{"id":31567,"date":"2024-02-12T08:04:41","date_gmt":"2024-02-12T06:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=31567"},"modified":"2024-02-12T08:06:52","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T06:06:52","slug":"rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Rotten Evidence<\/em>: Ahmed Naji Writes About Writing in Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"
Both Rotten Evidence<\/em><\/span> and the trial against Naji are attempts to, in some ways, define literature and writing, or at least their fundamental purpose.<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison<\/span><\/i>, by Ahmed Naji<\/span>
\n<\/span>McSweeneys<\/span><\/a> 2023<\/span>
\n<\/span>ISBN <\/span>9781952119835<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lina Mounzer<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

By now, the story has become the standard addendum following any introduction of Ahmed Naji\u2019s name: in 2015, an excerpt from the young Egyptian writer\u2019s second novel, <\/span>Using Life, <\/span><\/i>was published in a literary supplement in Cairo. A sixty-five year old man filed a case against Naji and his publisher, \u201calleging that reading the excerpt caused him to experience palpitations, sickness, and a drop in blood pressure.\u201d While Naji and his publisher are ultimately acquitted, prosecutors then file an appeal, under the argument that Naji\u2019s text \u201charmed public morals.\u201d Naji is found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison. He spends ten months there before another appeal \u2014 from the defense \u2014 earns him a release.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Rotten Evidence<\/span><\/i> is a non-linear account of those ten months, a combination of reading journal, dream diary and daily reflection. Originally published in Arabic in 2019 as <\/span>Hirz mikamkim<\/span><\/i>, Naji described, <\/span>in a talk at City of Asylum<\/span><\/a>, the unorthodox process of the translation, a collaborative work between himself, translator Katharine Halls and editor Daniel Gumbiner. Rather than striving for a \u201cfaithful\u201d rendering of the Arabic original, the translation was treated, at Naji\u2019s own urging, as an English text unto itself and edited as such, regardless of any departures that this necessitated from the original.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Ahmed Naji’s Rotten Evidence<\/em> is published by McSweeneys<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The book is not so much a prison memoir as the memoir of a time spent in prison. This is because Naji, from the very outset, engages earnestly with the idea of genre, highly aware of both its conventions and constraints. \u201cPrison literature,\u201d Naji tells us, \u201cin the mind of the political prisoner, is an unavoidable feature of the political struggle [\u2026] an extension of their activism.\u201d Moreover, it also necessitates writing about other prisoners, which Naji mostly avoids here, seeing it as an infringement of people\u2019s privacy as well as, if one is not careful to render \u201cthe frustration and humiliation of prison without reducing its victims and their secrets to figures of drama,\u201d a violation of the \u201crelationship of obligation\u201d imposed by the bonds that one ends up sharing with fellow prisoners.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the real issue, he says, is that: \u201cMost Arabic prison literature I\u2019ve read isn\u2019t concerned with \u2018artistry.\u2019\u201d Its intention rather lies in \u201cthe documentary content of the text and what it can do to serve the literary-political cause.\u201d But Naji declares himself \u201ca writer who doesn\u2019t give a fuck about history,\u201d and as such declares his book an attempt not to write about prison, but to write about writing (and reading) in prison.<\/span><\/p>\n

In tone, the book is cynical, bitterly funny, oftentimes tender without ever being sentimental, and Naji accomplishes all of this through a wry distance from all his subjects, including, first and foremost, himself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a book about the self, the self as writer, about the self vs. society, which, if one is to speak broadly, is one of the essential themes of literature, and is a particularly relevant preoccupation for literature \u2014 and novelists \u2014 from the Arab world. It would be easy to fall into East\/West dichotomies here, with the West as the place which champions the individual by way of holding sacred personal freedoms, and the East as the place where the individual must be subsumed into the conformity of the (inevitably) authoritarian society or else risk censure, imprisonment, or worse. But Naji rejects this easy framing, too. Among a list of clich\u00e9 themes and subjects he bemoans, that he says he\u2019s \u201ctried so hard to run away from,\u201d are: \u201cAuthenticity and modernity. Why the Arabs have lagged while others have flourished. Self and other, East and West.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps, at the risk of generalizing, it can be said that Arab writers are more keenly aware of how their consciousness and choices have been shaped by social forces, domestic and political both. Whether they choose to write about social issues or relegate society to the background while foregrounding the individual, it is always a conscious decision, undertaken either to directly address or reject a particular template, literary and\/or existential. And Naji falls firmly on the latter side, as evinced by his larger work in general and this book in specific.<\/span><\/p>\n

