The Second Erasure: How Do We Speak of (and with) Political Prisoners? 

The Second Erasure: How Do We Speak of (and with) Political Prisoners? 

Thoughts Prompted by Abdelrahman ElGendy’s Debut Memoir

By Laura Gribbon

How do we speak of political prisoners while they are still inside, and how do we speak with them once they’re out? This is not a question about representation, but rather about production; about what we manufacture when we speak or write about political prisoners.

When an authoritarian state crushes political dissent, it does not simply imprison bodies; it manufactures a narrative about them, a story designed to make the imprisonment legible, justifiable, necessary. In Egypt, the perceived dissident becomes a Muslim Brother, or a moral degenerate, or a threat to national security, or an agent of foreign powers undermining the fabric of society. The specific charge matters less than the function: to flatten a life into a threat, to smooth out the edges until nothing remains but a silhouette the state can point to and say, this is what we are protecting you from.

In order to counter this, to build a case for their release, we, in civil society—whether journalist, human rights activist, or lawyer—often do the same. We flatten nuances, strip away the complications. We make people secular or religious in exactly the right proportions. We make them monogamous, family-driven, a writer not a journalist, Egyptian not western-inspired, educated, elite, cultured, someone who never wanted to be involved in politics—as though that were a choice one could make. We construct this man or woman, present them to the court, to the public, to the world: Look. They are harmless. They are ours.

Reading Abdelrahman ElGendy’s memoir almost a decade after I first encountered the reflections he smuggled out from his prison cell, I find myself confronting those same questions again. This isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled with them. Over the years there have been others: colleagues, friends, acquaintances. When they are inside, our world becomes a stage for a very particular play: the campaign, the careful word, the sentence that must survive its own saying. You learn to walk a tightrope: critiquing the reason for the arrest without provoking “the Arms,” as ElGendy calls them. And if you are family, friend, or lover, you too are drafted into the performance. You cycle through roles: the distant caretaker, the quiet sacrifice, the silence that says everything, the confrontation that says nothing. Sometimes all at once. Sometimes none of it is enough.

And this is the trick of the thing. To win their freedom, you must first build them a reputation.

You might make someone a family man, a devoted father. You might make him a basketball player, a student, a minor, leave out any anger or questioning of power. And then, one day, the cage opens. And the man who walks out is not the man you built. He has been narrated, summarized, captioned, and now he must live in the body of a character he never auditioned for. How is he supposed to act? What does freedom look like when your own name has been used as a costume? When the story that saved you is the story that erased you? When you have been so thoroughly translated into something legible to power that you no longer recognize the original text?

The problem, then, is not simply that political prisoners are misrepresented. It is that the very machinery of advocacy—the campaign, the carefully curated narrative, the legible self presented to power—produces a second erasure after the first.

I met ElGendy through his words. He smuggled out his writing via visitors, scrawled on pieces of paper and hidden in books. He wrote about his friend Ammad, about color synesthesia, and about Harry Potter, mostly in Arabic, and a few of us translated and edited his thoughts to publish with Mada Masr. Sometimes he both wrote and translated himself. We even managed, a few times, to get some feedback to him, and he would send back his responses. At other times, when we couldn’t reach him, we had to make decisions about what we could decipher and take liberties with and about what we should or shouldn’t edit. His piece on Ammad, for example, describes his first close encounter with a person with Downs Syndrome. It was extremely sincere and heartbreaking, but perhaps also a bit naive. We didn’t want any misconceptions, or for certain language, especially in English, to be read with a critical eye and not in the spirit in which it was meant; for his words to be used against him somehow. Yet, there was something we wanted to preserve about those raw early thoughts as they were penned, and not to tamper with them or to edit them out. In those days, it wasn’t just about conveying his thoughts, but also about sticking to a narrative that might, hopefully, see him released.

