‘Texts That Survived the Ashes’: By Ahmed Naji

 

Texts That Survived the Ashes

When I first arrived at Tora Prison, the investigative officer confiscated the books I had with me under the pretext of showing them to the State Security officer first, but he allowed me to keep my black journal and a blue pen. He said he knew that I was a writer, so he would leave me the journal, and that there were books in the prison library that he would allow me to borrow, on one condition: that I would not publish anything during my time in prison, otherwise he would deprive me of paper, pen, and books and turn my days in prison into a living hell.

After the Marcel Proust incident, I realized the trap. I couldn’t publish anything while in prison, yet during my release anything I had written while here would be scrutinized, and I would likely be forced to burn it.

Over a succession of nights and days, I came to understand what Proust meant by documenting lost time. The days in prison resemble one another, and by repeating them they turn into one day, a slow, eternal waking moment.

Writing creates an identity and a footprint for each day, gives meaning to its passing, and turns lost time into history. Following in the footsteps of Proust, I began writing my memoirs, but this time I didn’t record what was going on in prison, but rather recorded my dreams.

Each page in my prison diary begins with today’s date, then a narration of what I dreamt. If there was no dream or I didn’t remember it, then I’d write a few lines about my state of health and mood.

During my time in prison (February 2016–December 2016), I left Tora twice to attend appeal hearings against the verdict. In one of the sessions, as I stood with other prisoners in a metal cage in the courtroom, my brother approached, confused, and said that he had run into Sonallah Ibrahim, who gave him a bag containing sets of ballpoint pens and reams of tracing paper and asked him to deliver the bag to me.

My brother, a cardiologist who comes from a world far removed from literature and politics, didn’t understand the gift from Sonallah Ibrahim, who spent about five years in Al-Wahat prison in the 1960s, when he was imprisoned with thousands of leftists and communists jailed by Nasser. More than fifty years later, Sonallah explained to my brother, he thought about what a writer needs most in prison and decided to gift me pens and paper, which could be hidden and smuggled easily into prison so that I could write. I told Mohammed that I had enough pens and paper and asked him to convey my greetings to Sonallah for his gift, which I would not be able to accept, because my return to prison with that gift would raise suspicions.

I entered prison recalling the prison literature written by Sonallah Ibrahim, the writers of his generation, and various generations of Egyptian politicians and writers, all of whom considered and wrote about prison as a battlefield and a struggle against political authority. For the political activist, imprisonment is an extension of the battle, and therefore every action taken turns into an act of resistance. For political prisoners, writing is the highest form of resistance, because it is a declaration that their will has not been broken, and that they are capable of thinking, creating, and innovating, and as such it is also a crack in the prison walls. As the aim of the prison is to isolate the prisoner between the walls of oblivion, so the prison guard did not allow the release of Marcel Proust’s memoirs, because their release and publication would have been a breach of the walls of the very prison he was charged with protecting.

This book is, in a way, a penetration into Egyptian prisons, a puncture in the wall, and a challenge to the authority of the warden. To write in prison is to “present evidence” against the warden. The political prisoner, in particular, writes about the humiliation and torture endured in prison, so that the writing becomes a testimony and a documentation in its own right.

The role of prison literature as “testimony” has grown in recent decades with the proliferation of human rights organizations in the West and East, which rely on these testimonies in their legal and human rights actions against authoritarian states and repressive regimes. These organizations have teams of workers whose job is to reach victims/prisoners and record, document, and collect their testimonies.

While these testimonies have played a crucial political role in levying charges against the perpetrators and unmasking the brutal practices of torture and killing within prison walls, the methodology and linguistic mode employed in the collection and publication of these testimonies in recent decades have significantly undermined the humanistic and personal essence of prison testimonies and literature.

In the sphere of human rights testimony, there’s no room for the prisoner’s voice except as that of a victim speaking in the language of law and facts. Any expression of grief, anger, or desire is considered a violation of the artificial neutrality and objectivity of the language of human rights. Part of the significance of this book and other anthologies lies in the fact that the translated texts are not all legal testimonies, but instead include personal letters from prisoners to their families and literary texts, whether in the form of poems or prose. Anthologies of prison writing restore diversity to the voice of prisoners, bringing it out of the sphere of human rights testimony and into the space of literature that is capable of relaying a variety of emotions.

