Becoming Free Behind Bars: A Review of Huna

Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming, by Abdelrahman ElGendy
Hogarth 2026
ISBN 9798217153602

For those of us who lived it, it is difficult—impossible—not to reflect on our lives through the prism of before the Egyptian revolution and after it. Before, there was a sense of stagnation disguised as stability, no freedom to speak but a predictable clarity on what could or could not be said, and no tangible scope for political engagement or agency. After, there was the shadow of an exhilarating time of being in the streets, chanting for freedom, becoming a political actor, and feeling for once that one was affecting change. The before held thwarted dreams, the after held shattered ones.

In the fifteen years since 2011, dozens of memoirs and accounts of the revolution and its aftermath have been published, including from imprisoned activists, each probing the realities of before, during, or after. In the first few years following the official “defeat” (the exact moment of rupture is debatable) of the uprising’s goals (bread, freedom, social justice), I devoured what post-revolution books I could, searching for my own sense of resolution. As an active participant, I had chronicled the revolution myself for the New York Review of Books, later ruminating on its aftermath through my novel, and continuing to quietly thread what was lost with it through most everything I wrote.

Yet six or seven years into this, with each new book released, I found myself unable to stomach another story—hollowed out by the experience and repetition of it—even as I was still compelled by a sense of obligation to read my fellow Egyptian writers. And so I read reluctantly.

I did not expect to feel any differently about Abdelrahman ElGendy’s post-post-revolution prison memoir, Huna, which means “here,” until I got some fifty pages in. I had followed ElGendy’s story from the onset, when various activist and writer friends brought attention to his case as they campaigned for the release of unjustly incarcerated political prisoners. In 2013, when he was seventeen, ElGendy and his father were dragged from their car as they drove near a protest in downtown Cairo, and were hauled to a police station for questioning. What they hoped would be a few hours in detention extended for days, then months—at first without clear end—until they were eventually handed down fifteen-year sentences. His father, a.k.a. Baba, was pardoned early, in March 2017; Abdelrahman not until three years later, after serving six full years.

Members of ElGendy’s family were not political. In fact, they steered as far from the revolution as they could:

In the nascent days of the January 2011 revolution, my family remained on the sidelines… Only after the historic fall of Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year dictatorship on February 11, 2011, and the transfer of power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, did my family step into Tahrir Square to join the celebrations. “History is unfolding just kilometers from our doorstep,” Mama said that week, her voice carrying an unfamiliar heat after days with her eyes glued to the TV. “We cannot stand by and take no part.”

The book superficially skims over that revolution of 2011, when millions took to the streets in a public uprising that ousted a thirty-year-longstanding president; it also glides through the couple of years proceeding it. ElGendy was essentially just a young teenager then, engrossed in his final years of school and exams, but old enough—curious enough—to take note of the atmosphere around him. He writes:

In 2013, as I neared graduation, Egypt teetered on the brink of political chaos. Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood—the Ikhwan—had been voted into power the previous year in the country’s first democratic elections. Ever since, the air was thick with debate.

That summer, street protests began again, in far larger numbers than in the early days of 2011, and this time propped up by the country’s military forces, which were angling to dethrone the Muslim Brotherhood president and his clan from power. It was against this backdrop of an eventually ousted president and a divided nation that ElGendy and his father drove through central Cairo one day in October 2013, trying to catch glimpses of the simmering aftermath through the windows of their car.

Of a scene from that day, ElGendy writes, “in my heart a drumbeat” at the sight and sound of protesters chanting for the end of military rule. “Baba had no desire to be near the protest. I, on the other hand, belonged nowhere else.” Even when he rolls down his window to simply film the protests with his phone, his father snaps at him to put his hand inside, noting the danger of that mere gesture—filming being a form of engagement, and solidarity. In ways, of course, his father was proven right.

It is this young man—ambitious, bookish, fiercely disciplined without being indulgent or nostalgic—that allows this book to offer a precise, tactile record of the human intellect as a site of defiance under state containment.

