Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else, if not here in English. —GUSTAVO PÉREZ FIRMAT, “BILINGUAL BLUES

Those sorts of stories accumulated until they formed an archetype: the tragic yet resilient Iraqi woman, a metaphor for the country itself. In hindsight, it seems so facile to see Iraqi women only through the prism of their war-ravaged lives, but how else do you report a story where pain is etched on the face of every woman you interview?

That day, I came to a stark realization. I was afraid of men, and the harder I fought, the more intense the fear became. I can't think of an experience that is more harrowing than a woman being sexually harassed or assaulted by a man.

It's because I'm tired of being branded a terrorist; tired that a human life lost in my country is no loss at all.

I found it a condescending expectation—that my words and mannerisms would meld into the mainstream around me—but it was also a fair question: how do you retain so strongly strands of somewhere or something you have never lived? - Nour Malas

Gender is a bodily discourse - repetitively performed, so as to become real and accepted - as opposed to a sheer identity that requires a fixed representation.

Every time Iraq began to unravel, it was women who worked the hardest to stitch it back together.

The essential Arab concept of maintaining dignity seemed alien to all but the savviest of soldiers

Syria: never the country I called home, but certainly my homeland. - Nour Malas