Dreaming of Solitude: Haifa Zangana and Alia Mamdouh

This chapter concentrates on new areas of exploration of testimony and memory in unconventional forms such as the prison diary by focusing on the narration of torture in Dreaming of Baghdad (1990) by Iraqi writer Haifa Zangana and the prevalence of fear in The Foreigner (2013) by Iraqi novelist Alia Mamdouh. Dreaming of Baghdad, written in London during the 1980s, revisits Zangana’s experience of imprisonment in 1970s Iraq in complex ways. While Dreaming of Baghdad offers new forms for the exploration of the subjectivity of Iraqi revolutionary women by exploring the precariousness of memory and challenging taboos on testimony, The Foreigner explores the subjectivity and trajectory of Iraqis in the diaspora, focusing on the effects of violence and the infringement of taboos.