In scorching heat, inside a mouldy blue rectangle, a prison transport van, my body was on its way to another prison after the judge announced my sentence: five years in prison, five years under surveillance, and a fine estimated at around twelve thousand dollars.
Through a small wire-mesh window, I saw streets, trees, houses, restaurants, cafés, and the faces of other prisoners. Prisoners of hunger, death, and power. I heard their conversations, their laughter, their snoring.
As for me, a prisoner of conscience, of hunger, of a fragmented body, I saw them.
Five years of prison for my body. Deprivation of everything, movement, and freedom. Why?
This is the price of politics in my country.
Whom do I consult, complain to, scream to, or question?
God.
I do not think there is anyone else to complain to. He exists everywhere, in the sky specifically; nothing is like Him. I understood that when I was young.
I spoke to Him.
And when I began speaking, I felt nothing.
So I fell silent.
Then, sobbing, I cried.
Now…
I searched my memory carefully…
It was the first time my crying had ever poured out honestly.
A young prisoner interrupted my tears.
Today, every feature of his face has disappeared from my memory. The transport van picked him up as we travelled from one police station to Port Said Prison, and he accompanied me there.
On the way, I asked him:
“Political or criminal?”
“Both,” he answered, then continued. “Thank God, I was sentenced to death in the Port Said Stadium case.”
It was the incident in which seventy-two people from Al Ahly’s supporters were killed. He also explained, smiling with hope, that the Court of Cassation had overturned his sentence and that he was being tried again.
I told him, almost as though competing with him over our share of injustice, that I had just been sentenced myself, very freshly sentenced.
“It’s nothing. Time will pass and you’ll get out, my friend.”
He said it and smiled.
I smiled too, as though we were trying to endure time.
But what if the Court of Cassation had not overturned his sentence?
I still see his body hanging.
His feet in the air.
The rope around his neck.
His face was black.
He died.
Perhaps he ascended to God, and their bodies fused together.
I don’t know.
Tomorrow, before we finish our glasses of arak in Beirut, I will ask my friend. He is an expert in the embodiments of theology.
As for me, I will tell him about ethics and love.
But I am no expert.
The van stopped at the prison gate.
We got out, and as is customary with the prison “welcome,” the initiation ritual for a new prisoner, built on beating and humiliation to break his will from the very first moment, I entered after being stripped, beaten, cursed, and humiliated.
I could no longer see the young man.
He disappeared completely.
As though I had imagined him.
A single month was how long I was transferred from one prison to another, a place rank with rot, so I could sit my second-year university exams.
Eight subjects were waiting for me. I had summaries prepared by two loyal friends, faithful to the bread and salt we had shared.
I studied the notes carefully, hoping to scrape through with passing marks and put a smile on my mother’s face, my mother, always beloved.
The following morning, an exam paper lay in front of me.
Now, I cannot remember which subject it was.
Perhaps anatomy, or something involving bones and intestines.
I studied radiology.
With a smile trying to look suspicious and mysterious, the officer told the invigilator:
“Let him copy the answers. In the cell he can’t study properly.”
Then he took on the character of a church father and continued, as though beginning a sermon:
“He’s a smart young man. He answers the questions. He won’t cheat.”
The officer was trying to help me cheat.
The invigilator was preventing me from cheating.
The officer was trying to give me a little justice.
The invigilator thought he was giving me a little justice too.
Honestly, I was not paying much attention to either of them.
My body was trying to hold in my shit.
I felt it beginning to slip through my anus.
I asked the invigilator to tell the officer that my intestines were hurting badly, which meant I needed to shit.
He asked him.
He allowed it.
I entered the bathroom in the officer’s office and found a Western-style toilet in front of me. Before I had even properly settled onto the seat, my waste was already pouring into the sewer below.
In my two years of imprisonment, this was the only time I took a shit sitting on a proper toilet rather than squatting on the floor.
For five minutes, I recovered my humanity.
Five minutes.
That was all.
For two years I was less than an animal.
As for the rest of my life, I don’t know.
Even while writing these lines, and afterwards, I try to be human.
I will fail.
I am not alone.
All the damned are like this.
After death, when our bodies hide, decompose, and vanish beneath the earth, perhaps our humanity becomes complete.
Our souls too.
Perhaps.
