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Beneath the burka

DREAMING OF BAGHDAD
By Haifa Zangana
160 pp. The Feminist Press $15.95

Reviewed by Alan Goodman

Haifa Zangana’s Dreaming of Baghdad is a slim volume, translated from the Arabic in collaboration with Paul Hammond. Within the space of 160 pages, Zangana manages the trick of expositing simultaneously her past, present, and future experience as an Iraqi dissident, imprisoned in the 1970s for her opposition to Saddam Hussein. The key here is the word, “experience,” as the presentation is not simply a narrative of chronological neatness, but a collage of emotive memory, feelings, angers, humiliations, and guilt.

Zangana, A native Iraqi woman, evokes as close as is possible through the written word, the abject fear and memory displacement that accompanies torture and prolonged imprisonment without knowledge of its duration. Throughout the book memories of colleagues, of places, of arrest, of childhood mingle with dreams of fears, trauma, and hope. For style of presentation, “narrative” is too constrictive a word for the unfolding of Zangana’s account.

A somewhat similar prism of oppression, hopelessness, idealism, and protest exists in writings of the French existentialists. The Russian writer Solzhenitsyn, in recounting life as a dissident in the Gulag, might serve as an accurate indicator of what one can expect in Dreaming of Baghdad, albeit this book is much abbreviated in comparison.

Zangana refers to herself in turn, and without preamble or difficulty, both in the first and third person. When memory turns too painful, or perception is skewed by fear, the third person seems to serve the function of revisiting events outside the self. The prose is sparse, but effective in conveying emotion. After a long imprisonment, Zangana is presented with a confession admitting to made-up acts against the state. She relates her emotional state as follows:

... My body begins to tremble. My mind loses its grip on nerves and muscles. Fear grows like a weed. The world shrinks. The sun shines but I cannot see it. The day passes slowly by but I do not feel a thing. Here is the Qasir again. Here is the corridor, the room, the doorway. I close the door behind me. I wake up tired, exhausted by the short or long trip I have taken. I am sweating, my skin oozes salty water. My skin cries, my fingers tremble, and I stare for hours at the tip of my white shoe. Something has died inside me ...

This is not a book one reads for amusement to while away some empty hours in an exercise of relaxation. For even as the act of reading is herein easy enough, the issues the book raises are immensely important to current events. What was the point of invading Iraq? If it was to oust a dictator who had proven himself a menace to his own people, what did this have to do with the issue of terrorism facing the United States after 9/11, as Saddam Hussein—for all his villainy—was essentially a freelance dictator without sympathies for any cause other than his own delusions of becoming a power in the Middle East.

The Ba’ath party, of which Hussein was the supreme leader, was the cause of the torture and family dislocations described by Zangana in Dreaming of Baghdad. And one can easily come away believing that the finger of guilt in this story falls entirely on the dictator of Iraq. My curiosity was piqued upon reading the introduction to the book, however, in which Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, writes a scathing denunciation of both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. One assumes that this lumping of the American President and the Iraqi dictator has the imprimatur of agreement from Zangana. And the dual condemnation for the destruction of Iraq, its culture, and its families seems to fall equally—fairly placed or not—on both men’s shoulders.

It is a most interesting introduction to the book, as nowhere in the body of Zangana’s text does she even mention anyone but the Ba’athists as the villains of her difficulties. Perhaps more instructive for literary comparisons, and situated as an Afterword, are comments from Ferial J. Ghazoul, professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo. If forming one’s own opinion about what one has read eludes the reader, Ms. Ghazoul enlightens us about Zangana’s unique mixing of first and third person and stirring a literary pot with past and present soups. The short book is thus sandwiched between two statements, each seemingly with an agenda of adding to—or presenting additional opinion to—Zangana’s statement. One can’t help but wonder if the introduction to the book is meant to extend our understanding of Zangana’s story or challenge it.

If you are interested in what goes on beneath the burka in the minds of Iraqis struggling to sustain personal equilibrium amidst decades-long oppression, then I think you can add this book to your list of tomes that might help in accumulating a body of understanding for a distant society—if not for another distanced human being.

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Alan Goodman was principal bassoonist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1970 until he retired in 2001. He holds a BS Degree from SUNY Potsdam in Music Education and a master’s degree from the U. of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in performance, and has studied towards a master’s in musicology at New York’s Hunter College. He writes a column for the International Double Reed Society and occasionally contributes to The Planet, a free newspaper in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. His book A Bassoon Lite, Please appeared in 2000. Living in Wyoming with his wife Betty, he fly-fishes and awaits work as the most available jazz tenor sax player in the Bedford area.

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