 Haifa Zangana spent her younger years in a political prison in Iraq. She was tortured and humiliated, repeatedly, in Abu Ghraib and various other prisons. Zangana has written about her experience as a political prisoner in the autobiographical novella "Dreaming of Baghdad" with a foreword by Hamid Dabashi and an afterword by Ferial J. Ghazoul.
Title: Dreaming of Baghdad
Author: Haifa Zangana
Publisher: Feminist Press at The City University of New York (Sep. 1 2009)
Pages: 160 pages, Paperback
Price: U.S. $ 15.95
ISBN-10: 1558616055
ISBN-13: 978-1558616059
Zangana alternates between first nd third person point of views when writing of her experiences as a child, a soldier, and a working immigrant in a European country. In her prologue, Zangana says, "I wrote this book in tiny installments over eight years, when I had persistent nightmares about my past. I was writing about my life as a radical activist in Iraq in the 1970s (p.3)." This statement rings true through all the passages. The book is divided into fifteen sections that seemingly have nothing and everything to do with each other. She flips from being a child being punished for disobeying her brother to a prisoner being transferred to another location. However, the theme itself is persistent. She talks of her cultural history, rich with promise and hope and its unexpected decline after the revolution of the 1970s.
"Dreaming of Baghdad" could easily have been a sob story of one woman's horrific struggle through different obstacles in her life. She could have emphasized herself as victim. Instead, Zangana went the opposite route. Her imprisonment by the Baath regime is told in spurts, so as not to overwhelm the reader. She does not specify any torture techniques, besides a few passages in the beginning of her imprisonment about the beatings she received. She spends most of the book in shock which permeates to you as you read. In the epilogue, Zangana ceases to be a victim. She acknowledges that she too engaged in acts she was not proud of. "...our emotions were buried under the tutelage of ideology. We were far too occupied with the struggle to recognize each other as individuals, to the extent of sometimes failing to behave humanely (p.154)."
 The author only really comes to realize what she has gone through and what she has done, halfway through the book after she has arrived at Abu Ghraib. "At that moment, for no good reason...the mask I had worn for weeks began to crack," writes Zangana. "I touched my hair, my face, and I cried. I cried quietly, a painful continuous moaning that lasted all night, during which I mourned my disappointments, my fear and the longing I had to see my friends and comrades (p.108)."
Her time at Abu Ghraib prison is unlike what recent reports have been about. In 2004, there were blood-curdling stories in the media about the abuse and torture of supposed terrorists by American soldiers. The torture tactics were adopted to humiliate and degrade the prisoners into giving American officials information that may or may not have been true.
The Abu Ghraib prison of Zangana's time is decidedly different. It is divided between the women's prison and a special prison for prostitutes. They wear long sleeved black dresses and sleep outside their cells for some alleviation from the heat. They are not tethered to leashes or made to take nude photos; the women at the prison made friendships and supported one another.
At Abu Ghraib, Zangana saw her parents once a week. It is a complete change from her other prison stays. At Qasr al-Nihaya, a detention center for political prisoners, Zangana was denied this privilege. She was kicked and hit on the head. She spent two weeks in a room with just an old sofa and nothing else. She had limited access to the bathroom and was made to fend for herself.
"Despite terrible pain, I keep on trying (p. 29)," she writes. This is a mantra that Zangana lives by. She has been through a horrific ordeal in her life. She was a political prisoner, subjected to years of seclusion from her family and friends. Most of her loved ones are dead, killed by the Baath regime for their freedom struggle.
Zangana lives in London now, and is a writer and painter. She held a one-woman show in London and Iceland and has also participated in various group exhibitions. She has written articles for numerous publications, most notably The Guardian. She is a founding member of the International Association of Iraqi Studies and also a member of the advisory board of Brussel's Tribunal on Iraq.
Towards the end of the book, she writes about her time in London, her boyfriend, and the memories she cannot leave behind. Her life now is one of normalcy, "...the first [letter] was from her bank manager, reminding her she was overdrawn. The second was from the council regarding her housing problem (p.148)." But she is constantly dragged back to her radical activist past, something she can never escape from, whether she wants to or not.
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