The morning after the exam, inside the cell, a huge prisoner with a long beard called Sheikh Youssef was shouting:
“Who put the piss bag in the tomato bag?”
He clapped his hands, asked God’s forgiveness, and repeated in disgust:
“People, please, pay attention. Don’t put your waste in the food we’re going to eat.”
His shouting woke me.
I heard the same irritated conversations about the shit again and again.
I was the one they were talking about, a new body inside a narrow, rotting cell.
I had got confused.
My mind wandered.
Instead of putting my bag of urine with the waste bags, I had put it in the tomato bag.
Trying to look calm, he asked:
“You?”
“No, Sheikh. Of course not. It wasn’t me.”
I lied.
Lying is not a sin in prison.
That is what I claim.
And even if it were a sin, so what?
Then I have one sin inside prison and other sins outside it.
In this prison, prisoners relieve themselves into bags.
Urine, always.
Sometimes shit.
Sometimes even that is difficult.
The prisoners in the cell would get so irritated when someone decided to shit in a bag that screaming fights would break out.
It would be a truly rotten night.
The smell of shit when it sits there is suffocating, unbearably foul.
The cell was extremely small. Historically, it had housed a single horse during the British occupation of the city, or so history says.
As I remember it, it measured two metres by three.
It contained five beds.
Eight prisoners lived in it.
Three slept on the floor.
Eight bodies equal one horse.
Eight bodies divided among the beds and the floor beneath them.
Every day we had forty minutes.
More than forty prisoners came out to use only eight bathrooms.
We showered.
Washed our clothes.
Washed our backsides after emptying them, assuming anything came out in the first place.
God help the man whose intestines, especially his anus, decided to become stubborn about releasing shit.
He would spend the whole day twisting in pain, eventually forced to bag his waste.
Fights would erupt.
Rot would spread.
Politics and its ideologies would be cursed.
Religions and their sects.
Backsides and their smells…
About a week after I arrived in this prison, I was standing outside the cell, rot creeping into my nose, looking at bodies whose differences had been erased.
From below, I caught sight of his face on the second floor, the floor reserved for criminal prisoners.
He stood there absent-mindedly, as though his thoughts and childhood memories were floating away with his cigarette smoke.
I asked myself, trying to remember the features of his face:
Is that him?
And who knows what brought him here?
“Omar… Omar… come here.”
I called to him.
Omar was a friend of every cell.
Across three different prisons, he was imprisoned with me. He was always being moved from one prison to another, and fate kept bringing me to him, or him to me.
Omar was a young man with a pure heart, a rough voice, rough hair, and a pale face…
Forgive the description.
We were numbers without features.
He was the prison’s artist.
He carved names and different shapes into bars of soap.
For nothing in return, he placed happiness in the hearts of those he gave them to.
He made names and words for prisoners to send to the people they loved outside.
Omar was the director of other people’s love stories, romances that reached the tangled threads of love that prison tried to tear apart.
And succeeded.
Time succeeded too.
Cruelty succeeded too.
Unfortunately.
Omar went to the criminal nobatshi, the prisoner appointed by the authorities to supervise us inside the ward.
He repeated my question to him.
He came back, nodded, and said:
“Yes. That’s him.”
Then I began to remember.
Yes.
It was him.
He had entered prison on two charges, murder and weapons possession.
He killed a young man in broad daylight in the middle of the city, then ran away, failed to escape, and was imprisoned.
Now he was waiting for life to sentence him to death.
His name was Osama.
“Osama,” Omar repeated, then said my family name.
“Is he related to you?”
Omar laughed as he asked.
He was.
His father was my father’s cousin.
When I was a teenager, I knew him from a distance.
From up close, I met him only in prison.
I was political.
He was criminal.
No difference.
Our bodies were under the eye of authority.
He was sentenced to death.
Perhaps they hanged him.
Now, I don’t know.
Another time, another day, we were standing there during a morning that passed like a thousand years.
A day that did not belong to time.
Inside this cursed prison.
I asked him:
“Who’s that?”
“That’s the Devil. The Devil went to prison because he raped his sister, then killed her. That’s what they say.”
That was his answer.
The Devil was serving twenty-five years on charges of “rape and murder”.
Everyone around him rejected him.
He was very ugly.
