gender in the Middle East. Finally, she writes aboutBaghdad today as a city populated by bereaved women and children who have lost their loved ones and their land, but who are still emboldened by the native right to resist and liberate themselves to create an independent Iraq.

The carefully crafted, subtle, and humorous stories in Packaged Lives show Zangana at her best as a fiction writer. She portrays her subjects keenly, sensitively, and lovingly but without compromise. Iraqis living in exile come to life in her narratives as men and women who are caught between two worlds.

This evocative memoir captures the loneliness of exile and the connection between memory and survival.

A novel by a Kurdish-Iraqi writer that gives voice to contemporary Iraqi women's experiences of political repression, violence, exile, and the yearning for peace.