I don't think I'm alone when I say that despite all that we hear and read about the Middle East, it's difficult for an untraveled middle American like myself to really understand what's going on Kabul, Tehran or Baghdad.   For this reason, Dreaming of Baghdad - an eyewitness account of life in this ancient city - caught my eye

Author Haifa Zangana was born and raised in Baghdad and came of age during the Ba'ath Party's rise to power under the leadership of Saddam Hussein in 1968.   With typical revolutionary naïveté, she joined the opposing Iraqi Communist Party, sincerely believing that Iraq could be a country free of tyranny and "dreaming of a better Iraq for everyone, regardless of their religion, race or political belief."  Due to her activism, she was imprisoned and tortured by the government, eventually obtaining her freedom and settling in exile in London. 

Once she was "safe" in London, her experiences as a revolutionary, torture victim and exile continued to haunt her, often in the forms of dreams and nightmares.  Partly as therapy, she put these memories into words and in 1990 originally published this collection in English in France, under the title Through the Vast Halls of Memory.    This new version is translated from the 1995 Arabic edition and was published in 2009 by The Feminist Press out of City University of New York.

Staying true to the dream format, Zangana presents these haunting memories in fourteen unconnected chapters.  While some parts are literal transcriptions of recurrent flashbacks to her life in prison, others are more pleasant recollections of childhood and family - the things she remembers most fondly about her Iraqi homeland.   Presented with little regard for chronology and frequently flipping back and forth between first and third person, the series of events can be hard to follow at times.  

First, we meet her family on a childhood trip to Zino on the Iraq-Iran border, then to an interrogation scene in Baghdad.  Later, we visit Iraqi Communist Party headquarters in Nawchilican hidden in Kurd-occupied northern Iraq.  Darker stories follow as we witness gruesome torture scenes at Qasr al-Nihaya (Palace of the End) and Abu Ghraib.   Finally, we see the life of silence and solitude that she leads in London. 

She writes in a lyrical poetic style that creates a striking contrast to the horrors that she relates.   One of her stated goals - over these 150 pages - is to find a place for these memories and to pay tribute to the many people she encountered along the way who didn't survive.   But she deftly avoids the soapbox and doesn't hesitate to reveal some of the darker aspects of her and her comrade's behavior.   She writes about Haidar who "escaped" from detention in Baghdad and made it back to Communist Party headquarters a little too quickly and a little too unscathed.  He could not be trusted.   "Death was the only proof of innocence.  To live was evidence of treason, and this assumption had the rule and force of law.  No one had ever disputed it."

I feel rather uncomfortable criticizing this acclaimed work.   Sitting here safe and secure in my home, trying to decide which restaurant to eat at this weekend, to even consider complaining about one misplaced comma in this woman's tortured and passionate memoir seems a bit pathetic.   While I hope that writing this book helped Zangana start to heal from her traumatic experiences, I find the book too disorienting.   It may be that my minimal knowledge of the time and place contributes to this, but the lack of any sort of narrative underpinning really makes it difficult to follow her story.   A prologue and epilogue by the author, as well as a foreword by Hamid Dabashi and an afterword by Ferial J. Ghazoul help round out the story a bit, but I continually found my focus drifting, despite the often graphic subject matter.    Some of this confusion is undoubtedly intentional, helping to emphasize the author's own plight, but I think the overall story suffers as a result and I think other readers without extensive background in Middle Eastern literature or politics would feel the same way.

Dreaming of Baghdad is a powerful, but disorienting memoir of one woman's life as an Iraqi revolutionary.   While it may work as a piece of feminist or radical literature, I found that the presentation was overly dreamlike and feel that most of what I learned from reading this book was due to subsequent research.   I do recommend the book to anyone with a specific interest in Iraqi history or the psychology of torture, but I suspect that the general reader could find more informative fare elsewhere. 



I found this book at my local library and I'm happy to enter it in laurashrti's National Library Week Write-off.

Recommended: No