Looking at him made me nauseous, personally, back when I was still capable of believing in right and wrong.
In prison, there is no right and wrong.
Later, I often saw him standing in the middle of the yard collecting bags of shit, urine, and leftover food, carrying them out to large bins.
He always wore blue suspenders.
His face was wrinkled and dark.
What remained of his teeth was yellow.
His nose was large.
The redness around his eyelids flaked with dried blood.
His ears were small and folded sideways.
His hair was coarse and short.
He was very ugly.
That was how he was made.
That was how he lived.
That was how he dies.
Perhaps by now he is dead.
If I had been in his place, in the place of this Devil, I would have behaved better.
I do not mean the rape or gathering the bags.
I mean when they beat him.
Being struck with a stick by a prisoner like me was lighter than the severe beating delivered by authority.
Lighter, but more humiliating.
Authority has the right to beat.
The musayyar, the head prisoner, is appointed by authority. Authority gave him the stick.
So he is a smaller authority.
Here, the scale by which the Devil’s humiliation is measured becomes confusing.
The authorities beat him often.
He hid the fact that he was sad.
And he was dead.
There were different stories about why we called him the Devil.
They say he had been called that since childhood.
Imagine that the moment your hearing begins to work, you learn that you are the Devil.
You were created to be humiliated.
Insulted.
Stepped on.
Hated.
Then you hate yourself.
You think of killing whoever invented the mirror, only to discover that he is already dead, so you follow him.
The Devil is an ugly number.
Very ugly.
In prison, I lived beside people of different beliefs and various takfiri ideas.
Abu Turab held some of them.
That was his name.
He was a man in his sixties from North Sinai.
His white hair was long and wild.
His body was thin and restless.
There was something wrong in his mind.
They said it was the result of torture.
That makes perfect sense.
He was a takfiri.
Some prisoners made fun of him, Omar especially.
Abu Turab would call out to the guard:
“You taghut! You unbeliever! Guard, you taghut!”
Then, when we walked for the few minutes allowed during exercise, he would look at Omar:
“You unbeliever. Apostate… grow your beard. Unbeliever.”
That was how he addressed him, irritated because Omar refused to grow his beard.
Omar would laugh at him.
Their argument would continue, laughter and unbelief.
Once again, the cell piled our bodies together.
Hours later, evening covered us while shit, as usual, remained jammed at the edges of our anuses.
Nothing new.
We sat together discussing the reason for the shouting during visiting hours that day.
We receive visitors inside a cage.
A cage.
Exactly like animals.
One of us thought perhaps the prisoner had kissed his wife, or touched her waist intimately, or done something else sexually affectionate.
But the man standing beside him said the wife had been crying.
The reason, she had told her husband, was that one of the search officers had “taken an interest in her beauty”.
He began flirting with her until he reached the point of rubbing his hand against her thigh.
He harassed her.
She realised what he was doing and moved away.
He overturned her food onto the ground.
She gathered it back up and remained there crying.
On the floor.
Because she cried, her husband was thrown into solitary punishment.
She does not know that bodies have no rights here.
She does not see him running.
Squatting.
Putting his shit into a bag.
She does not see him as a number, castrated, annihilated, stripped bare.
She does not see him being treated like an animal.
Less than a domesticated animal.
Omar did not care about our conversation.
He was playing with the cockroaches filling the cell.
He saved me from them after giving me his bed and sleeping on the floor himself.
Omar was a companion to cockroaches.
At first, I was afraid of them.
Then my fear lessened after I watched Omar play with them.
He would pick them up and turn them onto their backs.
He called the small black ones “French cockroaches”.
From time to time, a few pale cockroaches appeared.
He said those were the Germans.
Another world war.
We watched it.
After seeing prisoners and cockroaches, I learned that cockroaches, too, come in ranks.
When the news came, I nearly died of happiness.
The news of my transfer.
When I heard it, I embraced them intimately, sorry to leave them in this earthly hell as I moved from one prison to another, one with more freedom.
Yes.
Freedom.
It was still a prison, but not like this one.
I would return to a prison I knew.
I did not love it, but I did not hate it as much as this one.
At least it had a bathroom.
Once again, I would no longer have to piss into a bag.
One prison, compared with another prison, is freedom.
Freedom has degrees.
Prison has depths.
Life itself has degrees and depths.
