Our Women on The Ground Book Review
In Our Women on the Ground, journalist Zaina Erhaim invites readers to places very few of us dare to go. All the more remarkable is how a book like this can bring us closer and offer a glimpse into those places, even if only through the journalist’s eyes.
Take the detail that opens her essay: Zaina writes what it was like to live in eastern Aleppo, and recounts how she once asked a friend to take her video camera to the hospital — just in case a bomb hit her apartment. That small device held her life’s work: footage and testimonies that were more important to her than her own survival. This single detail speaks volumes about the kind of courage upon which this book is built, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.
This book, in essence, brings together powerful, deeply personal stories from female journalists across the Arab world — women reporting from the inside, often at great personal risk, with a kind of courage that rarely makes the front page. It’s worth reading the foreword before diving in: Christiane Amanpour offers a frame that stayed with me. She points out that the Balkan Wars of the 1990s marked the end of a certain kind of immunity for journalists. Before, they were seen as neutral observers. After, they became targets themselves — regardless of gender. Reading these essays with that in mind changes something. These women weren’t just documenting danger from a safe distance. They were, and are, part of the story’s body count.
Erhaim is one of the essayists in this ground-breaking collection, and I suspect the book will fascinate any fan of the stories behind the stories that come out of war zones. I’m definitely one of those people, and I find it refreshing — most war reporting I’ve read over the years is written by outsiders flown in for a few weeks, whereas these women lived the stories they tell, often for years, in the language of the people they’re writing about. A woman journalist in a region prone to segregating women from men also has access to half the population that her male counterparts do not.
The anthology includes essays by 19 sahafiyat — Arabic for female journalists — most of them recounting their experiences, including sexual assault, and analysis of their and other women’s life and work in dangerous or oppressive countries in the Middle East and North Africa. One honest caveat, though: the collection leans noticeably toward Syria and Lebanon, so don’t expect equal coverage of every corner of the Arab world. It’s a strong, vivid slice — not a complete map.
Within that slice, editor Zahra Hankir also makes room for a 20th Arab woman who was not a traditional journalist — Ruqia Hasan. Her vivid Facebook posts about ISIS atrocities in Raqqa, where she lived, ultimately cost the young Syrian Kurdish woman her life. It’s a reminder that the line between “journalist” and “witness” gets thin fast in these essays, and that the book is as interested in that blurred space as it is in the professionals with bylines.
Structurally, the book is divided into five sections: Remembrances, Crossfire, Resilience, Exile and Transition. I chose not to read them in order and don’t feel I lost anything by skipping around so I could read essays by writers I was familiar with first. However you move through it, some essays are simply harder to shake than others. The one by Nada Bakri, the widow of New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, was the most gut-wrenching for me. Her painful prose details the struggle to accept her husband’s death during a clandestine reporting trip to Syria in 2012, as well as the anxiety of being a dual-reporter couple trying to excel at work and raise a child in a region with little sympathy for women stepping outside society’s prescribed roles. It’s rare to read this side of war reporting — not the dispatch itself, but what it costs the person who has to keep living after it’s filed.
Women reporting from inside these stories are still a relatively small group, especially at the upper echelons of the profession — which makes a less visible cost elsewhere in the collection land harder. Hannah Allam, reporting on Iraq, names that cost: the unspoken rule in the field that if you dig too deep into women’s lives, you risk being seen as soft, or as missing the real story. Reading her essay next to Bakri’s reframed something for me — these women weren’t just risking their physical safety to report. Some of them were also quietly fighting to have their subject matter taken seriously at all, inside their own profession. Allam’s writing makes that cost physical rather than abstract — she describes the specific choreography of running for cover in an abaya, one hand pinning the fabric under her chin, the other hiking the hem to free her feet, and clsoes her essay with the image of women who, every time Iraq came apart, were the ones who stitched it back together.
Not every essay sits in that register, though — the collection has room for wit as well as weight. Yemeni freelance photographer Amira Al-Sharif, who documents the lives of women and girls in her war-ravaged country, offers a lighter perspective on the sacrifices she has had to make to practice her unconventional profession. Her essay traces a small, quietly moving arc: her imam father bought her her first camera, then disapproved when she wanted to become a photojournalist, and only came around after years of her persistence — to the point that he now suggests subjects for her to photograph. As she puts it herself: “Today at thirty-five, I don’t have a husband, but I do have a camera.” Donna Abu-Nasr strikes a similarly wry note in “An Orange Bra in Riyadh,” exposing the indignities of everyday life for women in Saudi Arabia through one of its most absurd manifestations: the difficulty of buying undergarments when you’re forced to cover up completely — even in the lingerie department. But Abu-Nasr, Bloomberg’s Saudi Arabia bureau chief, is no lightweight: despite the obstacles faced by women reporting in the kingdom, she landed a major 9/11 scoop, official confirmation by Riyadh that 15 of the 19 hijackers aboard the planes that struck the Twin Towers were Saudi citizens.
Hankir says her goal in creating this collection was to amplify the voices of women trying to shape and document Arab history, “without projecting themes of women’s issues and patriarchy onto them.” She succeeds at the former, but I don’t see how one avoids the latter — not because Hankir fails, but because for most of these women, gender wasn’t a side note to their reporting. It was the access, the danger, and the story all at once. Hankir herself describes these journalists as twice burdened: coming from places that often treat women poorly, while also being some of the most repressed reporters in the world.
You can’t separate the two without losing what makes these essays singular. And that appeal reaches further than the essayists’ own circles: this is a book for readers of any gender or background who want to understand the Arab world better, not just readers with ties to it. It’s also, I think, part of why this book resonates so widely in the West: there’s a deep fascination with how women function in ultra-conservative societies where repression can be violent and even deadly. This anthology pulls back the curtain on those places, while connecting readers to brave and incisive female journalists who help us better understand the Arab world.
A line from Hankir’s own essay hasn’t left me since — her reckoning with fear, admitting that fighting it only made it “more intense.” It’s not a war-zone sentence. It’s a sentence that could belong to any woman, anywhere, and that’s exactly why it lands so hard here — placed next to essays about bombs and checkpoints, it’s a reminder that danger for these women rarely stayed at the border of the conflict.
This book is a drop in a much larger ocean of stories still untold, and I hope to read more essays from female journalists in different parts of the world. But what stayed with me most, in the end, is how many of these women describe journalism itself as a form of refusal: to disappear, to be silenced, to let the official version stand. That’s the question I keep returning to now that I’ve finished it — not “what happened to them,” but what it actually takes, day after day, to keep refusing.
Find Our Women on the Ground on My Bookshelf, or purchase through Waterstones, Bol, or Amazon. For more books that I read, head over to the full list of book recommendations. Leave a book review yourself, or check out what others have said about this book.
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