Forever A Prisoner

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The walls of Lahib Nouman's home don't just talk, they howl. They scream in terror, shout with rage, moan in pain and sob with frustration. All the emotions overloading this tiny woman's brutalized mind she projects onto the walls of her living room. She scrawls on them with maroon lipstick, ocher spray paint and gray lumps of charcoal, in Arabic and a sprinkling of French. It's the only way she knows to exorcise her mental demons, to preserve what remains of her sanity. "There's so much inside here," she says, slapping violently against the side of her head. "I have to take some of it out and put it down somewhere, or I will burst."

The effort seems to have taken over Nouman's life to the exclusion of everything else. Her small home in Baghdad's working-class al-Ghadeer district is filthy; the rooms are damp and smell of rotting garbage. Her pets, a mangy brown pup and two molting cats, have shed clumps of fur on her bed, an old foam mattress on the living-room floor. There are pieces of stale bread everywhere.

But the squalor doesn't seem to bother Nouman. She has lived in much worse places--a succession of prison cells, torture chambers and mental-hospital wards. Her living room may be fetid, but it is home, and she's free. "Nobody bothers me here. Nobody does bad things to me," she says. "I can say and do and write whatever I want."

Even by Iraqi standards, Nouman, 48, has enjoyed little freedom, at least not since 1985, when she ran afoul of Uday, Saddam Hussein's barbaric eldest son. A criminal lawyer, Nouman had the temerity to defend a man Uday wanted punished for insulting his girlfriend, and Nouman paid for it with nearly two decades' worth of torment. In prison, she endured rape, beatings and unspeakable torture. In the hospital, she was subjected to countless sessions of shock therapy and powerful sedatives. Along the way, her mind became unhinged, her memories scrambled and her face frozen in a mask of permanent terror. "They have turned me into a witch," she says, ruefully pulling at her stringy hair, which she has dyed the color of tea. "They have made me horrible."

Until three weeks ago, Nouman was incarcerated at al-Rashad, Baghdad's main mental hospital. When U.S. forces began taking the city, the staff ran away, enabling inmates to escape. Nouman made straight for her house in al-Ghadeer, and has been holed up there ever since, scrawling furiously on the walls. "This is my work now," she says. "This is what I have to do."

Already she's running out of space. She set out to write the story of her life, but the narrative is lost in a maze of digressions. There are religious motifsa number of crooked crucifixes (she was raised a Chaldean Catholic) and exhortations to Mary and Allah. There are homages to her favorite mutt, Sandi. There are political slogans calling for solidarity among Iraq, the Arab nations and France, where she was educated. And then there are some doggerel verses that don't always make sense but are apparently designed for self-motivation: IN THE GRAVE, THERE ARE NO COWARDS. I WILL NEVER GIVE UP.