That is what the prisoner-philosophers say.
I left the large cage in which authority had placed us, animals without visitors, and climbed into the prison transport van.
Crowding.
Suffocation.
Noise.
Rot.
Things and bodies packed together, filthy.
Everything stupid and foul.
Even our souls had no value.
Under the fiercest heat of the sun, three hours passed before the van stopped.
Its wire-covered windows trapped the breath.
Molten fire.
Sweat glued to our skin.
For fifteen minutes, more than thirty prisoners and I were crammed into a blue van, black inside and out.
It had once been blue, before dust turned it dark.
The whistle of iron called us.
The door opened.
We got out.
Our hands were freed from the handcuffs.
We were told:
“Line up.”
At the command, we moved into the line they had packed us into.
They cursed my mother.
They cursed the mothers of the men beside me.
No one objected to our mothers being attacked with the filthiest sexual insults that can be hurled at women, though no one, neither the men doing the cursing nor us, knew where our mothers were or with whom.
That was not the point.
The point was humiliation.
Exposure.
Violation.
The collar of my prison uniform was short.
The palm of the smallest guard was wider than the back of the bravest man’s neck among us.
And the truth is, there was no brave man among us.
Terror invaded our hearts.
It appeared in the trembling of our bodies.
Violation.
Humiliation.
Stripping.
Beating.
And other details.
Like this.
I had not stood this way since the fifth grade, perhaps the fourth.
It makes little difference.
My face against the wall.
My arms stretched straight upward.
Do not turn around.
Feet fixed.
Guilty.
Silenced.
I began removing my clothes simply because I had heard the order.
I cursed my ears.
Here, all the “no”s disappeared.
The wishes multiplied.
So did the insults.
We began to turn around.
We saw one another naked except for the small piece of underwear covering the equipment of our masculinity.
As we will be before God, among all people, on the Day of Resurrection.
So God says.
I do not like being naked in front of people.
But these were not people.
They were God and authority.
And we were slaves.
Prisoners.
The same thing.
Slow down.
Easy.
Who is God?
Absolute authority.
What is prison?
Authority more absolute than absolute authority.
Then there is no shame in our bodies being exposed before God and authority.
They are the owners of the body.
Every few moments I turned around to see what was happening behind me, or perhaps to remind the man cursing us to insult my mother again if he had forgotten.
Then my eyes landed on the body of a prisoner whose hands and feet had been amputated.
Yet he was remarkably skilled in a scene made of half a body.
Using only his mouth, he managed to grip his bag.
He crawled on what remained of his body, rolling and hurrying towards the man searching him.
They treated him brutally.
Beat him.
Insulted him.
They wondered:
How do you imprison someone with an incomplete body?
He challenged their expertise in controlling bodies.
That was how the guard saw him.
“A failed prisoner.”
“Useless.”
Even “half a prisoner” in the eyes of an authority that measures the completeness of a human being by the intactness of his body.
But who can challenge authority inside prison except a madman?
And who defends madness in our time?
No one.
As for me, my body complete, lost and frightened, my ears rang.
One of the guards, the informers, meaning the search officers, called us using another degrading insult against our mothers.
Then he said:
“Anyone who hears the first two names of his full name finishes the rest himself, then takes his bag and goes to the search officer.”
At that moment, my level of concentration matched what it had been during my secondary-school final exam.
Physics, specifically.
I successfully answered the rest of my name.
As for my physics exam result, there is no need to mention it.
Had I not failed the science subjects, I would not have entered the radiology institute.
Perhaps I would not have been imprisoned either.
Perhaps I would not have written any of this.
Another fate might have caught me.
Another boredom.
Another absurdity.
Another meaning.
Pharmacy.
Science.
Fine arts.
Another prison.
Or a psychiatric hospital, perhaps.
When I was in Paris, alone, I thought about staying there.
For a while.
I see.
I see.
Everything.
As it really is.
I see the human being as he really is.
Very weak…
That is how I see it.
Now…
Again…
My body.
After they stripped it and searched it thoroughly, they took it from me.
Or they took me from it.
I don’t know.
All I know is that I, or it, returned to the same cell, in a prison I know well.
But it does not know me.
It forgot me because I never wrote on its walls.
I did not forget it because it carved itself into my body.
I think.
