Collective Antigone (ed.), Imprisoning a Revolution: Writings from Egypt's Incarcerated (University of California Press, 2025).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?

Collective Antigone (CA): This book is not so much edited as curated, by a team of Egyptian and international scholars, human rights defenders, and activists who came together in support of prisoners of conscience in Egypt. With this volume, we have tried to bring together letters, as well as poetry and art, that not only reveal the injustice and even horrors associated with the system of mass political incarceration in Egypt but also offer, with all its particularities, a collective voice to the world about the freedom erased and the dreams crushed by the collective imprisonment of a generation of Egyptians. Many of those imprisoned for alleged “political” crimes were guilty of nothing more than a Facebook or Twitter post, or even just being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

At least 100,000 Egyptians have been imprisoned since the beginning of the 2011 revolutionary uprising by each successive governing regime, under extremely dire conditions. As tragic, this regime of mass incarceration has proceeded with the effective indifference of the international community. Egypt’s incarcerated are largely absent from international discussions, existing mainly in documents and reports by local and international human rights and prisoner solidarity organizations. Their personal stories remain mostly unknown and their humanity hidden, if not erased. Against this longstanding and increasing violence, literature has long had the power to inspire empathy and support. We believe these letters have a strong literary character and quality despite the majority being written by unknown, “ordinary” Egyptians.

J: Why did you name your curational team Collective Antigone? 

CA: Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, appears in the fifth century “Theban Plays” trilogy by the Greek playwright Sophocles and especially of the eponymous tragedy. She defied the orders of her uncle, Creon, newly crowned King of Thebes, and buried her brother Polynice, accused of treason. Antigone’s defiance of the king’s authority in fidelity to her family and her principles has long served as inspiration for those seeking justice within authoritarian systems. Imprisoning a Revolution reveals that there are numerous Antigones in Egypt today. What’s more, adopting a pseudonym protects the team from obvious risks. It also reflects the collaborative nature of this work, which would have been impossible without the dedication of every single person involved in it. 

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

CA: The book is composed of four parts. It begins with an essay by award-winning Egyptian author Ahmed Naji, who narrates his prison experiences to question the still common notion that the main value of prison writing lies in its function as testimony. He argues for the equal value of prison writings as literature. The sometimes tense relationship between literature and testimony, aesthetics and politics, raised by Naji sets the tone of the book. An introductory curational essay follows, which documents the deep relationship between the modern Egyptian state and its carceral system, from the late Ottoman era to the present day.

The third and main body of the book consists of forty-six chapters, each with a short author biography and comprising some one hundred letters, poems, and images of artwork created by prisoners from a wide variety of sources. They include well-known journalists and activists such as Alaa Abd El Fattah, Ahmed Douma, Mahienour el-Massry, and Sarah Hegazi, as well as unknown workers, women as well as men, young and old. These letters do not just denounce the condition of detainees in Egyptian prisons; they document from a very specific point of view the history of the 2011 Revolution and the counter-revolution in Egypt. Said otherwise, they compose a micro-history from below of contemporary Egypt from 2011 until 2023.

Finally, the fourth part of the book comprises an interview that members of Collective Antigone conducted with the famed Kenyan novelist, playwright, and philosopher, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, himself imprisoned in Kenya in 1979 for a year for his political writing. With over half a century as one of the world’s foremost thinkers about the power of language and writing as forms of resistance, Ngugi revisits his experience in prison through the letters in our volume that most moved him. He gifted Imprisoning a Revolution with a message of hope to the imprisoned authors and, through it, to all Egyptians still hoping for a democratic transformation in Egypt.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

CA: The experience of prison today has become even more difficult than in previous eras, reflected in the desperation that is expressed in many of the letters, especially in recounting the routine humiliations, torture, overcrowding, and sickness suffered or witnessed by the writers. Reflecting the immediacy of experience rather than its recollection, the book polyphonically captures history in the making, and does so in a manner building on the increased attention to imprisonment in Egypt and across the region. This volume connects to rather than departs from our previous work. We are a multi-generational collaboration, with members sharing experiences that go back to the Egyptian student movement in the 1970s, feminist activism since the 1980s, the internet and social media generations, and the “Tahrir generation” that led the #Jan25 revolution. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

CA: We have multiple audiences in mind. First, we hope to reach an educated public, policymakers, and journalists. We hope that the power of the writing can shock the conscience and mobilize the public and governments globally to take seriously the ongoing abuses by the Sisi regime, and to use the repression and the often horrific costs of imprisonment for the incarcerated, their families, and Egyptian society as a mirror to consider the similarly, if often more hidden (or at least less discussed) costs of similar carceral regimes in their own countries. Second, we hope to reach the community of Arab, Middle East, and Islamic studies scholars, to provide both a historical introduction on carcerality in Egypt (and through it the broader region) and a collection of primary source texts for research and for pedagogy.

