Originally appearing at: Booklist
In this extraordinarily intimate memoir Zangana lays bare the trauma of torture and the special grief carried by those who survive it. Recalling her political initiation in early 1970s Iraq, she writes of a hope to change the world by resisting Saddam Hussein’s powerful Baath Party. Captured, imprisoned, tortured, and exiled, Zangana has known little peace in the decades since. Rather than recall the seminal moments of her life in a linear fashion, she crafts a series of linked stories, letters, and memories. She writes of her family and friends, life in Iraq with the opposition, and her current home in London. Most startling are accounts of her arrest and torture as she describes the men who interrogated her, how she was presented with the beaten bodies of her friends, and how those who beat her were later executed themselves. The power in Zangana’s painful story and the beautiful way she shares it are almost too much to bear. Memory, she writes, “. . . is the unwritten record of the past. Its only partner is forgetting.” Zangana has written and thus preserved her story in an indelible book of genuine shock and awe.
