Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi novelist, author, artist, and political activist, best known for writing Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London.
Life and career
Haifa Zangana was born in Baghdad to a Kurdish father from the northern city of Kirkuk and Arabic mother from Karbala. Her family home was always full of relatives from the northern cities. She was seven when the Iraq Revolution of 1958 resulted in the country gaining independence. She was a teenager when the Ba'ath Party assumed power. In the 1960s, she was part of a protest rally to release the Algerian political prisoner, Jamila Buhrayd. As a young Iraqi growing up in an uncertain environment, she noted that: In the early 1970s, as a young activist in the Iraqi Communist Party Haifa was imprisoned by the Baath regime at Abu Ghraib. She was one of a group of female resisters who were imprisoned for distributing leaflets at their university and for attending political meetings. They were captured and tortured and forced to sign confessions, but Zangana managed to escape execution. When she was released from prison, she stayed in Iraq to continue her studies. She graduated from Baghdad University and the School of Pharmacy in 1974. After graduating, she was appointed to manage the Red Crescent's nascent pharmaceutical unit in Dummar, near Damascus. This was a challenging role due to lack of funds. The work required continual movement between Syria and Lebanon. She left Iraq for political reasons, first moving to Syria where she continued to work for the Palestinian Red Crescent. She relocated to Britain in 1976 and has settled there. As a painter and writer she participated in the eighties in various European and American publications and group exhibitions, with one-woman shows in London and Iceland. She is also a frequent commentator The Guardian, and a contributor to European and Arabic publications such as Red pepper, Al Ahram weekly and Al Quds, and is a founding member of the International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Brussel’s Tribunal on Iraq. She was an advisor for the and as a consultant for she contributed to the "Arab Integration" report and the "Towards Justice in the Arab world" report which was withdrawn by the UN general secretary. Zangana has consistently drawn on her experience of living in exile to inform her artwork and writing.. She has also been active in helping other women to use language to explore their lives, as in the case of Palestinian ex-prisoners.. Her work with women who were formerly political prisoners in Tunisia focuses on helping them to write their own experiences as part of a transitional justice process.
Works
Books
Party for Thaera: Palestinian women writing life
City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance, Seven Stories Press