J: What were the main challenges you have met while working on this book?

CA: Like most projects, the hardest part was to calibrate our expectations with what was realistically achievable. As this was conceived as a collective project of solidarity since day one, building the team required reaching out to a broad network of scholars and activists who work in Egypt and have long experience of human rights work and engaged scholarship. As we describe in the Introduction, there is less chance today for most prisoners to communicate safely with family, friends, or even their lawyers than in the past. Beyond that, only a fraction of them have written letters that would be relevant to a public collection such as ours, and even fewer were written in a context that would enable their publication. Even so, we were able to obtain far more letters than could possibly be published, which necessitated the equivalent of assembling a jigsaw puzzle without a picture of what the finished work is supposed to look like. We were quickly overwhelmed by the variety and the number of writings we collected and deciding what to include was made more difficult by the fact that each letter bore the story of an individual and their community. 

We described this broader complex as a “carceralocracy,” a system of global governance that relies on the imprisonment of political dissidents in authoritarian contexts with the indifference or even support of Western liberal democracies. In the book we also argue that this is more than a legacy of the colonial order; it is its continuation in the postcolonial world.

We worked hard to make this collection as inclusive as possible in terms of the backgrounds of the letter writers—age, gender, religious, and/or political affiliation—and the ultimate disposition of their sentence (released, still imprisoned, executed). Yet we still wound up with relatively few letters from several groups, most notably members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Ultras movement, in good measure because their conditions of imprisonment were even more restricted and securitized, or they simply did not tend to write letters in the manner other groups did. Nevertheless, we feel the final collection offers an important and broad window into one of the most important phenomena in contemporary authoritarian politics in Egypt and globally.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

CA: Each member and organization participating in the collective is working on their own individual research and advocacy projects, comprising a broad range of topics including the relationship between art and politics in the Arab world and Africa, human rights in authoritarian contexts, Arabic literature, and feminist studies. But all of us remain involved in various ways in human rights and particularly prisoner-related work, in Egypt and across the region.

We hope that this volume will encourage similar efforts to bring forward the voices of societies suffering from mass political imprisonment. Palestine is an obvious case study, and the ostensibly miraculous fall of the Assad regime will likely encourage memoirs and anthologies of reflections on previously hidden or at least unpublished letters from the over 100,000 Syrians imprisoned under even worse conditions than their Egyptian counterparts. We hope that this volume can inspire and in various ways serve as an example or encouragement for future collections, not just in the global Middle East, but also in countries such as El Salvador or, potentially today, the United States, with large-scale prison complexes. 

And we also feel it is important to move beyond words and offer direct support; thus, all royalties from this volume are being disbursed directly to families of Egyptian political prisoners through a fund established with Amnesty International.

Excerpt from the book (from pages 136 to 38)

Mostafa al-Aasar, a freelancer for regional newspapers including UltraSawt and Al-Araby, was detained in February 2018, and hiss pre-trial detention renewed until Egypt’s Supreme Court Security Prosecution ordered his release on bail on May 7, 2020. He was released on July 18, 2021.

Ramadan Nights in Prison

This is my second Ramadan without friends.

Friends: they are mine and I am theirs. Do I remember them? Forget them?

Remembering is painful and stabs me in my mind, diminishing its ability to keep pivotal moments of my memory intact, even though the moments aren’t in a chronological and logical order—but the mind has its own methods, and it’s impossible to just follow [whatever path] we want.

The blurry moments of memory exhaust me, as if a part of me is being separated from me and I cling to it so that it does not escape. The clear moments destroy me like a punch with an iron fist in the face, but those in between kill me because they remind me of my condition. I am the one who is caught in the middle of two conditions, neither winning nor losing, neither happy nor sad, neither free nor constrained, neither alive nor dead, existing like a reserve player. I am the living embodiment of the irritating state of indecisiveness!

Prison kills us slowly. It empties us of our human content. Every night it sucks yet another drop of our blood, and in the morning it takes the breath from our lungs. It takes a step from our feet every time it prevents us from moving. It takes speech from our tongues in every situation in which we are impotent, unable and powerless to express, complain, or scream. It takes all of this and in return it gives us fear, insomnia, nightmares, rheumatism, osteoarthritis, muscle atrophy, emotional imbalance, slow reaction, calcification of the mind, and scars on the heart whose effects time cannot erase. It takes the rays of light from our eyes and from our vision. It strips us of everything except the dampness and cruelty of [our] prison cells. It strips our minds of memories, the past, ideas, and all previously stored images. The mind becomes an empty box, and the body becomes a corpse without a soul.

Sadness spreads in the mind like cancer, spreading in every cell until it completely forgets what happiness used to mean. Even the laughter that is forcibly stolen from our lips makes me wonder, why laughter in the midst of tragedy? Is laughter evidence of happiness and its logical synonym? Who is the stupid fool who came up with this ridiculous equation? We may laugh because—sorry—we are no longer good at crying.

