Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, and more. A winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, he spent six years as a political prisoner in Egypt after being arrested alongside his father at a protest when he was seventeen.
In his debut memoir, ElGendy recounts those years of incarceration and the refuge he found in reading and writing. Moving beyond the conventions of a prison memoir, Huna explores family, friendship, language, resistance, and what it means to remain when hope itself may not be enough.
ElGendy answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his book.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Funny enough, I was introduced to reading through Mickey Mouse magazine! It was an incredibly popular comic publication in Egypt while I was growing up. Megalet Mickey, as we call it, has been published in Arabic by Nahdet Misr since 1959, and is localized, with funny Egyptianized character names and dialogue that blends Standard Arabic with the Egyptian colloquial, and even its own culture-specific comics and storylines; it has special annual Ramadan issues for example.
I was obsessed with Megalet Mickey. I would read it while eating, always holding it behind my plate. I was always the one tasked with fetching water or anything else anyone needed at the table because I always had one clean hand, my reading hand. If I ever messed up and my parents wanted to ground me, they would take Mickey away until I apologized. That was the equivalent of taking away my phone back then.
It runs in the family, too. My father and uncle both grew up reading it voraciously. I remember a day in the 2000s, we drove to my father’s childhood apartment, used as a family storage space by that time. I stumbled across a massive box of Mickey back issues from the late 1980s and early 1990s, years before I was born. The day I inherited that box was one of the happiest days of my childhood.
But the very first full book I read was in Arabic, when I was around six or seven years old: Captain Masr by Omar Taher. It’s a humorous collection of satirical essays about everyday life in Egypt and what it means to grow up in that society, with all its quirks and contradictions. I think Taher’s style is very instructive in showing how to weave a story whose apparent lightness carries an undercurrent of political commentary. I didn’t have the language for that at seven, of course; I just thought it was incredibly funny. But it was my introduction to a genre that I still love, and it sent me down the rabbit hole of reading all of Omar Taher’s work.
What book helped you through puberty?
Definitely the whole genre of Riwayat Masriyya Lil Geeb, a long-running, hugely influential series of inexpensive, pocket-sized novels that introduced generations of Egyptian readers to horror, science fiction, espionage, etc. Some were translations, like Goosebumps, published in Arabic as Sarkhat Al-Ro’b (A Scream of Terror), while others were iconic Egyptian series, such as Paranormal, Future File, and The Man of the Impossible. One of the most popular ones that I was obsessed with as a kid was Al Mughamirun Al Khamsa, which initially began with translations of Enid Blyton’s The Five Find-Outers before Mahmoud Salem went on to write the rest as an original Egyptian adventure series. Many of its issues were also passed down by older family members, and I remember how ecstatic I was when my father would take me to Sour El-Azbakeya, Cairo’s most famous secondhand book market, to get a whole bag filled with issues. I think I learned to read at an early age, around four years old, thanks to that series.
I quickly branched out into reading a lot of YA, first in translation and then in English at around ten years old: Harry Potter (my fond memories of which are now sadly tainted by the author’s horrendous politics), The Hunger Games, Eragon, Percy Jackson, The Mortal Instruments, you get the picture.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
I think I would’ve loved to have been touched by June Jordan’s work much earlier in my life. There’s an incredible collection of June Jordan’s work called The Essential June Jordan, which I guess wouldn’t have been available when I was 16, but the poems inside it were. June is such a north star for me when thinking about the personal and the political and how even to say that they’re intersecting is an understatement, because for so many of us, they’re one and the same. Our personal lives, our very sense of personhood, has been shaped by the inherently politicized conditions of our existence, and vice versa, our political engagement emerges from these personal experiences. And so, there’s no separation on the page when we make our art. The page is the personal is the political is the art. One of her teachings often guides me when thinking on the page:
And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Oof. Many. To narrow the scope a bit, I’ll pretend it’s a memoir / memoir-adjacent writing class since that’s the genre I write in. Off the top of my head: I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti; One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad; In The Wake, Christina Sharpe; There’s Always This Year, Hanif Abdurraqib; Heavy, Kiese Laymon; In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado; Easy Beauty, Chloe Cooper Jones; Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward; The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison.
And I would teach Athqal Min Radwa by Radwa Ashour as a masterpiece of blending the personal and the revolutionary, though it is not yet available in English. It was the first literary memoir I read in Arabic that made me want to write in this genre.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
While writing Huna, I intentionally avoided reading anything related to prison or incarceration stories because I was always interested in Huna not being pigeonholed as a prison memoir, but rather as a memoir that speaks to the human condition through the vehicle of a prison cell. I actually read a lot of poetry during that time because it pushes me to consider what is possible in language. I also read in Arabic to keep one foot rooted in that narrative tradition and let it inform my English prose.
To name a few: Fady Joudah’s work, especially his poetry collection […], has been a dear companion. To me, Fady is a brilliant example for what it means to be a writer in English while remaining rooted in the abundance of the Arabic tradition. Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks helped me think about structure and how it can become an argument within a book, a kind of meta-narrative. Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz (and all his work) taught me that there is no writing more breathtaking than that of an author in complete command of their prose while remaining open to the life it takes on of its own. Solmaz Sharif’s Look and Customs helped me grapple with what it means to keep language both politically and poetically agitated. Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds expanded my sense of how far the English language can be bent and broken into meaning. Otared by Mohammad Rabie made me realize I was more interested in reckoning with hopelessness without the reflex to redeem it by searching for hidden hope.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I just finished and loved The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, as well as an ARC of the forthcoming, brilliant Exhibit G by Fady Joudah. The books I’m currently dipping in and out of are Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Selected Political Writings by Ghassan Kanafani, and Writings on the Wall by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Next on my list are James by Percival Everett and Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi.