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New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011

By Anne-Marie McManus

This text is the beginning of the introductionary article by Anne-Marie McManus for the CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture Journal, Vol 25, No 1. (2023). It is part of the special issue “Comparative Approaches to Prison Literatures in the MENA and its Diasporas”, edited by Anne-Marie McManus and Brahim El Guabli. Read the full article here.

In the past fifteen years, the mass relocation of prison survivors, families of the disappeared, activists, and cultural actors from MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) countries to Europe and North America has placed carceral experience at the heart of contemporary debates and cultural work. The hubs of the new MENA diasporas are in western Europe, but the numerous MENA writers, activists, artists, and former prisoners who are producing work on prison today are to be found globally, from the Gulf and Turkey to North America. Their literary, cultural, and theoretical works and practices are marked by razor-sharp political consciousness; multilingualism; diversities in positionality, media choice, and political views; and savvy uses of digital media that were forged during the uprisings of 2010-2011. This emerging body of work and activism on prison in the MENA is inextricably tied to ongoing struggles for justice for the detained, the tortured, and the disappeared.

In prison memoirs and archived testimonials, in art galleries and on social media pages, prison survivors and the families of the disappeared are advocating for accountability and knowledge of their loved ones’ fates. Syria’s disappeared have been at the forefront of these campaigns, and in recent years Europe has hosted high-profile uses of universal jurisdiction as a legal framework to prosecute Syrian carceral perpetrators and events in the name of victims who live in diaspora. In 2022, for example, Germany’s Koblenz court convicted two Syrian regime officials for crimes against humanity, and in late 2023 Canada and the Netherlands initiated proceedings with the International Court of Justice against the Syrian state to halt all acts of torture in its carceral system.[1] Such demands for justice across the MENA have brought the topic of prison, as well as its significant place in literary and cultural work, into world literary circuits, media awareness, and political discussion in new ways. In turn, the present special issue, produced between 2022 and 2024, aims to open conceptual pathways to address the shifting constellations of MENA prison writing today.

Photo by Zeina G Halabi.

A Radical Tradition

Since the uprisings of 2010-2011, carceral violence – including imprisonment, torture, forced disappearance, and their threats – has been a core force in shaping the geographies, political trajectories, and lives of activists, writers, journalists, and artists. Uncounted individuals have fled their home nations to avoid imprisonment. For many displaced MENA activists of the 2011 moment and those who are politically active in diaspora, any hope of return is overshadowed by fears of being taken for questioning by mukhabarat (state security), perhaps at the airport or at home, and thereafter disappearing into a menacing carceral archipelago. These practices of state intimidation began decades before 2011. However, the sheer prominence of carceral violence as a topic of advocacy, theorization,and creative practice for new generations of MENA writers and activists is a direct reflection of how pervasively states have used incarceration and torture to quell popular uprisings and reinstate control over their populations in the past decade and a half.

Put otherwise, the topic and cause of imprisonment critically preoccupy MENA activists, writers, artists, and thinkers whose political consciousness was forged in the 2010-2011 uprisings and their violent state repression. Imprisonment and revolution, as multiple contributions to the present special issue explore, are now historically and imaginatively entangled. In this way, the new literary and political practices of the contemporary MENA and its diasporas take their place alongside radical prison traditions from across the world, offering not only documentation (e.g., of human rights violations, of individualand collective survival and resilience inside carceral institutions) but also acting a resource for emancipatory thought (Rodriguez). Contributors to the present special issue trace continuities and ruptures across prison writing, narrative, activism, and cultural production before and after 2011. With views from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Morocco, and the new diasporas, the essays in this issue also conceptualize MENA prison literatures across the scales of nation, region, and world.

