Huna

A Memoir

De: Abdelrahman ElGendy

A gripping, deeply moving memoir of survival, education, and resistance by a student protestor–turned–political prisoner in post-revolution Egypt.

“I will never be the same after reading Huna.” —Javier Zamora
“A beautifully written portrait of a radical political awakening.” —Hanif Abdurraqib
“The work of a truly liberated writer.” —Fady Joudah

In the summer of 2013, Abdelrahman ElGendy was seventeen years old and a budding student activist in Cairo. Two years after the January 25 revolution, hope for a free Egypt had dissipated; that summer’s military coup, led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, resulted in unprecedented massacres of civilian protestors by the police and military, spurring a wave of further outrage and mass demonstrations. Abdelrahman knew he needed to be a part of it, and his reluctant father, fearing for his son’s safety, accompanied him to a major protest. But before they could so much as leave the car, they were swept up in a brutal police crackdown—and their lives were shattered.

Abdelrahman would spend the next six years as a political prisoner, shuffled, alongside his father, from jail cell, to pre-trial detention center, to The Scorpion, Egypt’s most infamous prison complex. Over the years he should have spent as a college student, he was cast into a struggle to preserve his personhood through excruciating conditions, under the grind of incarceration with no end in sight. As his body bore the worst of prison, he turned to the only refuge left to him: the mind. He not only earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering while imprisoned, but also taught other prisoners English and literary Arabic, read and wrote voraciously, and cultivated a sense of community and solidarity with all those who have suffered at the hands of authoritarianism.

In his remarkable debut, Abdelrahman refuses the comfort of easy uplift. In the words of the Arab world’s most enduring protest song, “Sawfa Nabqa Huna”—We will remain here—Abdelrahman finds not a promise of hope, but a provocation: When hope itself becomes perilous, what else can sustain us? Huna is a testament to the radical act of choosing to remain when erased, and of what endures, perhaps more faithfully, beyond hope.