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. She writes how it is like to live in eastern Aleppo, and recalls asking a friend once to take her video camera to the hospital—just in case a bomb hit her apartment. Not out of vanity, but because that small device held her life’s work: footage and testimonies that, to her, mattered more than her own survival. That single detail tells you everything about the kind of courage this book is built on.
This book 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.
Erhaim is one of the essayists in this ground-breaking anthology that may 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 comes from outsiders parachuted in for a few weeks, while these women lived the stories they tell, often for years, in the language of the people they’re writing about.
Despite the fact that I am not a former Middle East correspondent and polyglot with family and cultural ties to these countries, I bet I am not alone in appreciating stories by journalists who do not need interpreters to provide context and explain what is being said. Needless to say that a woman journalist in a region prone to segregating women from men has access to half the population that her male counterparts do not.
Women who are so-called ‘ethnic journalists’ are still a relatively small group, especially at the upper echelons of the profession. But connections notwithstanding, I believe Our Women on the Ground will appeal to readers of all genders and backgrounds who want to broaden their understanding of the Arab world. 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: 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.
The collection’s editor, Zahra Hankir, also gives voice to 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.
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.
Some of the essays were gut-wrenching, like the one by Nada Bakri, the widow of New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid. 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 where there is little sympathy for women stepping out of society’s prescribed roles. I kept thinking about how rarely we 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.
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. The daughter of an imam, or Muslim preacher, she observes: “Today at thirty-five, I don’t have a husband, but I do have a camera.”
In “An Orange Bra in Riyadh” Donna Abu-Nasr exposes the indignities of the gender divide through one of its most absurd manifestations: the difficulties women face buying undergarments in Saudi Arabia, where they’re forced to cover up completely — even in the lingerie department. But Abu-Nasr, who is Bloomberg’s Saudi Arabia bureau chief, is no lightweight and, despite the obstacles faced by women reporting in the kingdom, she ended up with 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.
There’s a deep fascination in the West 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.
What stayed with me most isn’t any single atrocity or scoop—it’s how many of these women describe journalism itself as a form of refusal: to disappear, to be silenced, to let the official version stand. This book is more an introduction than a complete record—a drop in a much larger ocean of stories still untold. I, for one, hope to read more essays from female journalists in other parts of the world.
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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