Prison nostalgia and the collapse of emancipatory futures: Women‘s writings from the Egyptian prison of al-Qanāṭir al-Ḫayriyya

Abstract

During the 1960s and 1970s, many intellectuals and ordinary citizens in Egypt were imprisoned and detained for political reasons. Many of them wrote about their experiences, creating a corpus of prison memoirs known by the Arabic name of adab al-suğūn (prison literature). These texts reflect the ambivalent position of intellectuals during the Nasser and post-Nasser periods, oscillating between their faith in the state, even when it revealed its repressive nature, and their progressive loss of trust in it. This article focuses on memoirs written by women who were imprisoned in the al-Qanāṭir al-Ḫayriyya prison in 1981. I will first highlight some common themes in women’s prison writing, particularly within Egyptian literature. Then, I will closely examine two memoirs: Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī’s Muḏakkirātī fī siğn al-nisā’ (‘My Memories from Women Prison,’ 1983) and Laṭīfa al-Zayyāt’s Ḥamlat taftīš: awrāq šaḫṣiyya (‘The Search: Personal Papers,’ 1992), pointing at the way these authors use the resources and conventions of the genre of prison literature to deconstruct the rhetorical image of the imprisoned intellectual. Building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope and on recent scholarship regarding the interplay between temporality, post-colonial memory, and trauma, I will demonstrate how the mass arrests of 1981, the emergence of a neo-liberal order in Egypt, and the failure of revolutionary and emancipatory ideals disrupt a linear perception of time. This creates a rupture, leading to what can be described as a ‘post-colonial melancholia’ that leads the women authors toward an idealization of the prison experience.