Huna (a Memoir Of Revolution, Prison And Becoming)

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

A gripping, deeply moving memoir of survival, education, and resistance.

In 2013, seventeen-year-old Abdelrahman ElGendy was a budding student activist in Cairo. Two years after the January 25 revolution, hope for a free Egypt had dissipated; when that summer’s military coup unleashed unprecedented massacres of protesters, Abdelrahman didn’t hesitate—he joined the street movement. His father, fearing for his son’s safety, accompanied him to a mass demonstration. But minutes after they arrived, they were swept up in a brutal police crackdown, and their lives were shattered.

Crushed inside a holding cell, Abdelrahman first heard the words of the Arab world’s most enduring protest song, ‘Sawfa Nabqa Huna’ – We Will Remain Here. He wondered: If no one wanted to remain behind bars, what was the ‘here’ they chose to inhabit?

Abdelrahman would spend the next six years as a political prisoner chasing this Huna, shuffled, alongside his father, from jail cell, to pre-trial detention center, to The Scorpion, Egypt’s most infamous prison complex. As his body broke under the grind of incarceration with no end in sight, he turned to the only refuge left to him: the page. He earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering while imprisoned, read and wrote voraciously, and, through writing, bore witness.

In his remarkable debut, Abdelrahman offers not a promise of hope, but a provocation. When the very things that can save you – tenderness, family, friendship, language – are used against you, how can you find the courage to love? Huna is a reckoning with what it takes – and what it costs – to remain when erased, and of what endures beyond hope. 

''Call it a manual on schooling the self, a deployment of fury to romp through prison life, a philosophical meditation, a love poem to family, friends and a fruit worm. ElGendy has gifted us a book like no other. Read it and be moved, delighted, informed and wiser.'' Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo: My City, Our Revolution

‘Huna is extraordinary. ElGendy has written a powerful and intimate memoir that will no doubt secure its place in the canon of prison diaries. With razor-sharp prose, ElGendy evokes the claustrophobia of prison cells and Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the vulnerability and camaraderie of inmates, the enduring and unconditional love of family, and the horrors of the political trajectory in Egypt. This book broke me apart and put me back together again.’ Tareq Baconi, author of Fire in Every Direction

''A work of masterful, uncompromising music, Abdelrahman ElGendy’s Huna sings to what is terrified and tender inside all of us. In exquisite prose, ElGendy plunges us into the nightmare of incarceration, only to carry us far beyond – into a complex and teeming world in which souls both break and become. Unforgettable and riven with love, this book not only confronts the shared captivity of this age – it whispers to the beauty pressed within the walls, the secret yearnings of our own, unfinished homecomings. More than a political-coming-of-age, more than a call to courageous struggle – Huna is a miracle.'' Sarah Aziza, author of The Hollow Half

''You don’t read Huna, you live it, savor it, bite, suck up each word – the taste in your mouth? An untranslatable term Abdelrahman ElGendy teaches us, qahr: an injustice,