My dear Awatef,
Before marching off to their guillotines…
More than fifty days have passed since Amr Rabie was kidnapped and the Egyptian authorities are still not willing to reveal just where the engineering student is. Amr was snatched from Cairo’s Ramses Square and for fifty days neither investigations nor questions by those journalists who’ve taken the trouble to ask after him have revealed where he’s being held. Gone for all this time—no one knowing where he might be or what’s become of him and the authorities saying nothing.
My dear Awatef,
Before marching off to their guillotines…
More than fifty days have passed since Amr Rabie was kidnapped and the Egyptian authorities are still not willing to reveal just where the engineering student is. Amr was snatched from Cairo’s Ramses Square and for fifty days neither investigations nor questions by those journalists who’ve taken the trouble to ask after him have revealed where he’s being held. Gone for all this time—no one knowing where he might be or what’s become of him and the authorities saying nothing.
Amr’s kidnapping is a different kind of pain, Awatef, because Amr—like us—believes that the state institutions are corrupt, believes that the law here counts for less than a gnat’s wing. Amr believes in this generation and its capacity for change, he believes in the revolution and the movement of the masses and that is why the pain transcends our ideological differences. In prison, everyone’s a victim of injustice, Awatef. There’s a bitterness to injustice; it sticks in the throats of souls that are proud and free, a feeling known only to those who’ve tasted freedom, who’ve helped direct the storm. And so the pain grows with every day that passes and brings us no news, not even the smallest detail. The unenforced and broken laws that everyone bemoans don’t bother me, Awatef. What bothers me is: where is Amr Rabie? Did they kill him? Did they torture him till he couldn’t move? What’s happened to Amr? Many questions and unknown answers: a painful void. Amr Rabie should never have passed beyond their walls, Awatef. Never.
They know just how wretched and dangerous a business it is: the filthy, cramped cell’s tiny walls, which box in your allotted portion of foul air, are the worst thing you’ll encounter in your life. How can a free man squat behind bars? How can others shrug him off and meet all his demands with the single line, “You’re not allowed…”? A line that only the cell door and the small walls ever utter. You don’t have the right to move from room to room. You don’t have the right to privacy, nor the right to go and visit whomever you feel like. You’ve nothing but patience, and patience without freedom and agency is impotence. Patience is a dream and a fetter to those with free souls, Awatef, to those proud souls that bow to no one else, those souls that are both prophets and devotees of freedom. Hunched behind their bars, now, souls broken by dreams, souls winding down, souls stripped bare by patience.
Others talk of how fast or slow the days must go by, of the inevitability of struggle, of the different ideological positions of each detainee, each according to his affiliation. They think of the passing days—how bad and how black they must be—and how hard it must be breathe in a cramped cell on a hot and stifling night, and they spin theories about a pitch-dark experiment against humanity in a land that does not recognize man. They talk and theorize and rush to state their positions so glibly—and they are free, on the outside of that distant place, a place that is so far from the broad streets and polluted winds that gust unchecked, so far from the right to do things, the right to choose your experience. Why then do their words come so easily? Why can’t they grasp that free, proud souls that do not fear death, fear prison? That the hardest thing for a soul that has stood up to death, is impotence? That’s the truth, Awatef. Prison is humiliation and torture. For the free soul dignity is all—speaking truth to tyranny—so what “position” are these lot chattering about? How important can it be?
The souls hunched behind bars will not return as they were, no matter what else changes, Awatef. The passion that moved them will slowly dissipate; hard experience did for ours, passion after passion vaporized away —you know? You see, our souls stayed behind in Mohammed Mahmoud, stayed in that street to care for everything that has vanished outside it. We’ve seen hard times, Awatef—too hard for things to return to their natural state, too hard to hope for that. Now all we hope for is to be able to live with those experiences, ragged and shot full of holes as we are. We gather up our shattered limbs and bury them on the sly. We sew our wounds and wait for them to heal, forbearing. We live. How is that the days have carried us from Mohammed Mahmoud to their prisons? By what right? By what authority? Who seized the right to murder dreams and souls so wantonly?
We should never have passed beyond their walls, which lie so heavy on our souls. We should never have emerged again, years later, calling for freedom, demanding it for ourselves and for all—all against all. The days toyed with us and tossed us about until we reached their prison gates. The cells show no mercy to the free man, Awatef. Alienation is hard, but to be forced into it is much harder, I believe. In this patch of land we learned to live with alienation for long years, and in Mohammed Mahmoud we learned that we belong to no one but ourselves, and ourselves alone. In prison, you belong to no one but yourself, to inner alienation—to a life you do not belong to and never wanted and never fought for, a life whose end you foretold. The circles tighten about us and no help at hand, Awatef. This phase that they talk of as just “a matter of days” is many slow deaths of many things that shall never return again. The souls that despite everything learned to fly are broken inside and a broken soul is a bullet to the head of passion, which is death. Let’s not make light of this. Prisons are tombs and escaping a tomb does not necessarily mean paradise, nor freedom—the freedom that we spread, Awatef.
