Capturing Freedom's Cry

Capturing Freedom's Cry: Arab Women Unveil Their Heart is a poetry collection by Syrian-Lebanese poet and author, Ghada Samman, that is set in the early years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1979).

Written in Beirut amid the war's violence and published in Arabic as I'tikal Lahzah Haribah (Capturing a Fleeting Moment), containing over sixty poems, Capturing Freedom's Cry: Arab Women Unveil Their Heart provides a critical insider's perspective into the war's impact on personal and civic life and expresses the poet's contemporaneous experience.

Samman unveils a courageous and relentless awareness of what war exacts from love relationships, and the struggle for precise, honest expression in the fleeting and wavering nature of war's intense experience. Embedded within many of Samman's poems is the theme of women's struggle for social and sexual freedom and an unyielding sense of hope and determination to persevere and see the nation return to peace once more.

Capturing Freedom's Cry: Arab Women Unveil Their Heart provides a critical insider's perspective into the early years of the Lebanese Civil War. Samman, living in Beirut at the time, chose to stay through much of the war to convey the traumatic effects that conflicting interests, political powers, and societal influences had on life in Lebanon.

In Samman's poems, the female narrators often assert their personal power and right to sexual freedom and love. Underlying is a call for a sexual and political revolution where the nation's freedom and women's liberation from patriarchal oppression are inseparable. A woman's longing for her beloved functions as a platform for exposing war's corruption and oppressive social and political ideologies governing women's sexuality. The poems embody an outspoken critique of socio-political strife and cultural disparity that continues to oppress women and use their bodies as political tools for reinforcing patriarchal structures and beliefs.

Samman provides readers with an understanding of war that is mirrored by an internal struggle with existing gender roles and social norms embedded in the self. In Capturing Freedom's Cry: Arab Women Unveil Their Heart, Samman's narrators participate in this struggle as they assert their right to love and to own their bodies.