April 21, 2022 49tranced by their own myth and “lose the
battle for narrative to a poisonous po-
larization between a rabidly militarized
pseudo- secular state and a viciously
sectarian- paranoid form of Islamism.”
Alaa always connected events in
Egypt to wider struggles for political
and economic liberation, from Pales-
tine to the United States. “We have
been defeated, and meaning has been
defeated with us,” he wrote in 2017.And just as we were—in every
step—affected by the world and
affecting it, so was our defeat both
a symptom and a cause of a wider
war on meaning, a war on the crime
of people searching for a supra-
national public sphere where they
might find intimacy, exchange,
communication, even quarrels, that
allow a common understanding of
reality, and multiple dreams of al-
ternative worlds.He was released in March 2019 but
required to spend twelve hours a night
in a police station, according to the
state’s draconian interpretation of his
five- year parole. He found handing
himself over to the authorities every
evening excruciating. He was also dis-
oriented by the changes that had taken
place in and around him. “I get lost
in the streets,” he said in an interview
with the independent news site Mada
Masr. “I get confused when I’m asked
to do two things at once.” He was mys-
tified by the fact that “people speak in
emojis and sounds—ha ha ho ho—not
text.” He was skeptical of resistance
discourse—“The Western Left has
spent twenty years cheapening the
term. Anything any marginalized per-
son does is called resistance”—and felt
that social media had led to a noxious
embrace of absurdity and a regression
in the ability to discuss complex ideas.In September 2019, after a building
contractor with close connections to
the Sisi regime published videos detail-
ing corruption and calling for protests,
the authorities conducted a new round
of mass arrests. Alaa spent two years in
preventive detention—a widely abused
legal provision that allows people to be
held in jail before charges have been
filed. When Covid- 19 swept through
Egyptian prisons, the authorities reacted
with denial and further restrictions. Alaa
was deprived of books, exercise, and—
for long stretches—contact with his fam-
ily. He used his court appearances as a
means to communicate with the outside
world, making impromptu speeches his
lawyers reconstructed from memory af-
terward. “Practically, I am a captive, not
a defendant,” he told the court.My situation has become absurd
even beyond a novelist’s imagina-
tion.... The Prosecution has not
confronted me with details of the
investigation, or any evidence, or
witness testimonies, or even ex-
planatory details of the charges
against me.Human rights groups estimate that
since the coup the Sisi regime has de-
tained 60,000 political prisoners—so
many that it has had to build a network
of secret prisons, where torture is en-
demic. One of the few organizations
that has monitored the number of de-
tainees and prisons in Egypt, the ArabNetwork for Human Rights Informa-
tion, announced on January 11 that it
was closing because of unsustainable
levels of harassment from the state.
Most political prisoners are accused by
the authorities of being members of the
Muslim Brotherhood. But all of Egypt’s
most prominent secular and liberal ac-
tivists have faced prosecution, impris-
onment, abuse, surveillance, or exile.
In the face of escalating repression,
Alaa and his family have remained re-
markably vocal and have paid a steep
price for it. His father, Ahmed Seif
el- Islam, was a Communist who was
jailed and tortured in the 1980s and
then became a widely admired human
rights lawyer. Alaa was in prison at
the time of his father’s death. (He was
briefly allowed out the next month to
deliver a eulogy included in this book.)
He was also behind bars when his son,
Khaled, was born. His mother, Laila
Soueif, a mathematics professor, and
his younger sisters, Mona and Sanaa,
have been indefatigable advocates for
him and the rights of other prisoners.
Two years ago, while camped outside
the prison doors, they were attacked by
female thugs who beat them and stole
their belongings as the prison guards
looked on. When Sanaa Seif went to
report the attack to the public prose-
cutor, she was snatched off the street
and forced into a van. She resurfaced
to face charges of “disseminating false
news,” “inciting terrorism,” and “mis-
using social media” and was sentenced
to eighteen months in jail.
On December 21, 2021, Alaa was
sentenced to another five years in
prison. His codefendants—the blog-
ger Mohamed “Oxygen” Ibrahim and
the lawyer Mohamed el- Baqer, who
had been Alaa’s defense lawyer until
he was arrested—were sentenced to
four years. The trial took place in an
emergency state security misdemean-
ors court, in which there is no possi-
bility for appeal; the case was referred
there just days before President Sisi an-
nounced that he was lifting emergency
law, having instituted so many other ju-
dicial and extrajudicial forms of repres-
sion that he was able to do without it.
The verdict was delivered to a few fam-
ily members and lawyers who had to
insist on being allowed into an empty,
guarded courtroom. Neither the judge
nor the defendants were present. De-
fense lawyers had not been allowed to
see the case file, to meet with their cli-
ents, or to mount a defense. The charge
of “disseminating false news” appears
to have been based on Alaa retweeting
news of the death of a prisoner.
