My review of City of Widows
Posted Dec. 11th, in Feminist Review :
City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance
By Haifa Zangana
Seven Stories Press
The most startling thing to me about Haifa Zangana’s book, City of Widows, is not her assertion that the women of Iraq are suffering under the current occupation. What left me quaking was the power of internal perspective and history that she offers, and her informed explanations of both policy and practice that reveal the extent of the damage that the United States has done to Iraq and the people who live (or used to live) there.
Despite having been a prisoner of the Ba’ath regime, she does not blast the party with malice, nor does she paint Saddam Hussein as an evil icon. Instead, she covers the recent history of Iraq just as a U.S. citizen would explain our own century’s historical events: acknowledging past mistakes in leadership, yet maintaining a priority of concern for the country’s current well being.
She explains that, “The woman as a fighter looms large in the Arab world. For us teenagers, it was Jamilah,” (a young female fighter in the Algerian resistance who was imprisoned and tortured by the French in the early sixties), “not a pop singer or a supermodel, who served as our role model.” Feminist publications, prominent women of the arts influencing policy, and accessible higher education were strides already made by the women of Iraq prior to the economic collapse of the country after the first U.S. bombings and sanctions in the 1990s. More than ninety women in Iraq become widows each day now, and there are over one million widows nationwide as a result of this war, each struggling to raise their families in an atmosphere of instability and paranoia.
She gives a scathing account of government funded NGOs, like the WFFI (Women for a Free Iraq), launched publicly in 2003, whose primary role is to support the Bush Administration’s line on the war in Iraq. She criticizes that they chose “to present the human rights case for intervention in Iraq,” when the case for war was thin. Thus they chose to be the female face of the invasion, and came to be seen by most Iraqis as colonial feminists… who “spared little concern for their sisters who would suffer.” And, “while Baghdad was being shaken to its foundations by B52 bombings… members of the WFFI made more than 200 media appearances, including an interview with Barbara Walters to “offer their support to President Bush for his principled leadership.”
She writes of how on the eve of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, U.S. ambassador April Glaspie was summoned to Saddam’s office, and in that meeting, indicated that the U.S. would not oppose his plans for invasion. “In response to the invasion, the United States bombed Iraq for six weeks…Thirteen years of economic sanctions, or the 'siege' as Iraqis called it, was established by UN resolution 661 of August 6, 1990… In order to survive, Iraqis had to sell every material thing of value. By the mid-nineties, half a million children died, a crime considered by many to be genocide.” And yet the U.S. expected to be welcomed as saviors only a few years later after bombing the country once more.
She concludes with information about anti-occupation organizations now working to gather support and to unite against the forces (U.S. forces) that have ravaged their country. One of these is IWW (Iraqi Women’s Will), one of the few women’s organizations that existed prior to the invasion. And she explains that, “In refusing to take part in initiatives by the U.S.-led occupation or its Iraqi allies, which usually offer material and social advantages, women practice passive resistance.”
The final sentence of this book sums up what the compact and powerful pages reveal:
“But for Iraqis, the presence of occupation troops and the crimes they are committing is the main story, and the question is how to stop them.”
Review by Jennifer M. Wilson