Several contributions to this special issue also break down traditional barriers around scholarship on prison literature. As described below, authors adopt interdisciplinary perspectives that combine literary views with, for example, digital media, ethnography, and oral history. An essay by Basit Iqbal and WalaaQuisay uses ethnographic methods to bring core concerns in prison literary analysis into dialogue with Muslim prison narratives. Their contribution marks a rare and much-needed perspective that looks across the Islamic/secular divide that structures prison literary studies, a field traditionally dominatedby voices from the MENA’s postcolonial, secular left.[2] As they break this new ground, Iqbal and Quisay joins other contributions in recalling that the worldly, canonical genres of prison literature are the most prominent – but far from the only – forms and media in which expressions on carcerality circulate, inviting literary scholars to develop new tools to conceptualize the complex “ecologies” of MENA prison literature (Beecroft 2015). Iqbal and Quisay’s analysis takes care, moreover, not to exceptionalize Muslim prison narratives against a purportedly secular literary tradition, echoing influential recent arguments that the very category of the literary in Arabic took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in complex dialogue with Islamic narrative practices and traditions (Allen; el Shakry; Sacks).

Additionally, this special issue queries a long-held convention wherein former prisoners produce testimonials from which academics subsequently theorize prison literature, memory, resistance, and so on. In original writing, Jaber Baker puts forward a theory of vibrant carcerality in Syria that draws on his perspectives as a former political prisoner and academic researcher from Syria who is currently based in France. Such shifts in the contours of knowledge production on prison in the MENA reflect theurgency of the present, as struggles for justice continue and as MENA diasporas bring academia and themakers of MENA prison writing into unprecedented proximities. Politically engaged and conceptually dynamic, the multiple forms of expression on MENA carcerality in circulation today overspill the traditional confines of prison literature, which itself is no longer a static object of scholarly research. Asanglophone scholarship is galvanized by protest movements for abolition and the end of mass incarceration ‘at home,’ emancipatory thought on and from prison in the MENA and its new diasporas takes on robust new relevance as a global interlocutor and ally.

Pre- and Post-2011

The rupture of the post-2011 period is historically distinct, with writing and expression on MENA prisons shaped by lived dynamics of revolutions, displacements, and diaspora. Yet this evolving body of literary works and political thought also partakes in an older, postcolonial, and regional tradition of prison literature that contests techniques of state violence. As early as the 1950s, while many MENA anti-colonial struggles were still under way, incarceration served as an effective tool for silencing and removing domestic opponents, including former allies in independence struggles, from public life. In the 1960s, MENA intellectuals, activists, and authors began to flee to Europe and other world locations to escape the prison regimes of newly independent home nations. As postcolonial MENA nation states consolidated their rule, many would develop extensive security apparatuses to silence and disappear political dissidents (or those perceived to be such). Popular outrage at those security regimes, which continued to operate with impunity despite global campaigns for accountability, helped to drive people’s demands for dignity in the peaceful uprisings of 2010-2011. Yet those demands went largely unheard.

Today, as many individuals still struggle to address the traumas of the post-2011 era, state mobilizations of carceral violence continue on both regional and world scales. During the late stages of this special issue, the Israeli state used indefinite and incommunicado imprisonment, torture, and their threats as tools of repression against Palestinians during its war on Gaza following Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023 (Amnesty International). In April 2024, the leading Palestinian thinker Walid Daqqa (also Daka, Daqqah) passed away from cancer in detention, bringing to an end his 38-year incarceration in the Israeli prison system. Daqqa’s influential political writings are the subject of two essays in this special issue, which collectively emphasize the vital and ongoing relevance of the MENA’s radical prison tradition for anti-colonial and emancipatory thought.

Photo by Georges Khalil, London 2024.

Expanding the Borders of Prison Literature

Since the 1970s, MENA prison literature has emerged as a critical site for the documentation and denunciation of postcolonial state authoritarianism. While many texts were produced by the survivors of prison ordeals, carcerality and its terrors were also vital topics for writers who had never entered a prison. Pioneered by members of the secular left, the corpus of writing known as “prison literature (adab al-sujun)” primarily took the form of memoirs, novels, and poetry. Authors who had survived prison have debated whether their works could properly be classed as adab al-sujun, often balking at the notion that this genre, steeped in documentary concerns, was not ‘real’ literature (Taleghani). Despite these debates, however, prison literature in Arabic is now an established genre on both regional and world scales.