Both the book and the trial against Naji (its absurdities hilariously sketched out here) are attempts to, in some ways, define literature and writing, or at least their fundamental purpose. And it should be said that <\/span>Rotten Evidence i<\/span><\/i>s a definition of writing <\/span>against<\/span><\/i> the one offered by the trial, in which one judge, offering a ruling to justify the initial two-year prison sentence handed down, \u201carrogantly attempt[s] to define anew the craft of novel writing.\u201d Set out as one in which the writer \u201cextends a call to virtuous acts, to the adornment of the self with good morals, and to the performance of commendable deeds\u201d \u2014 all of which, says the judge, endow the writer with a role no less than that of \u201cthe tongue of society, truthfully expressing its hopes.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the power of literature, for both writer and reader, according to Naji, is \u201csomething superior to moralizing and edifying.\u201d He illustrates this poignantly through a story about one of his cellmates, nicknamed the Rhinoceros. One night Naji wakes up to find the \u201cfamously arrogant and unfeeling\u201d Rhinoceros crying. When asked why he\u2019s crying, the Rhinoceros responds, \u201cIt\u2019s my feelings, man. They\u2019re too much for me. I need to get them out.\u201d When probed further about the source of these too-big feelings, the Rhinoceros confesses it\u2019s down to a book, a book that Naji tells us is \u201ca best-selling novel in a genre you might call Islamic romance.\u201d In other words, hardly a work of \u201cliterature\u201d as the academy or canon might define it. Still, something about the book moves the Rhinoceros so much he can\u2019t help crying. At some point, Naji flips through the book, trying to see what secret it contained that might have reduced a man like the Rhinoceros to tears. But he finds that there is \u201cno secret to the novel; the secret was somewhere else.\u201d It lies in the fact that \u201cwords, books, and literature [have] an inner force, a hidden strength that might be stored inside a sentence or a word or a letter.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Naji doesn\u2019t say this, but it is in fact implied: that that strength only comes into being in the alchemy between writer and reader. Otherwise every book would move every reader. And so while the power (and function) of language is essentially one that exists in relation to a context \u2014 as the book makes abundantly clear with its examination of various dictions: of the prison, the courthouse, the street \u2014 the real power of literature realizes its full potential through a <\/span>relationship. <\/span><\/i>A relationship whereby the two selves in communion only come into contact on the page, through the words. And it is always a reciprocal one. After all, the writer necessarily creates with a reader in mind, no matter how abstract or unknown. The words are never not being set down without the awareness of the fact that they will come into contact with someone else on the other side of the page, or without the consideration of what those words might communicate to that someone (which, as experienced writers come to grudgingly acknowledge, often bears only tenuous relation to the writer\u2019s own intended meaning).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This of course is the crux of the issue that lands Naji in prison in the first place: what he perceived as innocuous, especially when compared to other writings of a more political nature, was seen to be causing harm to \u201cpublic morals.\u201d And ironically, he finds that \u201cthe language [he] was imprisoned for using [is] standard fare inside the prison.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While Naji was on the inside, on the outside he became <\/span>a cause celebre<\/span><\/a>. PEN America bestowed him with their PEN\/Barbey Freedom to Write Award. They also sent a letter, signed by over a hundred writers, to Egypt\u2019s president Sisi, \u201cdemanding Naji\u2019s immediate release.\u201d (Proving that PEN America is happy to mobilize its clout when it deems <\/span>the cause uncontroversial and its support non-threatening<\/span><\/a> to the status quo, but I digress). This, too, is ironic, because at every turn in the book, Naji rejects the idea of being a martyr for free speech, and places considered distance between himself and other writers, like <\/span>Alaa Abd el-Fattah<\/span><\/a>, sent to prison for the courage of their convictions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing is such a famously abyssal undertaking \u2014 a relentless confrontation with the limits of one\u2019s own intellect, patience and imagination \u2014 that no one would venture to do it if there weren\u2019t an equally transcendent pleasure in it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, he tells us: \u201cBefore I went to prison, I wasn\u2019t brave enough to think of myself as a writer.\u201d Which is what makes prison such a bitter pill to swallow. He had been so aware of the \u201chistorical lineage [he] seemingly belongs to,\u201d whereby writers are subject to various sorts of punishment for work that steps out of line; he had taken care to be \u201cvery cautious.\u201d And in prison, he kicks himself for his miscalculation: \u201cWhy did you do this, Ahmed?\u201d he asks himself. \u201cDid you really have to write that stuff?\u201d He\u2019d just been \u201cmessing around, killing time.\u201d And so \u201chow had the game suddenly gone [so] far,\u201d to the point where it had landed him in prison?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That definition of writing as \u201cmessing around\u201d and \u201ckilling time\u201d is intended as a dismissal of his younger, more naive relationship to writing. But a kernel of this idea remains visible in his more mature assessment of what the craft means to him.<\/span><\/p>\n

