Prison is not merely an engineered structure of iron and concrete; it is, in its essence, a systematic attempt at “metaphysical isolation”, that is, at killing the soul, freezing time, abolishing memory and consciousness, and shaping the body, and everything that falls under human existence. In modern Egypt, prison conditions have grown worse, to the point of turning into a “panopticon” space, as described by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. A space that seeks to regulate every movement and to narrow the prisoners’ field of vision, with the ultimate aim of erasing the self and inflicting a “slow death” on the prisoner.
In the face of this systematic erasure, writing emerges, and in particular prison letters and missives, as the only existential tool capable of piercing the wall of darkness. A few lines on paper, often smuggled or written under censorship, become akin to an act of rebellion, carrying the weight of human experience and of repressed and yearning emotion. These letters are not content with being a form of communication; they turn into an attempt to redefine the world from the vantage point of the shackle, and in doing so they build a paper bridge that links isolated individual existence, as in the letters of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, with the wider human history.
Writing in Prison… “Asserting the Self” in the Face of Systematic Erasure
The prison authority relies on a strategy aimed at crushing human existence through metaphysical isolation. This is done through a spatial engineering designed for total control and for counting breaths, a process that is aggravated by increased security surveillance. In Egyptian prisons, the Prisons Regulation Law was amended to increase the period of solitary confinement that can be imposed by decision of the prison warden to 30 days, which may reach six months by decision of an assistant minister of interior, and even this is not what is applied, as many prisoners languish in solitary confinement for years without any legal basis other than that the authorities wanted to punish them. Solitary confinement, with this endless expansion, represents the most extreme form of “erasure of the self” through sensory and social deprivation, as the prisoner finds himself facing a difficult linguistic challenge: the scenes of abuse and torture to which he is subjected, as documented in several testimonies, exceed the capacity of language to describe and narrate, which places the imprisoned writer in tension between the pressing need to bear witness and the limits of expressing this hell.
Under this pressure, writing turns into an act of existential commitment, along the lines proposed by Sartre, where it becomes the essence of free existence and a responsibility towards the world. The prisoner writes not in search of eloquence or aesthetics in their broadest sense, but to fulfil a pressing necessity of existence: “asserting the self, and its capacity to live, to rise and to continue, so that it does not dissolve into defeat or pass into nothingness”. This writing is a “political act” that challenges the structures of power, because it proves that the mind and consciousness, which are the real tools of freedom, have not yet been detained, and indeed resist being dissolved.
This systematic refusal of absence manifests itself in acts of intellectual resistance. When a prisoner who has spent long years in solitary confinement requests a list of books that includes Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo” and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s “The Psychological Impact of Defeat”, this is not merely a request to read. It is a declaration of “epistemic rebellion”, and a rejection of the punishment represented by the “epistemic silence” imposed on him. This behaviour reflects a process of self-preservation, and an insistence on building an “emotional geography” set against the repressive geography of the prison authority. Here, the mind refuses to become part of the prison’s repressive engineering, and uses literature and philosophy as a weapon to tame heavy and lost time.
Arresting Emotional Life: The Struggle of the Barbed Wire
The impact of prison in Egypt goes beyond the bounds of the prisoner to become a devastating collective punishment that targets the stability of the family and of emotional life, and this destruction is aggravated by the strategy of “recycling” (re-arrest), whereby the detainee, after obtaining a release order or an acquittal, is transferred to unofficial places of detention, then included in a new police report, and the process is repeated dozens of times. The policy of recycling is a “destruction of future existence”: it does not punish a past act, but kills the hope of emotional and family stability, and turns the penalty into an “eternal punishment” with no defined time. This tactic is the harshest form of psychological violence directed against the prisoner and his loved ones, as the dreams of freedom of many are assassinated even after their sentences have expired.
The moment of the visit is also the moment that most exposes the struggle between love and repression, but because of the harsh prison procedures it turns into a ritual of masked pain. Earlier women’s testimonies describe the visiting room in prisons such as Qanater and Damanhour as akin to “hell”, because of the severe overcrowding, the shouting and the cramped space. The visit lasts no more than 30 minutes, and the prisoners are separated from their families by barbed wire that prevents real contact on the pretext of guarding against epidemics. In this fragile scene, the female detainee, moved by love, seeks to ease things for her family, so she deliberately (like “Alyaa”, a pseudonym) puts on a “clean galabiya” and combs her hair “to look her best”, in an attempt “to hide the features of the pain and exhaustion” she is living through. This disguise is the highest degree of love and sacrifice, as the prisoner (and I was one of them, and indeed a witness to the eagerness of all prisoners, political and criminal alike) is forced to play the role of “the healthy person” to protect his loved ones from seeing the harsh truth behind bars.
