A Party For Thaera

Palestinian Women Write Life In Prison

Edited by Haifa Zangana

978-93-85606-38-0

New Delhi, 2021

Language: English

102 pages

Price INR 300.00

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Book Club Price INR 240.00
INR 300.00
Out of stock
SKU
1182

The new inmates were greeted with enthusiasm. Was it the energy they exuded, their different haircuts, their tanned skin, their slim bodies that had not yet suffered the consequences of being on a diet of margarine and cheap jam?

I was living my life—working, acting in theatre and studying the law. Now here I am in an Israeli prison, with the minutes frozen in time. I simply cannot carry on. Death would be more merciful.

In a first, nine politically-diverse women, former Palestinian political prisoners, sat around a table in a small room in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, to share their stories of incarceration. These non-writers learnt to express the reality of their time in prison, of the separation from their children, of the endless struggles against Israeli occupation, to produce heartfelt narratives that go beyond simply recalling the details of their sentence or revisiting their trauma. Instead, this unique volume transforms their experiences into an expression of the self, giving readers an “exceptional” insight into an almost unknown women’s world, of life and love behind bars and beyond.

Haifa Zangana

Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi author and activist. She has written several books, including Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London, Dreaming of Baghdad, and City of Widows: an Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance. She was an advisor for the UNDP Report, Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (2005) and a consultant for the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. Her writings are regularly published in the Arab and western media