Jailed in Egypt at 17, He Wrote to Survive and to Share His Long Ordeal

Abdelrahman ElGendy envisions the end of his book to be inspiring, despite all the horrors he will have to recount.

Starting at the age of 17, Mr. ElGendy spent six years and three months in squalid prisons in Egypt, and according to him, one way he survived was to imagine the memoir he would publish if given the opportunity. free pay.

He knew the harrowing abuses he witnessed and endured during his incarceration — including guards beating prisoners and beating them with batons and wooden chair legs — would make a powerful story, if hard to read and even harder to share. But the thought of the book also gave him a purpose to exist at a time when his life was all but suffering.

He knew he didn’t want his memoir to be about pain and degradation. The idea that, somehow, it could also be about hope helped ease his despair, letting him dream that everything he was going through was finally having a positive meaning. .

“This is how I want my readers to receive my work one day: What you’re holding between your hands, that’s it. This is how I survived,” said ElGendy, now 27 and studying for a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Pittsburgh. His autobiography is his thesis project.

Mr. ElGendy was arrested at the age of 17 in Cairo in October 2013 while sitting in a car with his father while photographing and filming a protest.

His previous activism was short-lived: He participated in only a few protests, which began after his friend’s father was one of them. Hundreds of people were killed by Egyptian security forces in August of that year amid a brutal crackdown on supporters The recently ousted president, Mohamed Morsi.

Earlier on the day of his arrest, he had struggled with his parents, who were not politically active and didn’t want him to take any more risks. But a teacher he loved was recently arrested and he wanted to do something about it.

They made a compromise: His father would take him to the rally and they wouldn’t leave the car.

But plainclothes officers were standing nearby. They pulled the teenager out of the car, grabbed his phone and beat him. His father, begging them to release his son, was also arrested.

The father and son spent days awaiting interrogation, crammed in a small cell with dozens of other people sleeping on top of each other. The teenager stood in a corner, fanning his frail father with a piece of cardboard.

They were eventually tried in groups of 68, all held in one cage in the courtroom, and sentenced to 15 years in a maximum-security prison for “unlawful assembly”.

After his conviction, the teenager was transferred to prison, where he was stripped naked and groped, he said, and shaved. He said inmates call the ritual a “welcome party” and it’s designed to “tame and break” inmates.

His fear of suddenly becoming a teen prisoner in a country with a notoriously brutal punishment system He felt even more guilty when his father, who owned a marketing research company, joined him behind bars.

The first time he wrote while in custody was after his trial in May 2014.

As he stood inside a police transport vehicle, he saw his reflection in the metal, which prompted him to describe in words the cruelty and absurdity of the events that had led to him. he goes there. He returned to his cell and hurriedly wrote his first essay in Arabic.

“Remnants of a lost dream and withered hope: I saw them peeking from my reflection on the cuffs squeezing my wrists,” he wrote.

His inmates cried when he read it to them, so he decided to sneak the newspaper to his sister, who publish it on Facebook. On her next visit, she shared her readers’ reactions: shock, sadness, and pity. That encouraged him to keep going, and writing became the way he would fill most of his time while sitting in his cell.

Mr. ElGendy’s case is not as public as that of some famous prisoners. Protesters around the world did not chant his name, international newspapers did not write demands for his release and editorial board unaware of his situation.

After all, his circumstances were not unusual; in fact, it was popular in Egypt. He is just one of more than 60,000 political prisoners in Egyptian prisons, including those held before trial, human rights groups estimated last year. A New York Times investigation revealed the extent of abuse suffered by inmates, many of whom were simply accused of having non-conforming political views.

While in prison, Mr. ElGendy enrolled at Ain Shams University and eventually graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. Egyptian law allows prisoners to take university entrance exams.

When he was a student, he was allow to have books in English that his jailers thought were for the classroom. He said he read more than 300 books, researched and wrote mostly at night next to the cell’s bathroom, where the dim light came in and when the prison was quieter.

His determination to complete his degree, he said, was partly motivated by the role he imagines graduating will play in his memoir.

He explains: “I was in the middle of a mental breakdown while studying to finish my degree, and what kept me going was thinking how paradoxical it would be in the book when the protagonist didn’t graduate after all this. What motivates him to continue, he added, is the “concept that whatever I go through has not been entirely in vain.”

Mr. ElGendy hid his writing in the dirty clothes he gave the family during their monthly visits. His father was pardoned after three years in prison.

His writing began to receive attention and in 2018 the Egyptian publication Mada Masrone of the only remaining independent voices in Egypt, made his essays in the form of a multipart series, “The Anatomy of an Incarceration.”

In one femalehe wrote about the anticipation of a family visit and the careful choreography needed to leave his cell, where each inmate was given a 12-inch free space:

“We tiptoed and jumped across the cell, not wanting to step on anyone’s head or stomach by mistake – those two hurt the most. We only aim at the hands and feet. I shouted that we were ready as I approached the cell door, and it opened with a bang to let us out for the first time in a week – a whole week went by with 64 other inmates in one room. small 4 x 5 meter cells.”

With the sentence upheld on appeal, his only hope for early release is a presidential pardon. But he never received one. He was transferred between seven prisons over his six years.

It was eventually determined that a clerical error had resulted in him being improperly tried as an adult.

He was retried when he was young and was released in January 2020. A guard woke him up to tell him the news. He left the prison as suddenly as he entered it.

Mr. ElGendy currently lives in Pittsburgh, attracted by a strong creative nonfiction program. He spends his days writing his master’s thesis, working on the release of other prisoners, and giving lectures on human rights.

In prison, he said, reading protest works by contemporary Egyptian authors – like the poetry of Mostafa Ibrahim And Tamim Al-Barghouthi and novels by Ahdaf Soueif – shake and inspire him. “I absorbed this idea of ​​resistance through storytelling,” he said.

“I dream that my book plays the same role for generations to come,” he added. “Stories exist, because I told them. I was there, here’s what happened and you can’t take my word for it.