ElGendy was a minor at the time of his arrest, but the police station conveniently misplaced his ID and he was tried alongside his father, as an adult. In some ways this feels almost emblematic, and the heart of the book—daily life in prison—reveals to us that ElGendy is mature far beyond his years. In fact, this is what sets the book apart from many a prison memoir. Aside from giving us the routine order of play between inmates and wardens that is based on hierarchies, favors, food and cigarette exchanges, here we are also privy to ElGendy’s determination in embarking on—and completing—the entirety of his university career behind bars, as a Mechanical Engineering student at Ain Shams University. He negotiates the bureaucracy not just of prison but also of Egyptian higher education from inside his cell, relying on family visits to smuggle in textbooks, and coordinating exam proctoring with wardens.

It is this young man—ambitious, bookish, fiercely disciplined without being indulgent or nostalgic—that allows this book to offer a precise, tactile record of the human intellect as a site of defiance under state containment. Huna resists the familiar scripts of the genre, tipping the balance away from a story defined by the overwhelming weight of systemic brutality, or singular arcs of political martyrdom.

As father and son are shuffled together from pre-trial detention to the severe isolation of Tora Maximum Security prison (a.k.a. Scorpion), their shared confinement reframes the traditional narrative into an intimate, intergenerational account of survival. ElGendy captures the excruciating quiet of indefinite waiting and the burden of responsibility watching his aging father suffer incarceration at his own hands: “I resented him. I wished he’d yell at me, make it easier to hate him. But he just looked at me, broken like a crime scene, denying me absolution. So I looked away.” In some sense, the rigid logic of engineering alongside his close reading of the mechanics of the Arabic language becomes a daily defense mechanism against psychological erosion as well as a living framework for building character amid complete systemic erasure. This is in essence what ElGendy offers us—a study of how not to be sentimental, and of what it means to build character in even the harshest, most limited of environments.

In one particularly searing scene from the book, after father and son are finally reunited after being placed in separate prison facilities for several months, Hazem Bey, the prison chief, pressures ElGendy to act as a snitch, revealing the Muslim Brotherhood members among the inmates. ElGendy categorically refuses, even after the chief threatens to separate him from his father: “I took a deep breath and forced out the words: ‘Actually, I don’t want to be in the same cell as Baba.’”

Later in the same scene:

When I told him I was assigned to a different cell, Baba’s puzzled expression wrecked me.

I wanted to tell him I couldn’t take it anymore: the sight of him slumped against the wall… struck by a guard, his blood trickling. I couldn’t bear the smirks and taunts when he threw a dad joke, or the malicious barbs from an Ikhwan trying to unsettle me by targeting him. How every second, the thought plagued me: I did this to you. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t that I didn’t love him enough, but that I loved him too much to stay.

I wanted to tell him I was sorry he had me for a son.

Instead, I touched his fingers through the naddara’s holes and walked away.

ElGendy left for the United States after his pardon, only to flee again amidst the ICE crackdowns and the “abduction” of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. “I locked myself in my apartment for a month,” ElGendy writes of the time.

I had been protesting and writing; it didn’t take long for my name to appear on one of the doxxing sites used by the Trump administration to identify deportation targets… When the Trump administration revoked the first F-1 visa at my university, the lawyers I had been in touch with told me that the question had likely become no longer if I would be arrested but when.

Today, he lives in Europe, and although his name is no longer on any blacklists in Egypt, the fate of one-time political prisoners is always precarious—they are often re-arrested again in sweeping crackdowns.

Huna is not to be read for lyrical prose—the writing is raw, urgent, youthful—but rather to be experienced, felt, through the harrowing narrative arc of its ongoing injustice. ElGendy gets under your skin with a tortured guilt towards his father yet maintains an equally forceful internal battle of retaining strength for the sake of them both. The narrative is crafted so carefully as to create a sense of waiting—suspense—even for a reader like me who already knows the story. This is its power, as well of course its urgent message. ElGendy resurrects the reason why one should continue to read post-revolution books: for the 60,000 political prisoners who continue to live its story behind bars, and for whom our reading is their chance at survival.