woman of ill repute

Through the stories in this collection, Iraqi writer Sabiha Shabar has managed to present women and men as two equals in their suffering and struggle, and in their times of happiness and triumph. She strives for artistic honesty in her writing, as if she were taking from the flesh of reality what gives her narrative table the flavor of our Arab societies, with the dream that this table will be rich with everything that raises questions in our souls and builds the true human being within us. Critic Faisal Abdul Hassan says: "By virtue of my knowledge of this noble short story writer, I know how much she suffered in her life in order to preserve her dignity as a human being and a writer, and how many temptations she rejected in order for her words to remain free in what she said without a violent authority dictating her political discourse, so she repeated like others the speech of a parrot that means nothing, and time leaves nothing of it but shadows and blind rambling. She preferred to emigrate from her homeland, Iraq, during the time of dictatorship in the late seventies of the last century, picking up her fictional characters from this place of exile and that place of exile, as a bee does when it collects its raw honey to later formulate from it a song that we enjoy."