Prison literature presents itself as expressing a truth that is inaccessible to the ordinary reader. The writer introduces prison literature to the reader in order to demand reverence and submission: “I have come from hell, and I have no reason to lie; I am recording and writing here, being true to my cellmates and to experience.” And since the experience presents itself as a sublime and sacred fruit, it has no need for any crafting or artistry. Some writers believe that artistry in prison literature contradicts the sincerity that the text should deliver, and that the charm of the text lies in its honesty.

The experiences in Egyptian prison literature are full of contradictions that raise doubts about the veracity of these narratives. One of the most widely read Egyptian prison books in recent years, for example, is the book Mushaghib fi-l-mu’ataqal [A rioter in detention] (Cairo: Dar al-Kanuz, 2016), by Sherif El-Serafi, a supporter of the Sisi regime who was arrested in 2013 and sentenced to a year in prison on charges of “disrupting the memorial” to the martyrs of the revolution. In his book, we do not see a single word of condemnation of the criminal system or of prisons in Egypt. Rather, Sherif glorifies himself and proves his patriotism by relating how he used to spy on his fellow prisoners from the Islamic currents, conveying their news and activities and
planning to the prison administration, and then praising the prison system and the wisdom and greatness of President Sisi. Sherif’s account of imprisonment contradicts that of most texts in this book.

Even in the 1960s, the prisons of Gamal Abdel Nasser contained prisoners from the Islamic and communist currents. Nevertheless, there appears to be a blatant contradiction between the writings of the two currents in their recording of the facts. The memoirs of the Islamists speak of daily torture parties, while the leftists talk about educational and study circles inside the prison, as well as literary and theatrical works written and performed inside. However, this contradiction may be an affirmation of the subjectivity of the prison experience, not its reality. There is no agreed upon truth, as every prisoner has political and class prejudices and unique experiences and pain.

The truth requires acceptance and agreement by all and proves itself through various forms of evidence, whereas the essence of prison literature is deeply rooted in the solitary soil of personal narratives. Every lie or contradiction can be interpreted to be a result of imprisonment and its psychological effects. Even if the facts clash and the portrait of truth is shaken, reality always remains on the side of the narrator, the writer. Every contradiction or error resulting from oversight or intention presents itself as an outcome of the prison experience and its pressures.

Then there is the ideological impact that spreads its shadow and exerts its weight on the text so long as prison literature is part of a political battle, just as prison in the political prisoner’s consciousness is part of his struggle. The authors of most of the Arab prison literature I’ve read were imprisoned because of their political activities, and so imprisonment is a continuation of the political struggle. Prisoners keep their minds from going crazy, and their souls from rotting, for the sake of a better future they will make with their party or group when they get out. They write after their release from prison in order to record the experience of their political group on the wall of time, in order to make even a small scratch in the structure of the walls of power and its narration. And therefore what is important is not the artistry of what will be written about the experience, but rather the premise that the written testimony will carry, and its role within the unending struggle of the imprisoned writer/politician.

The prisoner’s testimony seeks to clarify and educate the public. Literature is self-sufficient, its value is in its uniqueness, not in its clarity, and it is from literary work that writers learn their craft. In a literary work, form is a core element, and form and content work towards the same goal—that is, both make up the significance of the literary work, whereas in prison documents and testimonies, the subject matter dominates and the artistic form is simply a vehicle for its expression.

Political detainees do not enter prison alone, and even if loneliness is their companion for the initial period of investigation and arrest, in their writing about prison, the moment always arrives when they meet their comrades in political work.

Prison writings differentiate between political and criminal prisoners and set a boundary between the two worlds. The writer even deliberately highlights the differences between himself or herself as a political prisoner and the criminal prisoner, even if the two share the same cell.

The prison experience is a melting pot for the political group; it tests the convictions of the members of the group and the bonds that exist between them, whether the bonds of brotherhood when tears fall at dawn prayer or when comrades tremble in ecstasy when someone hums a song by Sheikh Imam.*

Every writing about prison that I have known wasn’t only about prison, but was rather the accumulated interpretations of the political conflict taking place at the moment it was written. In this regard, prison becomes one of the multiple arenas for this conflict, an arena that witnesses the defeat of the writer and the writer’s multiple attempts at resistance. Since my arrival in America, I have worked with a number of institutions and initiatives, all related to creative writing and prisoners in American prisons. Some of them are projects to teach creative writing to prisoners, while others judge literary awards for prisoners. I participated in events and even had the honor of reading my work with former prisoners. In American prisons, there is no distinction between political and criminal prisoners, although the majority of prisoners are imprisoned for reasons deeply related to racial politics and economic inequality.

