INTERVIEW:Exiled Iraqi writer and academic Haifa Zangana celebrates and laments the lot of women in her native city, where there are now 1.5 million widows, writes Mary Russell.
In the glorious city of Baghdad, where Haroun al Rashid's palace of marble shone pink in the sunlight and white in the moonlight, Zubeida, his favourite wife, devoted herself to building wells along the haj route to Mecca. She built them specially for those whose poverty forced them to make the pilgrimage on foot.
Haifa Zangana, born and educated in Baghdad and now exiled in London, has written a book about the city and its women, many of whom are now bereft of family and support.
City of Widows, however, is as much a celebration of Baghdad and its women - writers, poets and political activists - as it is a lament for what has happened to women there over the years, for Baghdad is the city pillaged by Timur the Lame, taken over by the Ottomans, occupied by the British and bombed by the Bush administration as a result of which there are now some 1.5 million widows in Baghdad. Did Haifa Zangana support the invasion? "We needed change," she says, "but it has to be change brought about by Iraqis. And that isn't what happened." She is scathing about what she calls "the puppet regime's colonial feminists", listing in detail the political affiliations of so many women-oriented NGOs now operating in Iraq and whose dollar trails lead back to Washington.
And then there is the hearts and minds campaign. Writing about former Iraqi radio stations, she quotes the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger: "If the Marines can get these moribund stations back on air, the coverage area would include Fallujah and Ramadi."
Sitting at the kitchen table in her London house, she talks about the city she was forced to flee when, as a 21-year-old student, her political activism got too hot for her to survive in an Iraq where Baathism was the order of the day. Her father, a Kurdish businessman, helped her to get out. The year was 1974 and it would be 30 years before she would make a return visit.
She misses Baghdad. "We used to eat in restaurants by the Tigris. We'd go there if someone had passed an exam or had a birthday." On Sundays, there were family picnics in Babylon.
When at university - she has a degree in pharmaceutical science - her politics brought her into contact with a faction of the Communist Party which was at odds with the Baathists. She lived in Damascus for a while, working on a PLO programme that provided medical aid for the beleaguered Palestinians, but when she returned to Baghdad, her activism landed her in prison. Abu Ghraib, to be precise.
"That was before it got the terrible reputation it has now. I was the only female political prisoner and they had nowhere to put me, so I was in with ordinary women criminals." The women took her to their hearts, looked out for her, mothered her. They loved poetry and in return she read to them.
"There were two good things about Saddam - his health programmes and his literacy campaign," she says. "It meant there were lots of books available to us in prison." But once out - her Arab mother mounted a one-woman campaign to have her freed - she had to leave. She lives now by her writing and political commentating while her mathematician husband, Mundher al-Adhami, another Baghdadi, is a fellow of King's College in London.
Their home resonates with the Middle East. Red is the dominant colour. Sofas all round the room are scattered with cushions; a Turkish coffee pot sits on the table; a tall tree out in the garden is called Fatima - after her husband's mother. They laugh when I tell them my confirmation name is Fatima. "There's a bus," Mundher says, "that goes from here to Fatima with lots of Irish people on it." Haifa looks momentarily puzzled: "Is Fatima a place?" she asks. In Islam, of course, Fatima was the prophet's daughter and wife of Ali, the Imam revered by Shia all over the world.
Is she a practising Muslim, I ask. She shakes her head and we agree on the phrase "cultural Muslim". In her book, she praises the work done by local mosques in supporting their community while bemoaning the fact that, with loudspeakers attached to the minarets, they are regarded as dens of subversion by occupying forces.
Women have suffered terribly in Iraq. In the lead-up to the invasion, many pregnant women rushed to have Caesareans in advance of the bombing. Her niece was one of them.
Zangana's book is meticulously researched, with 15 pages of footnotes to prove it, but she is not an academic. If she is a feminist, she says, it's because she is without knowing it. Clearly she doesn't like labels.
If she were back living in Baghdad now, she would be working with the resistance, she says, quoting UN Resolution 33/24, which "affirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle". Though for the life of me, I cannot, simply cannot, see this cheery, grey-haired woman taking up arms against the Americans, though I could be wrong.
Her book is dedicated to A'beer Qassim Hamza al-Janaby, the 14-year-old girl gang-raped and set on fire by US troops in Mahmudiyah on March 12th, 2006.
Haifa Zangana and Denis Halliday will speak at an Irish Anti-War Movement meeting at 7.30pm next Thursday, March 6th, at Liberty Hall, Dublin. City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance, by Haifa Zangana, is published by Seven Stories Press