The crisis in prison is not only that we strip naked in front of ourselves and in front of everyone with ease and appear in that image that we do not hope for ourselves to the point that we hate ourselves, but rather that there is no way to present ourselves in an alternative image that we like, and that there is no way to escape from this disgusting reality. There is no way. It is effective for distracting the mind and diverting it from thinking. Whenever you try to move away and distract yourself by any trivial means available, your eyes collide with walls, bars, and closed doors, throwing you before your distorted reality, which is represented by weakness, helplessness, and lack of destiny.

There is no distraction in prison. This is a fact as certain as the reality of global warming. There is no distraction or escape. There is no way other than confrontation. Confrontation with an enemy we cannot stand and to whom we are not equal breaks us at every moment until we no longer have a healthy atom.

There are few experiences after which a person does not return to what he was: to experience death—for example—in one of his loved ones, or to experience death—in reserve—as a prisoner.

This new person who is born after the end of the ordeal may live eternally estranged from himself, his community, his acquaintances, and his friends. He may face contempt for the self that has been exposed. He may voluntarily choose death as an effective means of salvation from the knives that are tearing him apart, or he may immerse himself emotionally and intellectually in a radical way in every arriving experience without any thought, becoming like a newborn crawling towards life.

What is certain is that he suffers from dullness and hypersensitivity at the same time, becoming a strange, annoying, and difficult person who is not good at human interactions, and ordinary people do not know how to get along with him, so a new desire for isolation and exhausting distance is born in him, a new conflict that tears him apart . . . something like a strange virus. It affects the brain and prevents it from performing its cognitive functions with the required efficiency, something like a fatal error in human programming.

Harmful psychological experiences, like a thread of smoke from burnt cigarette tobacco, may disappear in seconds if the individual is able to blow them away, but their destructive effects nevertheless remain attached to him against his will, just as smoke clings to the lungs, blood, and bronchial tubes, and just as its flavor clings to the mouth to be clearly announced to every incoming stranger. About ulcers in the wall of the soul . . . and the longer the experience lasts, the more the destruction increases . . . so be gentle with us, for we are more fragile than we appear, and perhaps at the same time we are more solid than you think.

To friends I say, “Do you still remember me when you sit together? I don’t want to lose the last seat—the last thing I can hold on to.

December 5, 2019. Previously published in Arabic on the website Atlas of Egyptian Prison. Courtesy of the author.

Sarah Hegazy

Sarah Hegazy was born in 1989 and started blogging in 2012. A queer activist, on May 17, 2017, the International Day against Homophobia, she created a social media event titled “Support Love.” At the beginning of October of that year she was arrested in the “rainbow flag case,” so known because in September 2017 she was captured in a photo raising a rainbow flag during a concert by the popular Lebanese indie rock band Mashrou’ Leila, whose lead singer, Hamed Sinno, is considered the first performer in the Arab world to come out as gay. Sarah was officially charged with “promoting debauchery and joining an illegal organization that threatens public and societal peace.” Mashrou’ Leila was banned from performing in Egypt, and later in their native Lebanon, and broke up in 2022 after years of harassment.

Imprisoned for three months in 2017, in her writings Sarah denounced the torture and sexual harassment she endured in prison, as well as the sense of alienation from her family and discrimination she faced in her community for being a gay woman. After her release, Sarah fled to Canada, uprooted from her family, her community, and her country, which she deeply loved. She never returned, even when her mother died, but remained engaged with events in Egypt, wrestling with the intersections of class struggle and LGBTQ+ issues. Sarah committed suicide in Canada on June 14, 2020. In an Instagram post the day before she died, under a photo of her lying on the grass with a blue sky above and a smile on her face, she wrote, “The sky is sweeter than the earth! And I want the sky, not the earth.”

A Dedication

Hello comrade,

I am grateful to those 

who make no claim to perfection or excessive idealism! 

to those who [sacrificed] to know the truth and are in constant search of it, secretly or publicly 

to those who heroically persist

to those who search for love on their own

to those who live with the bitterness and the sweetness of the world

to those who plant a rose inside their heart—and inside those of others

to those whose hearts were never orphaned

to those whom depression cuddles like a loyal lover 

to those who feel terror when hatred ravages the world

to those who care about rebellion, books, reading, and music 

to those who fell in love with Fairuz and Asmahan

to those who were fondly in love with someone 

to those who find peace in solitude

to those who search for love and beauty in ugliness 

to those who search for peace amid struggle and war 

to those who endured the struggle 

to those who collapsed in the face of the struggle

to the person who loves and hates, and then reconciles with life and death 

Written in Qanater Prison in 2017 and published as part of “Sarah Hegazy’s Diaries in Qanater Prison 2017” on the “Pride for Sarah Hegazi” Facebook page.