He argues that for him, the \u201cnoble guises\u201d in which writers \u201ccloak\u201d their desire to write \u2014 \u201cintellectual edification, revolutionary commitment, self-expression, dialogue\u201d \u2014 are just \u201cpretexts\u2026 attempts by writers to distract from their central motive, which is their own satisfaction.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s actually such a simple and obvious proposition: that the fundamental motivation behind most endeavors, and certainly artistic ones (which offer little financial motivation), is pleasure. Indeed, writing is such a famously abyssal undertaking \u2014 a relentless confrontation with the limits of one\u2019s own intellect, patience and imagination \u2014 that no one would venture to do it if there weren\u2019t an equally transcendent pleasure in it. And part of that pleasure is in fact in confronting those limits of the self, and then finding the places where they can be pushed, or where they are merely illusory, self-imposed rather than fixed. \u201cI didn\u2019t have anything to offer to society, \u201c writes Naji. \u201cI just found that writing was a way of knowing and understanding myself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There might seem to be an inherent contradiction in the fact that Naji continuously rejects the role of art or literature as a tool of social change and yet elsewhere also maintains that words are \u201ca terrific, untouchable power, capable of destroying society and its values\u2026 a magnificent toy.\u201d But the answer in fact lies in the contradiction itself. For, as Naji maintains in a chapter appropriately enough entitled \u201cAnti-Manifesto\u201d: \u201cwriting is itself a way to understand [the full dimensions of the writing process], a way to doubt and question. Forced to defend myself,\u201d he continues, \u201cI always felt like the defense itself became a prison in which my relationship with literature was confined.\u201d Under that definition, <\/span>Rotten Evidence \u2014 <\/span><\/i>doubts, questions, contradictions and all \u2014 can only be deemed a successful attempt at breaking out of that particular prison.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In tone, “Rotten Evidence” is cynical, bitterly funny, and oftentimes tender without ever being sentimental, writes Lina Mounzer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":481,"featured_media":31571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2656,51],"tags":[3378,555,571,1050,1118,1400],"coauthors":[3259],"class_list":["post-31567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-books","category-tmr-weekly","tag-ahmed-naji","tag-egypt","tag-egyptian-writers","tag-literature","tag-memoir","tag-prison-literature","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRotten Evidence: Ahmed Naji Writes About Writing in Prison - The Markaz Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rotten Evidence: Ahmed Naji Writes About Writing in Prison\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In tone, "Rotten Evidence" is cynical, bitterly funny, and oftentimes tender without ever being sentimental, writes Lina Mounzer.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Markaz Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-02-12T06:04:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-02-12T06:06:52+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/Ahmed-Naji-courtesy-of-the-writer.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1300\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"604\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Lina Mounzer\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Lina Mounzer\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"10 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Lina Mounzer\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/45423420f30e8ea91ef403306dcdcaef\"},\"headline\":\"Rotten Evidence: Ahmed Naji Writes About Writing in Prison\",\"datePublished\":\"2024-02-12T06:04:41+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-02-12T06:06:52+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1988,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2024\\\/02\\\/Ahmed-Naji-courtesy-of-the-writer.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Ahmed Naji\",\"Egypt\",\"Egyptian writers\",\"literature\",\"memoir\",\"prison literature\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Book Reviews\",\"Books\",\"TMR Weekly\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/themarkaz.org\\\/oldsite\\\/rotten-evidence-ahmed-naji-writes-about-writing-in-prison\\\/\",\"name\":\"Rotten Evidence: Ahmed Naji Writes About Writing in Prison - 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