At the height of the tragedy of the visit, the female prisoner is forced to make painful existential decisions. “Alyaa” recounts how she was forced to ask her elderly father, who endured the hardship of the long journey from Alexandria to Qanater Prison, “not to come to visit her again, so that she could spare him the hardships of the road”. This decision, which had a “painful impact”, represents the transformation of love into a painful sacrifice of shared existence. Voluntary isolation had become more merciful for the elderly father than the scene of shackles, wires and humiliation, and it is also evidence of how repression forces detainees to give up their basic right to emotional contact.
Moreover, the authorities exploit the visit as a psychological “theatre of terror”. In Damanhour Prison, the experience was described of “Mariam”, whose visit coincided with the visit of the “Makhsous” (women sentenced to death), who were wearing the “red galabiya” and were bound in handcuffs. This is not poor organisation, but a twofold psychological tactic: deliberately terrifying families, and linking political imprisonment with the scene of inevitable death, which magnifies the existential threat and increases families’ fear for the fate of their relatives.
The experience of visits in Egyptian prisons, as revealed by these stark testimonies and other cases of emotional separation, is a bloody meeting point between the brutal mechanisms of imprisonment and the steadfast existential will. The restrictions imposed by the authorities are a deliberate engineering of “material and moral restraint”, bodily and existential; the authorities aim to sever real emotional communication by cutting down time, through excessive overcrowding, and by separating loved ones with barbed wire. But, in a hardened existential response, the detainee engages in an attempt “to buy time and tame it”, condensing memory and the weight of existence into fleeting, counted minutes.
Letters as an Archive: Love, Memory and the Human Being
Prison letters are a double bridge: they are an emotional testimony to the harshness of life, and a historical document of political struggle. The experiences of world prison literature, such as Antonio Gramsci’s letters from his prisons or the letters of the Algerian militant Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, and of any other ordinary person whose name is unknown to newspapers, the media and intellectuals, show how the shackle turns into an enduring intellectual and human output. In this context, Egyptian letters document the dialectical relationship between love, memory and freedom, and become the guardian of the “threatened memory” of this period, where the letter becomes a companion to, and parallel with, human rights discourse, but is distinguished by its ability to divulge the bitterness of the self and to reveal “other dimensions of confession” that dry rights discourse cannot convey.
In an era in which a “National Dialogue” and a democratic horizon are constantly promoted, along with narratives the state broadcasts through its tools, the leaked letters come to brand this discourse with hypocrisy, as these letters turn into a “focal point of truth” that prevents the state from benefiting from its moral double standards, and exposes the contradiction between its discourse of détente in the media and the reality of violations inside the cells. These letters are essential documents that make up a real archive preserving the memory of torture, absence and selectivity in pardons, and they are raw material for recording the political history of a period in which the authorities are trying to control the narrative and the discourse.
Also, the function of the letters is not limited to documenting pain, but extends to an attempt to shape a new political consciousness, as in the letters that young prisoners addressed to leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and to official Egyptian figures, foremost among them the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, in which they demanded a decisive word on their case and on how long they would remain in prison. These letters reflect a growing critical awareness among the prisoners of the need to re-evaluate the political strategies followed by the opposition, while they realised that their continued imprisonment, without any political purpose, compels them to write continuously and to express their pressing human need to leave prison and return to life in a new political, social and human way that suits the present moment, and that tries to look at the reality of the current authoritarianism, the opposition and regional alliances in a way through which each tries to free himself from battles that will bring him and his loved ones nothing but torment with no real purpose.
These prison letters confirm, in their literary and philosophical dimension, that writing is the highest act of resistance against absence and erasure. It is a bridge of paper that connects the imprisoned self with the outside world, and turns suffocation into consciousness, and pain into an affirmation of life. The Egyptian experience has proved that the prisoner tries to resist being dissolved in the darkness by inventing ideas and patterns of living to form an “emotional geography” that struggles against and resists the geography of power in prison. The letters that come out from behind the walls are not merely personal cries or emotional pleas for help; they are “counter-maps” to what is imposed in the prisons, the houses of death, as Dostoevsky called them. These documents will remain the living archive of the period, and the real key to understanding the dialectical relationship that memory, freedom and love weave in their struggle with the walls of repression in modern Egypt, as these letters, once they are released in full and documented in a robust, orderly and clear manner, will be the basis on which the true history of this period is written, and the literary scene through which the steadfastness of those who tried to refuse to surrender to “nothingness” will be told.
