Alaa Abd el-Fattah: You Have Not Yet Been Defeated
Reviewing the essays of an Egyptian wrongly imprisoned
I recently reviewed for Jacobin the truly incredible collection of prison essays, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, by jailed Egyptian activist, Alaa Abd El-Fattah.
The collection is published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK, and Seven Stories in the US, and I cannot recommend it enough.
For my own thoughts on the collection, and how it relates directly to how Westerners try to engage political change in our own countries, I recommend reading the Jacobin review.
In it I also try to offer basic context on how the West is also contributing to the ongoing imprisonment of Alaa and many thousands like him in Egypt, particularly through decisions of the Obama administration, and staunch support in France, personally from Emmanuel Macron, for the regime that holds him in jail.
More than anything, in reading the essays, repeatedly I felt that the authoritarian states that the West enables in Egypt, Israel and the Gulf are possible most of all because we are prevented from seeing up-close the victims, and particularly the minds and souls of the victims.
Because this book is such a forceful collection of a man’s thoughts, and because it so generously describes political change in a way that can also help outline a path to democratic progress in Western states, it installs an incredibly powerful connection between Alaa and his readers in English. His struggle becomes our struggle because we are so closely in his thoughts, but also because he is taking on issues that also plague - however differently - Western states.
Particularly humbling, in an environment of Western discourse that can often foreground the injustices and discriminations we have suffered, rather than the steps to overcome them, is a monumental courage and optimism that a man in jail for most of a decade, who has faced torture and injustice that none should ever meet, is nonetheless committed to how these material injustices will be genuinely overcome rather than only evaluated.
The title - You Have Not Yet Been Defeated - is itself a call to Western readers who - while those like Alaa face years in prison for their beliefs - are often unable even to suffer the awkward silences, smear campaigns, condescension, or other blips, and still hold on to, and voice, their beliefs. I don’t say this to shame anyone, but rather because - within the tyranny of polite society - these blips can indeed take on monumental proportions that allow actual tyranny to persist. Understanding this seems important to how such a state of affairs can be undone, which it has to be.
Because I have written often of Palestine in recent years, the essays have particular resonance, due to Alaa’s forceful connection between his own struggle for freedom and that of Palestinian struggle. Indeed, while I was aware of the brief history of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty - its causes and unpopularity within Egypt, and the generous US military aid that has flowed since to dictators in Cairo - being in the company of Alaa’s thoughts, and his unflinching support for Palestine, you come to realise more deeply that a significant portion of the reason Egyptians are denied democracy is that a democratic Egypt will in turn demand justice for Palestine.
Because Western governments prefer to insist that this cannot and will not happen, and do their all to guarantee as much, Cairo continues to receive $1.3bn annually in military aid, in part to keep people like Alaa in jail (even if the US would probably prefer Egypt to be more discreet, and less brutal, in the ways it goes about it).
In one particularly joyous essay within the book, we hear of prisoners in Cairo celebrating Palestinian resistance to last year’s Israeli onslaught against Gaza. It is often an advantage of the oppressor to make those resisting oppression feel that they are isolated, and such testimony actually shows how networked the language and demand of liberty truly is. Because the logic of borders and racism - reproduced even in those quarters of Western media that do not mean to - function in ways that obstruct our faith in the successful networking of these struggles, testimony from a Cairo prison notebook - a corner of the world we are trained not to consider even existing - pulls down many mental walls, from which physical walls must follow.
I wrote this because I wanted to say a little more here, and a little more personally, without negating the value of the review, which explains more of what the essays achieve. Everyone is their own best judge of how many unread books they have or can handle, so I won’t say you must buy it, but it is absolutely worth your time, whether you are trying to fathom how we force change in Western states, or merely want the testimony of a soul that lifts free even where there is so much to keep it down.
I am still figuring out ways to integrate what I put on Substack with what I write elsewhere. The answer is probably that I should just start adding everything into Substack and presume you want to be kept updated. Please feel free to leave comments with what you like, or what you’d like more of, or how you’d like me to incorporate it all.
I have written a lot for Jacobin of late, mostly around issues of Palestine and democracy in West Asia, North Africa, and those countries often called the Middle East. I am still planning to write more about the ideas that pull all these pieces together, and where I hope they will lead. Thanks as always for your support in this project, and for those who are able to support this page in ways that create time for me to review books.