Face of Horror is the searing, first-hand testimony of Njoud Salem, a Palestinian woman and mother documenting the near-total annihilation of life in Gaza. This diary chronicles the daily fight for survival against a relentless Israeli military campaign, capturing the genocide with an intimacy that no news report can convey.
The narrative begins on October 7, 2023, with the first thunder of rockets, and unfolds as Njoud, her husband, and their three young sons are violently uprooted from their home. They are thrust into a desperate odyssey for refuge, fleeing from hospitals turned into battlefields to the squalid tent cities of the south. The journal is a stark record of the “second Nakba”—a landscape of relentless bombing, starvation, and the systematic dehumanization of a people. Through her account, we witness the destruction of her cherished home and all her material possessions, yet she clings fiercely to her faith and the love for her family.
More than a war diary, Face of Horror is a profound meditation on human endurance and the indomitable will to bear witness. It serves as a critical, primary source document from a survivor of a Holocaust, a challenge to the world’s conscience, and a testament to the spirit of Gaza that refuses to be erased, even as it is buried under the rubble of a world that has turned its back.
Njoud Ghassan Salem is a Palestinian writer and freelance researcher, born in Saudi Arabia and currently residing in Gaza. She has contributed to various research projects and reports focused on public health, social issues, and human rights.
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This was Tariq Mehmood’s first novel, published by Penguin Books in 1983, charting the experience of the second generation migrants to the UK. Set in the declining textile industry of the North of England, it is a raw story of pain and anger at the relentlessness of British racism, from the street to the state – a story of an unquenchable desire for justice, and reclaiming human dignity. A dignity that is wrapped around new questions of Identity, a crossroad between religion, language, history and resistance. It is a little big story, that talks to the extremities of social, political and literary issues today? Can stories of a generation be appropriated? How important is religion in identity? If all you have is a story to tell, who should you tell it? Are the issues of today, just the issues of today or can we learn something from the past? In these stories, friendship is not defined by religion or colour, but by humanity. And racism is much more than skin deep. It is an exhilarating read that bears witness to the urgent 80’s battles against state and popular racism. As important now as then. In this new edition, Mehmood provides a Foreword that describes how the novel came to be written and the lives of real people on whom the characters were created. In the Afterword, Mehmood revisits some of the characters who are now 40-years older, and reflects on how the book would have been written today where the conditions of mass mobilizations no longer exist in neoliberal Britain.
In the early 1970s, Donald Barnett — who worked with Karari Njama to produce Mau Mau From Within (published by Daraja Press) — also worked with three militants of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army to enable them to tell the story of their experience in fighting for freedom and against British colonialism. These rarely acknowledged militants were Karigo Muchai, Ngugi Kabiro and Mohamed Mathu. Their stories were published in 1973 by LSM Information Center (Richmond, British Columbia, Canada) as part of a series entitled Life Histories of the Revolution, as The Hardcore: The Story of Karigo Muchai; The Man in the Middle by Ngugi Kabiro; and The Urban Guerrilla by Mohamed Mathu.
As part of its mission of Nurturing reflection, sheltering hope and inspiring audacity, Daraja Press is please to republish the three booklets as a book that will help a new generation of activists — Kenyan and international — reflect on a history that might inspire audacious struggles to continue the struggle for freedom that was the goal of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army.
Donald Barnett’s introduction to each booklet contained the following text:
The life histories in this series have been recorded and prepared as historical documents from the revolutionary struggles of our time. The techniques and methods employed at each stage of the process, from initial contact to final editing, have therefore been chosen or fashioned with the purpose of guaranteeing the authenticity and integrity of the life history concerned. These stories, then, to the best of our ability to make them so, constitute a body of data and testimony as revealed by a few of those history-makers normally condemned to silence while others speak on their behalf.
This deeply personal and introspective work explores survival—not merely physical survival, but emotional and spiritual endurance through love, war, and loss. Written by a Palestinian author against the backdrop of the Gaza conflict, the book weaves together reflections on love, betrayal, war, displacement, and the search for meaning in a world stripped of stability.
The narrative oscillates between intimate romantic relationships and the brutal realities of life under bombardment. The author chronicles a turbulent love affair marked by passion, jealousy, betrayal, and eventual dissolution, examining how relationships fracture under the weight of pride, misunderstanding, and external pressures. Simultaneously, he documents the devastating experience of war in Gaza: displacement, hunger, the loss of loved ones, the daily struggle for survival, and the erosion of human dignity.
Central themes include the nature of survival—questioning whether mere existence constitutes living, and whether those who survive emerge intact or fundamentally altered. The author grapples with grief over the death of his grandmother, the loss of his beloved, and the collective trauma of a people under siege. He explores the tension between hope and despair, the betrayal of humanitarian aid systems, the corruption of values in times of crisis, and the profound loneliness of carrying unspoken pain.
Writing serves as both confession and catharsis—an attempt to staunch internal bleeding and make sense of chaos. The prose is poetic, fragmented, and emotionally raw, reflecting the author’s belief that true survivors do not write; they simply endure. Ultimately, the book is a testament to the impossibility of returning unchanged from love or war, and the quiet dignity of continuing despite everything.