Those editorial decisions—what to preserve, what not to tamper with, what to let stand even when it risks being read with critique—are exactly the negotiations that constitute the mediated prisoner. I was already inside the problem, translating a young man into a form the world could receive. Yet, what first attracted me to Abdelrahman’s early writing is precisely its unmediated honesty and relatability. Now, working in publishing, I read so many memoirs that are heavily affected by considerations about audience, preconceived ideas and how to counter them, weighed down by genre and expectation. ElGendy’s memoir, though obviously deepened by years of experience, still has that raw, contagious energy I always found in his writing. And it is complicated with a story like this; a prison memoir that so often might engender sympathy or voyeurism in its reader and stop there.

I met Abdelrahman’s sister Salma for coffee early in 2018 and was instantly drawn to her. Like him, she has a playfully serious energy, but with a witty dry humor. She spoke honestly about how challenging those years were for the family, and, for her in particular, there was the guilt of moving on and winning competitions for her artworks as her brother was stuck inside. With a cheeky grin, she also joked that now she couldn’t rant about her annoying brother anymore, though she was evidently extremely proud of him. We laughed, but the comment spoke volumes about the cost to families and those on the outside, emotionally as well as financially and physically, as Abdelrahman recognizes in Huna. The family member is drafted into the performance because the prisoner’s legibility to power requires a supporting cast. You build the reputation that might win the cage open. And, in doing so, you participate in the erasure.

This erasure is not incidental. Prisons have, inadvertently, always been spaces where political solidarity is forged, where new forms of resistance and collective identity take shape among inmates. Yet we must remember, as Laleh Khalili and Jillian Schwedler argue in Policing and Prisons in the Middle East, that the region’s notorious mukhabarat are not anomalies or products of a violent culture; they are deeply rooted in colonial administrations and their aims to crush dissent and discipline bodies. Instead of dismantling them, post-independence regimes inherited, expanded, and modernized these exact colonial legal frameworks and police apparatuses.

This matters because it reframes the performance as structural. The prison is not a rupture from “normal” political life; it is a concentrated site where the same logics of legibility and self-presentation operate on the outside, just way more intensely. These systems of surveillance, coercion, and fear are used globally. The ghorba he writes about is one shared by all who challenge systems of oppression—increasingly so, as we are witnessing. ElGendy’s own account of this is the sharpest entry point, as he also describes the fear of arrest and incarceration he faced in the US before fleeing. The outside world’s need for a usable prisoner forces a performance that continues after release. Yet, the man who walks out is not the man who was built for the campaign. And so we arrive at what might be the most radical act available to the released prisoner: the refusal to be translated and explained.

I think of ElGendy’s relationship to English—a fluency he strove for as a means of acceptance, of education, of access to a wider world, and which he now commands, critiques, and wields in his own way, aware of its limitations. To keep certain things in Arabic, to write in a way that resists the smooth passage into legibility that English promises, is to say: Stop mediating me and my story. This is not a retreat from communication. It is a demand for a different kind of encounter, one that does not require the flattening of layered identities, the smoothing of jagged edges, the translation of a life into a form that power can digest. It is the insistence on untranslatability as a form of dignity. Some things cannot and should not be made legible to everyone. Some selves resist the costume. Some stories refuse to be summarized.

For those of us who know and love people who have been through this, who have been narrated, captioned, flattened, and then released into a world that expects them to be grateful for the caricature, the question becomes: can we learn to meet them without demanding they become legible to us? Can we sit with the parts that don’t translate, the contradictions that don’t resolve, the person who is not the one we campaigned for or once knew? That, perhaps, is the solidarity that comes after the performance ends. Not the solidarity of the campaign, which requires a usable prisoner, but the solidarity of the ordinary.

So we return to the question: how do we speak of them, and with them? Perhaps the question is better posed as: what are we producing when we speak? The performance does not end at the prison gate. It changes stages, yes, but the script was written by the same hands that built the cage. Recognizing that is not a solution. It is, perhaps, the only honest place to begin.

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer and translator from Cairo, as well as the Literary Editor of The Markaz Review. He is the author of Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming; recently named a finalist for the National Book Award. ElGendy was imprisoned in Egypt between 2013 and 2020.  

Laura Gribbon is Managing Editor at the American University in Cairo Press, and was formerly an editor at Mada Masr, where she edited and worked on ElGendy’s prison letters. She has lived in Cairo since 2010.