The Terror of Life in Saddams Iraq
Explore the terror of life in Saddam's Iraq through gripping fiction, including *A Thousand Veils* by D.J. Murphy and *The Waiting List* by Dayzī Amīr—essential reads on survival, fear, and resilience.
Book
A Thousand Veils
by D. J. Murphy
When Fatima Shihabi, an Iraqi poet and journalist, learns she is marked for death by Saddam Hussein's secret police, she flees Iraq, evading Saddam's helicopters hunting her in the desert, only to discover that no other country will grant her asylum. Her flight from Saddam's vengeance, and the extraordinary efforts of Charles Sherman, a Wall Street lawyer, to save her life, is the subject of this gripping novel, inspired by a true story. How Fatima and Charles, bound by their common humanity, love for each other, and fate, manage to thwart Saddam and achieve redemption sends a powerful message to the post-9/11 world. Their story points the way toward eventual reconciliation and synthesis between Islam and the West. D.J. Murphy is a retired international lawyer, whose practice included representation of refugees seeking asylum in the United States. The author contributes ten percent (10%) of net royalties derived from this book to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.
Book
The Waiting List
by Dayzī Amīr
Daisy Al-Amir is one of the more visible figures in women's fiction in the Arab world today. This collection of stories, originally published in Lebanon as Ala La'ihat al-Intizar, is the most recent of her five publications. Her stories intimately reflect women's experiences in the chaotic worlds of the Lebanese civil war and the rise of Saadam Hussain as Iraq's leader. Set in Iraq, Cyprus, and Lebanon, the stories shed light on an unusual Middle East refugee experience—that of a cultural refugee, a divorced woman who is educated, affluent, and alone. Al-Amir is also a poet and novelist, whose sensual prose grows out of a long tradition of Iraqi poetry. But one also finds existential themes in her works, as Al-Amir tries to balance what seems fated and what seems arbitrary in the turbulent world she inhabits. She deals with time and space in a minimalist, surreal style, while studying the disappointments of life through the subjective lens of memory. Honestly facing the absence of family and the instability of place, Al-Amir gives lifelike qualities to the inanimate objects of her rapidly changing world. In addition to the stories, two examples of the author's experimental poems are included. In her introduction, Mona Mikhail places these stories and poems in the context of contemporary Islamic literature and gender studies.
