Lutfiya al-Dulaimi

With a heart as steadfast and warm as the Iraqi sun that first greeted her on January 1st, 1939, our beloved Lutfiya al-Dulaimi has laid down her pen for the final time. To us, she was not just the groundbreaking writer or the fearless activist the world came to know; she was Auntie Lutfiya, whose laughter could fill a room and whose presence made you feel seen, heard, and utterly cherished. I can still see her, in her later years, curled in her favorite chair by the window, a thick blanket over her knees, a cup of sweet tea steaming beside her as she read, her brow furrowed in concentration, a small smile playing on her lips when a sentence landed just right. Her home was a living tapestry of her passions. Books overflowed from shelves, stacked in teetering towers on every surface—novels, studies, translations, all bearing her meticulous notes in the margins. But her world wasn’t confined to ink and paper. She found profound joy in her garden, where she coaxed stubborn jasmine and roses to bloom, insisting they were “the best listeners.” And oh, the stories she told! Over endless glasses of tea, she’d spin tales from her youth in Baghdad, of a Iraq that was vibrant and complex, her eyes sparkling with mischief or clouding with sorrow as she recalled the wars and struggles she so bravely chronicled. She wrote over seventy books, but her most important work was the quiet, daily act of building a family. To her nieces and nephews, she was a second mother, a confidante who celebrated our triumphs and soothed our heartbreaks with equal, unwavering grace. Her love for her siblings was a fortress, a bond forged in a shared history that she preserved not just in her writing, but in the way she gathered us all, insisting we laugh and remember. Lutfiya’s legacy is the ink on the page and the fire in the hearts of every woman she encouraged to speak her truth. She gave voice to the silent struggles, turning the personal into the political with a poet’s grace. Yet, her greatest impact was in the intimate spaces: the young writer she mentored over a shaky phone call, the friend she buoyed with a handwritten note, the family member she taught that love is a verb—shown in the meal cooked, the story remembered