Just a few months before, in Septem-
ber, Sisi—who has denied that there are
any political prisoners in Egypt—pre-
sided over the launch of Egypt’s National
Human Rights Strategy. In his speech
he claimed that Egypt respects precisely
the rights—“physical safety, personal
freedom, participation in political life,
freedom of expression and formation
of non- governmental organizations”—
that his regime has eviscerated. He also
announced the construction of the first
in a series of large “American- style”
prisons. They will have modern ameni-
ties, he explained, and detainees won’t
even need to leave for court appear-
ances, because judges will be working
on site. In January the US government
withheld from Egypt $130 million in aid
because of its dismal human rights re-
cord, while simultaneously authorizing
more than $2 billion in arms sales.You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is
an invaluable record of events in Egypt
in the past decade, of the evolution of
a leftist, humanist, internationalist
thinker, and of the efforts of a remark-
able person not to come undone in the
face of overwhelming injustice. In a
short essay entitled “Five Metaphors
on Healing” (written during one of
the nights he spent on parole inside a
police station), Alaa quotes Schopen-
hauer, Nietzsche, James Baldwin,
Lenin, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques
Derrida to visualize the healing pro-
cess as a rebirth, an amputation, a form
of recycling, a haunting, and finally, in-
spired by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg
Manifesto, a regeneration:If we are to be treated like animals
with no agency, so be it. But weshall bypass cattle and livestock,
ignore pets and domesticates. We
shall look to the lizards, starfish
and earthworms—those beings
that can regenerate after any in-
jury, no matter how grave. We shall
accept that regenerated organs may
not be identical to what was lost.
They could appear to be mutilated,
but look closer and you will see the
beauty in monstrosity, for only the
monstrous can hold both the his-
tory of dreams and hopes, and the
reality of defeat and pain together.
The monstrous need not forget
their old injuries in order to lose
their fear of acquiring new ones.This sad, hopeful, poetic vision of
survival also reverberates through The
Book of Sleep by Haytham El War-
dany, an Egyptian writer who now lives
in Berlin. Written in 2017 and beauti-
fully translated into English by Robin
Moger last year, it is a collection of
essays, stories, and prose poems—all
of them very short, full of thought and
feeling that has crystalized into ex-
traordinary shapes.
El Wardany presents sleep as a state
where we can find shelter, escape,
consolation, and freedom. “By night,
another, quieter force is at work. It
spreads its palms over the things day
made and liberates them from their
destinies,” he writes. “Sleep does not
happen inside us or outside us. It hap-
pens when everything comes together.”
Entering sleep is both a lonely and a
collective experience, taking us into
“a withdrawal which flows through the
heart of the world.”Those who stay up late, exploring
sleep’s frontier, shrug off the daytime
imperatives of labor and productivity.
They wander and squander, making
the nighttime city into “a vast pyre, a
fire in which everyone competes to de-
stroy anything they can lay their hands
on—their ideas, their desires, their
disaffection, their heart’s blood—then
sit contented among the thick smoke
rising.” Sleepers meanwhile are freed
from the weight of individuality itself.
The abandonment of sleep puts us into
a state of sympathy and equality with
the objects and creatures around us:
“We are returned to nature: its indif-
ference and indifference to value.”
Sleep is not just a suspension, a lack
of consciousness, but a different, nec-
essary, vivid state. In it we dream, we
melt, we grow, we heal, we change.
The self discards itself, then finds itself
again. Sleep is a concession of failure,
a giving up—but a healthy one. It con-
tains hope, because when we drift off
we trust that we will wake, and “every
waking is an attempt, however modest,
at a new day.”
There are only a few references to the
events of the Arab Spring in the book,
and yet the question of how to move
past the elation and despair of that time
is the affecting undertow of the entire
text. In one essay El Wardany writes
about protesters occupying a space.
This radical act “can only be fully real-
ized by a second act of extreme, almost
antithetical, vulnerability, which is the
act of sleeping in the site of occupa-
tion.” It is when protesters bed down in
the site of their protest—as they did in
Tahrir Square—that they fully own it:The sleepers in an open- ended
occupation are no longer individ-
uals in a battle but, lying together
side by side, they become instead
the brokers of a new reality, their
dreams the language of this reality
whose code they seek to crack.Is revolution a dream? El Wardany
asks. Or an awakening? It seems it
can be either, depending on the cir-
cumstances. In the meantime, sleep is
where we come face- to- face with our
past and ultimately shed it. In a piece
entitled “The Squatting Beast,” he
writes:You will wake. It may take one
year or one thousand, but you will
wake in the end.... You have been
spat out of your life and reborn
with the next morning. A part of
you is forever dead.... When you
open your eyes, you will find that
vanished part sitting upright like
a dog and looking at you.... You
will continue to walk through the
streets where you encounter the
beast of the past. It will continue
to shrink with every glance until
only its gaze remains. You will
name these streets your new life.
Your new life, which grows and
flourishes beneath the gaze of your
past.It’s one thing to reconcile with your
past; it’s another to have oblivion thrust
over your head like a hood. The Sisi re-
gime wants to have the sole right to re-
member—to remember a dissident like
Alaa and keep him in prison forever;
to remember the revolution and make
sure it never happens again. These
books have their own word to say. QBasma Abdel Aziz, Amsterdam, 2018Lindsey 47 49 .indd 49 3 / 23 / 22 5 : 02 PM