Book Review - Inside the women's prison
Mahmoud El-Wardani, Saturday 14 Nov 2015
Fi Sign Al-Nissa(In The Women's Prison) by Jane Boctur, Beit Al-Yassamin Publishing, Cairo, 2015. pp.280.
More than half a century has passed after bloody incidents occurred
in Qanater Women's Prison - the most famous women's prison in Egypt. In
this book, Jane Boctur recalls the events of the almost four years that
she and a large number of other leftist women spent in detention and
behind this terrible prison's walls between 1959 and 1964.
The book's publication coincides with the 90th birthday of the
author, who is still full of optimism about life and confidence in her
country's future. She also possess an astonishing memory.
Boctur rushed to Tahrir Square at the age of 86 in a wheelchair
after the protests in January 2011 broke out, in solidarity with the
young people who ignited the revolution. But that is not surprising,
given her history of political activism.
She is a daughter of the leftist movement; participating in
nationalist activity against the British and against the tyranny of the
monarchy after enrolling at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University in
the forties, and sentenced by a military court to two years'
imprisonment. She spent a year in jail before her sentence was commuted
in 1949.
She went on to get a master's degree in journalism and a diploma in
Egyptology antiquities. Her life was very rich, and she worked in
teaching, journalism, translation and tourist guidance, as well as being
a documentary director; some of her films even won distinguished
awards.
As for her book, it contains an exciting narrative about her time
in jail between 1959 and 1964. This was the first time that the state
took the step of collective political incarceration of this number of
women, whose charges were limited to crimes of expression and opinion.
As evidence of the extent of tyranny and suppression which Egypt
went through during that time, not a single woman among those discussed
in the book had been subject to a trial; all had been arbitrarily
detained.
The author paints the psychological features of her fellow
detainees and of their jailers, both high-ranking officers and the
female prison guards. She also describes in depth the prison itself, and
the division between the criminal female inmates, i.e. those convicted
of prostitution, murder and theft, and the inmates detained for
political crimes.
In the background, there a picture of the society from which the
political female detainees came, whether they were teachers,
journalists, civil servants, doctors or even artists (including for
example, the renowned artist Inji Efflatoun and actress Muhsena Tawfiq),
and the way this society faced the authorities' decision to jail women
because of their opinion or political activity.
The author presents an honest record and a personal testimony
regarding very private moments in the life of this generation and the
life of this country. Most of the detainees were snatched from their
family homes, obliged to leave their children with neighbours. There
were even pregnant detainees such as the author Asma Halim, who gave
birth inside the prison. Her son spent the first three years of his life
within this milieu, learning his first words behind bars.
From another perspective, the author has chosen a style that
combines the fictive narrative and the documentary narrative, in order
to be able to cover this vast world on several levels; for there is a
world outside the enclosed walls which the detainees belong to not only
because they left their children there and their familial relationships
and their threatened families after being incarcerated but also because
it is the world which they were detained for the cause of defending its
political and social issues.
Throughout the book's pages, the outside world was always manifest
and present in different forms; the visits were an opportunity for
seeing children and relatives and exchanging news, and learning the
whereabouts of incarcerated husbands or fiancées or detainees in
general, who were gathered finally in the Oasis Prison in the desert
about 1000km from Cairo.
Naturally, it wasn't possible to find out the news except through
those irregular visits from relatives, because of the rigidity of the
political security agencies.
As for the prison itself, the administration attempted to isolate
them from other female prisoners. Their numbers ranged between 28 and 30
detainees, as well as the Israeli spy Marcelle Ninio, who was convicted
in the Lavon legal case in which an Israeli network blew up a number of
cinema theatres in Alexandria.
There were other foreigners too; two communist Greeks and an
Italian who was married to Kamal Abdel-Halim, one of the leaders in the
Communist Party, who was also incarcerated at the time.
Boctur devotes some space to delineate the relationships between
female detainees, criminal prisoners and jailers. She also looks at the
relationships between the female detainees who belonged to different
leftist organisations and the details of their lives inside prison. The
effort exerted in depicting this huge canvas is commendable.
The author asserts that the detainees didn't give in to their
legitimate sorrows and the agony of losing their children. For instance,
when Boctur was jailed she was the mother of three children, the oldest
four and the younger two, twins, three years old.
Despite all this, they changed their life inside the prison into a
continuing struggle not to lose their humanity and solidarity. For
instance, when they heard that President Gamal Abdel-Nasser had said to a
foreign journalist that there are no political prisons in Egypt, they
went right away to the prison's governor and demanded to be released
immediately because their detention was illegal according to the
president's statement.
When the prison governor tried to send them back to their
dormitory, they refused and decided to gather in front of the governor's
office. Eventually, they were cruelly beaten by the anti-riot force
inside the prison, with the participation of a group of criminal
inmates, and were dragged back to their cells.
Finally, the exceptional significance of this book, or testimony,
lies in the author's celebration of the human side of this experience
and in showing how the female detainees were torn between the
necessities of motherhood on one hand and their political standpoints on
the other.
For instance, there was only one condition for their release, which
was to sign a statement denouncing their political standpoints, which
they refused absolutely because it meant, according to Boctur, that they
would in so doing abandon their own humanity.
http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/164288.aspx
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