I worked with the American poet Jo O’Lone-Hahn to edit a number of issues of the journal INTRA, which is dedicated to publishing poetry by American prisoners, and while we read dozens of handwritten texts that arrived in the mail, I noticed the absence of any mention of the prison and its details and what goes on inside it, unlike the usual literature produced in Arab prisons. At that time, Jo alerted me that the magazine had sent several letters announcing the competition and its details to prisons in several states. Some prison administrators didn’t respond at all. Some agreed and delivered the announcement to the prisoners, who in turn sent their work via mail, which is monitored by the prison administration. All we were reading were the writings of prisoners composed under the watchful eye of the jailer who, unlike the jailer in Egypt, has absolute power to confiscate what he does not like.

As for the writings of the Egyptian prisoners, it is writing that was smuggled out because of the jailer’s negligence. The prisoners write, but they are keen to hide what they write. In my prison there were some prisoners who presented themselves as human safes. In the event of a search of the cell by the prison guards, prisoners rushed to these “safes” with papers that they did not want the prison administration to find. The human safes would fold them, put them in a plastic bag, and insert the bag inside their body, hiding in their orifices what their colleagues had written so that the jailer wouldn’t find and confiscate it.

Since my adolescence I’ve written using a computer keyboard; most of us now write on a mobile screen. But such luxuries are not found in prison. Writing in prison begins first with the search for paper and pen, which are very expensive supplies, then finding a place in the middle of the narrow cell where you can sit and write away from the intrusion of those around you and at the same time not be deprived of light. Instead of the chair and the table on which we were trained to write, the prisoner writes on his body: the thigh becomes the desk over which you bend to write, the letters and words that come together to form sentences mix with the pain of hardened bones and joints, the humidity of the prison that penetrates the body in winter, and the drops of sweat that fall and wet the paper, dissolving the inked words.

When the order to release me from prison arrived in December 2016, all I feared was that Marcel Proust’s fate would be repeated with me, especially as I had begun writing a draft of a new novel. The solution I resorted to was that I bought from another prisoner a copy of the magazine Al-Itha’ah wa al-televiziun [Radio and television], on the cover of which was a picture of the Lebanese singer Dominique Hourani in a short dress. I placed all my papers and the notebook that contained the draft of the novel in my bag, with the magazine on top of them. During my search at the prison gate, the officer this time opened the bag himself, and the first thing he saw was the magazine and its cover. He lifted it, laughed, and said, “Another woman? It’s these women that will bring you to prison again.”

I pretended to laugh at his silly joke, and the jailers and prisoners joined me in giggling, so he got high with joy. He put the magazine in the bag, pleased that everyone appreciated his wit, and ordered the door to be opened.

Since 2016, Egyptian prison conditions have changed for the worse. The number of prisoners has increased and overcrowding in inhumane prisons has increased. During the years of Trump’s presidency, Sisi was given the title of “favorite dictator” and the United States turned a blind eye to all human rights violations committed by the Egyptian regime, so it became even more brutal in its abuse of prisoners. My colleagues and brothers are in Egyptian prisons now; some of them have been deprived of books, and others have been deprived of paper, pens, and even the right to write letters to their families. For those who have been isolated from any light, and for those who have been left in the eternal darkness of Sisi’s prisons, my wish is that this book contributes to breaking their siege, and that a day will come soon when we read it as a historical document of a bygone era, not as a record of crimes still being committed.

*Imam Mohammad Ahmed Aissa (1918–1995) is a famous Egyptian composer and singer who for most of his career collaborated with poet Ahmed Fouad Negm, writing political songs about poor people and the working classes. See Andrew Simon, “An Ordinary Icon: Cassettes, Counternarratives, and Shaykh Imam,” in Social Voices: The Cultural Politics of Singers around the Globe, ed. Levi S. Gibbs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023).

Reprinted from Imprisoning a Revolution: Writings from Egypt’s Incarcerated, edited by Collective Antigone, courtesy of University of California Press. Copyright 2025.