Este libro narra la conmovedora historia de Patrocinia Polanco Rivas, una campesina salvadoreña que personifica la lucha por la dignidad en medio de la adversidad. A través de su testimonio y el análisis del autor Andrés McKinley, la obra recorre su vida, desde una infancia marcada por la pobreza extrema y la opresión de la oligarquía cafetalera, hasta su participación en la guerra civil como operadora de radio del FMLN tras el asesinato de su mentor, el padre Rutilio Grande. La guerra le arrebata a su padre, pero forja en ella una resistencia inquebrantable.
Tras los Acuerdos de Paz de 1992, la esperanza de una vida digna se desvanece ante la persistente pobreza y las políticas neoliberales que mantienen a las familias campesinas en la miseria. Para sobrevivir, Patrocinia trabaja incansablemente cortando caña de azúcar, mientras la falta de oportunidades lleva a su esposo y, posteriormente, a sus seis hijos a emprender el peligroso viaje migratorio hacia Estados Unidos. El libro documenta los horrores de este periplo: el abandono, la extorsión, el secuestro y la constante amenaza de la muerte.
Una vez en el norte, los hijos de Patrocinia se enfrentan a la dura realidad de la vida indocumentada y a la maquinaria represiva del ICE, especialmente bajo la administración de Donald Trump. La autora establece un poderoso paralelismo entre la violencia de los escuadrones de la muerte en El Salvador y la persecución sistemática de los migrantes.
El Precio de la Dignidad es un testimonio de la resiliencia humana, mostrando que la dignidad no reside en el éxito de la lucha, sino en la propia lucha, un legado que Patrocinia heredó de su padre. El libro se erige como un recordatorio urgente de las consecuencias humanas de la guerra, de la injusticia económica y de las políticas migratorias despiadadas.
Ancestral Daughter is a poignant collection of free-verse poetry by Palestinian writer Zeina Jhaish, exploring themes of diaspora, identity, resistance, and love. Through vivid imagery and raw emotion, Jhaish navigates her dual existence as a Palestinian woman from Gaza living in the diaspora, weaving personal and collective histories into her verses. The book is divided into two parts: “Ancestral,” which delves into exile, land, and the trauma of occupation, and “Daughter,” which reflects on womanhood, heartbreak, and rebirth. Poems like “Haifa on 85th Avenue” and “Godforsaken Homes” juxtapose longing for homeland with the alienation of displacement, while “Being a Palestinian Woman: A Guide” celebrates resilience. Jhaish honors her heritage, mourns ongoing violence, and clings to hope, dedicating the work to Gaza and Palestinian martyrs. Blending English and Arabic, her poetry is a testament to ancestral love and the unyielding spirit of her people.
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The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher is a riveting account of the bumpy first decade of the work life of Karim F Hirji, a retired Professor of Medical Statistics. Filled with a distinctive variety of eye-opening episodes, it covers lecturing at the University of Dar es Salaam, the life of a political exile in a remote rural area and the challenges of setting up from scratch a one-of-a-kind educational institute in Africa. With a style that seamlessly combines the personal with the general, Hirji provides an illuminating description of different aspects of the Tanzanian political, educational, economic and rural landscape during the 1970s. Starting with a commentary on teacher training, he concludes with a critical comparison of modern university education in the nation with that of the earlier era.
The inside story of the struggles of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, referred to by British colonialism as the ‘Mau Mau rebellion’, is little known today. The autobiographical material written by Karari Njama (a senior leader in the Mau Mau hierarchy) and compiled by Donald L. Barnett was first published by Monthly Review Press in 1966 as Mau Mau From Within: An Analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt. It was reprinted in 1970; it has remained out of print for many years. As the late Basil Davidson put it in his review of the first edition: “Njama writes of the forest leaders’ efforts to overcome dissension, to evolve effective tactics, to keep discipline, mete out justice … and to teach men how to survive in those merciless forests. His narrative is crowded with excitement. Those who know much of Africa and those who know little will alike find it compulsive reading. Some 10,000 Africans died fighting in those years . Here, in the harsh detail of everyday experience, are the reasons why.”
The book is an extraordinary story of courage, passion, heroism, combined with recounting of colonial terror, brutality and betrayal. It is a story of how the very idea of being ‘Kenyan’ was intimately linked to the idea of freedom, a connection that was destroyed not only by the firepower of the British, but also by those who collaborated and established themselves as the beneficiaries of neocolonial rule. Disconnecting notions of freedom from identity left only a caricature that rapidly descended into tribalism and ethnicity.
This momentous story of the struggle for freedom described here is relevant not only for a new generation of Kenyans but also for all those engaged in emancipatory struggles internationally. For so long as the experiences arising from the struggles described in this book are perceived as merely ‘African’ or ‘Kenyan’, it is not possible to fully grasp the contributions they have made to the struggle for a universalist humanity.
What is recounted in this publication is more than an ‘analysis of a peasant revolt’. It is, above all, a history of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. As Ngūgī wa Thiong’o points out in his Preface to this new edition, ‘we don’t have to use the vocabulary of the colonial to describe our struggles.’ We were tempted to rename the book ‘Kenya Land and Freedom Army from Within.’ But because the original title has wide recognition, and one of the characteristics of movements of the oppressed is to appropriate derogatory terms
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