Today, in keeping with the broader democratization of cultural production in 2011, and supported by social media technologies, a new diversity is evident in the media of expression around carcerality. A host of digital forms are now available to those who have survived prison and/or to those who wish to create cultural and social commentaries on prison and forced disappearance in the MENA region. These forms offer possibilities for expression beyond the primacy of the printed word and its authorial voice. Podcasts, YouTube interviews and series, short films, radio plays, and blogs stand alongside uses of Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and other social media platforms. These latter serve to inform wider publics of activism for justice and accountability, giving new digital lives to in-person events (e.g., vigils for the disappeared; speeches made to international organizations) and material works like art exhibitions and installations. They also serve as instant publishing platforms that allow cultural actors, activists, and collectives to address wider audiences, more quickly, and even in multiple languages. As scholarship begins to recognize this widening in the established genres of prison literature, it can celebrate the inclusion of voices, genders, modes of expression, faith commitments, and class positionalities that have previously been marginalized in academic accounts of MENA prison memory. However, any celebration of this plurality should always be tempered by an awareness that the sheer prominence of expression on prisons today indicates how generalized carceral violence became – notably in Egypt and Syria – after 2011.

The gold standard of prison literature, the novelistic memoir, has not been replaced by these emergent digital practices: it interacts with them. Facebook pages dedicated to works of prison literature now act as social media hubs for commentary and information-sharing on the disappeared (see also El Guabli, this issue). Digital works that first appear as YouTube testimonials might subsequently be published as printed works (McManus, this issue). Several contributors to this special issue reflect on these dynamics from different sites and disciplinary perspectives. As a whole, we offer these inquiries as initial gestures, encouraging new explorations across world literature and translational practices; embodied gesture and oral narrative practices; digital media, traditional print technologies, and even Morse Code.

Several analytical vocabularies aim to capture these dynamics. Brahim El Guabli’s “multimedia prison literature” (MPL) explores the possibilities for rapid advocacy and empathic mobilization that are offered by new combinations of text, sound, image, and multilingualism in digital practices today. With the new primacy of the digital, which communicates the embodied and aural dimensions of speech on carcerality, scholars are also revisiting literature’s relationship to voice and oral narrative. “Prison narrative,” a term that appears in my own and Quisay and Iqbal’s contributions to the issue, pursues these reflections through literary (in my own essay) and ethnographic (in Quisay and Iqbal’s essay) lenses. Each essay reframes, in differing ways, published prison texts within the dynamic networks of spoken practice that exist both inside and outside carceral spaces. Through these approaches, prison literature is drawn (back) into relationship with dream interpretation (see also Baker, this issue), oral testimonial, prayer and recitation, and the telling of prison stories among current and former prisoners.

Keep reading here.


Notes

[1] Shortly before this issue went to press, the Assad regime in Syria fell and, in emotional scenes broadcast on social media, prisons across Syria were opened. The essays produced for this special issue date from the last years of that regime, and we have chosen to publish them as such.

[2] While the prison literary corpus of the 1970s and 1980s gave central voice to the experiences of the secular left, many MENA states also used incarceration to suppress dissent from their Islamic opponents. Yet literary scholarship in English has tended to neglect writings by pious former prisoners, even when they are bestsellers (on this neglect in Egyptian and Turkish prison literatures, see Syzska; on cultural production by Islamist political prisoners in Morocco, see Slyomovics 168-173).


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About the Author

Anne-Marie McManus heads the ERC-funded project SYRASP (“The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria”) at Berlin’s Forum Transregionale Studien. She is the author of Arab Nationalism, Decolonization and the Making of a Transregional Literature (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and editor and co-writer of a book on the sieges in Syria, Design of Necessity (coculture and Impunity Watch, 2025). Her articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, The Journal of World Literature, and Books and Ideas, among others. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and NYU Abu Dhabi. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Email: mcan(at)trafo-berlin.de.


Citation: Anne-Marie McManus, New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 20.02.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/55370


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (February 20, 2025). New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved March 25, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13cfb


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