Ahmed Naji

Abstract

This article analyses Ahmed Naji’s Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence) and Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated through the lens of ‘prison literature’, that is “literary works produced in, about, or through the experience of political detention” (Taleghani 13). Comparing them to previous forms of prison literature from Egypt, it shows that both books depart from the social-realistic mode that has prevailed throughout the 20^th century.

Rather they renovate the genre with aesthetic traits drawn from postmodern and digital literature, exemplified by autofictional or anonymous modes of authorship and co-authorship, narrative fragmentation, and bodily exposures. These aesthetic features indicate a departure from the mainly documentary, testimonial nature that has characterized this type of literature in Egypt. It illuminates the author’s attempt to write about prison to mobilize and connect with transnational communities of leftist activists and persecuted writers. This link is established through the formal features of the books, the authors’ self-positioning in the narrative, and descriptions of the prisoner’s body as a site of vulnerability and dissent.

–The Full study is here: “From Prison to the World: A Comparative Reading of Naji’s <em>Hirz Mik” by Teresa Pepe