Dreaming of Baghdad
Organisation: Arab Media Watch and Iraqi Youth Foundation
Time: 04 March 2010 6:45pm -
Place: Arab British Chamber of Commerce, 43 Upper Grosvenor Street, Park Lane, London W1K 2NJ
Arab Media Watch and the Iraqi Youth Foundation invite you to the launch of:
Dreaming of Baghdad
By Haifa Zangana
The book:
In 1970s Iraq, the Ba'ath Party was at the height of its influence in the Middle East and popularity throughout the West. But a group of activists recognised the disastrous potential of the regime as its leader, Saddam Hussein, became more powerful. Haifa Zangana was among those resisters, a small group of whom were captured and imprisoned at Abu Ghraib.
From the distance of time and place, Zangana writes during her first years of forced exile from her beloved country about the time of her incarceration, the agonising loss of comrades to torture and death in prison, the haunting quality of life so far away from home and family, and the ways in which memory conspires to make people forget what sometimes is most dear to them. The richness of the text derives from the interface between the personal and the political.
Speaker: Haifa Zangana - author, Arab Media Watch adviser
Chair: Dr Wen-Chin Ouyang - School of Oriental and African Studies
Thursday, 4th March 2010 at 6.45pm
Arab British Chamber of Commerce, 43 Upper Grosvenor Street, Park Lane, London W1K 2NJ (opposite American Embassy)
Free entry, all welcome. Attendance is strictly by guest list only. Please contact info@arabmediawatch.com
About the author:
Haifa Zangana is an adviser to Arab Media Watch on Iraqi affairs, a weekly columnist for Al Quds newspaper, and a commentator for the Guardian and Al Ahram Weekly. She lectures regularly on Iraqi culture, literature and women issues. Born in Baghdad, Zangana worked with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Damascus, Syria, in 1975, and has lived in London since 1976. She has worked as an adviser for the UN Development Programme, writing a report on the rise of women in the Arab world, and as a member of the advisory board of a Brussels tribunal on Iraq.
Zangana co-founded Women Solidarity for Independent and Unified Iraq, and is the chair of Iraqi Committee for National media and culture. She is a founding member of the International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies. With Mundher al Adhami, in 2007, Zangana established the Iraqi contemporary studies award to encourage academic research in Iraq. She has published three novels, four collections of short stories, and two books on Iraq. The latest was "City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance."
About the chair:
Dr Wen-Chin Ouyang (School of Oriental and African Studies) is a reader in Arabic literature, an associate member of the Centre for Media and Film Studies, and a member of the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies.