Jean Sasson, the author of Mayada Daughter of Iraq, met the protagonist of the book, Mayada, in Iraq in 1998. Jean went to Iraq to witness how Iraqi people were living under the sanctions, and indeed was hoping to find the subject for a new book. As soon as Jean arrived in Baghdad, she went to the Ministry of Information and asked to be assigned a female translator. Since she was primarily interested in Arab women’s issues, Jean knew that no Arab woman would speak openly to an Arab man. She was given Mayada.
Mayada and Jean easily became friends and once Jean left Iraq they kept in touch on a regular basis. Inexplicably, Jean suddenly stopped hearing news from the Iraqi friend until one day she received a call: it was Mayada.
Mayada had been imprisoned and when she was finally released after weeks of dreadful detention, she fled to Jordan. However, her experience of detention became known years after when Saddam was removed from power. Only then, Mayada decided to disclose her story to her friend Jean Sasson, so that the world could know the truth of Iraqi life under Saddam.
Besides her recounts of life in prison where she was sharing the cell 52 with other brave and innocent women whose stories are also part of the book, the novel is enriched with details of Mayada’s powerful Iraqi family who lived in an era of grandeur and freedom, painfully shattered by Saddam’s regime.
The experience that these ‘’shadow women” undergo in prison is menat to be a portait of the last and worst years of the regime, and Mayada becomes the vehicle to make the truth known beyond the walls of the cell 52.
1 Comment
November 5, 2009 at 9:04 pm
really liked your concept. by these sources we come to know how women are struggling and surviving in other parts of the world.