Interview with Abdel Rahman El Gendy"

*How does it feel winning the Samir Kassir Award?*

The Samir Kassir Award, considered one of the most prestigious and respected honors in the Arab journalism world, holds immense value for me. It is a profound honor to join the ranks of previous recipients, including the great and dearly missed Egyptian journalist Mohamed Abu El-Gheit, may he rest in peace, and to be part of this lineage of journalists and writers that begins with the martyred Samir Kassir himself. The award offers excellent exposure and reach for the words and stories we write and hope the world will read. In a time when journalism is in such a dire position, with journalists being banned, targeted, incarcerated, exiled, and massacred, this award and what it stands for is more vital than ever. I am deeply grateful to the Samir Kassir Foundation, and the jury for this recognition and support.

*How does it feel to be a journalist and/or writer from a region where freedom of speech is compromised?*

After over six years as a political prisoner in Egypt between 2013 and 2020, I am grateful for the relative safety of my body and the space to write and grapple with the issues I wish to dedicate my life to. Yet, I am both enraged and heartbroken about being forcibly torn away from home, family, and my people. I constantly grapple with a strong survivor’s guilt about the over 60,000 political prisoners still languishing behind bars in Egypt, many of whom are dear friends, and the necessity of exile as a writer to continue reporting on and writing about them.

For many of us, exile is a precarious position of instability. You begin a long, tedious process of finding a new place to call home, legalizing your presence, and finding ways to settle. You do all this excruciating work just to reach the baseline that many around the world are born with, and sometimes you don’t even reach it.

With the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which my piece revolves around, these tensions of exile in the West specifically reach unprecedented heights. Being an exiled Arab journalist/writer can now spark severe backlash even here if one is not willing to toe the line of what is acceptable to speak out on and what is not. The first thing we are threatened with by those in power is our legal status and deportation back to our countries and their prisons once we address Western complicity in the conditions that made our exile necessary in the first place.

Sometimes, when I think of my exile, I remind myself: at least it’s better than prison. At least I can write and work toward freeing political prisoners in my country. This helps me put things in perspective and continue to work.

*Can you tell us more about your piece? What inspired you to write about the topic?*

My personal context is that I was a political prisoner in Egypt for six years and three months, from 2013 to 2020. I was arrested at a protest against the military regime in Egypt when I was 17 and was released at 24. Due to my continued writing and articles against the military dictatorship in Egypt and advocacy for political prisoners, I was forced to leave to avoid the threat of re-arrest, and after a long journey, I ended up in my current exile in America. This context is crucial in the article because the driving question of the piece emerges from this tension between homeland and exile for the Arab body.

My article in Al-Manassa, “Is There Life Before Death?”, began to take shape in my mind after revisiting Mourid Barghouti’s poignant poem, “I Have No Problem.” In it, Mourid reflects:

“I think of my life

From birth to present,

And in my despair, I remember

That there is life after death,

There is life after death,

And I have no problem with that,

But I ask,

Oh God,

Is there life before death?”

This haunting question stayed with me as I witnessed the horrors unfolding in Gaza, paralleled by my physical exile in America, and observed the racist indifference of the journalistic community, liberal friends, and universities towards the Arab body. Over time, I grew weary of appealing to the humanity of the Western white person and the obsession with crafting the impactful sentence that might make them see us as human, the bloody clip dramatic enough to draw their sympathy, the theater of torture and dismemberment we stage primarily to appeal to them, hoping they would grant us some acknowledgment of humanity.

I kept thinking: how do we overcome and shatter the Western moral superiority embedded in a world order where our disposability is not a failure of it, but one of its integral functions? How do we decenter the Western white person—whom I think of as a position rather than a skin color: any Western subject invested in the upholding of the White supremacist Western hegemony under which we all live—who sees themselves reflected in the eyes of our colonizers? How do we stop making them our target audience of appeal, and replace them with one another and with our partners in the shared struggle for liberation from the oppression of our local dictatorships and a global system that drives them and thrives on our crushed bodies under its tanks?

I couldn’t imagine submitting any other piece, to be honest. I was holding so much grief, so much rage. I felt a fracture within me that swallowed my words for a while. I could only write when I decided to attempt writing into the fracture. Not write a piece about the tension, but a piece that sits within the tension between grief and rage. I believe this piece gives language to the struggles many Arabs have faced since October. I wanted to name this turmoil, and by naming it, contribute to a collective effort to identify the evil we’re witnessing and experiencing—an evil that many of us agree is unprecedented in magnitude and viciousness, and definitely revealing.