HUNA Is an Arab Prison Memoir That Refuses to Cater to the Western Gaze

In 2013, Abdelrahman ElGendy is a 17-year-old fledgling activist as students like him take to Cairo’s streets in protest against a military coup. Only two years earlier, they’d been swept up in the hope of Egypt’s January 25th revolution. During one mass demonstration, in which Abdelrahman is present as a bystander recording the fervor from his car while his Baba, in the driver’s seat, tells him to put your hand inside, police arrive. They brutally attack protestors and drag Abdelrahman and his Baba away.

What follows is a journey from a jail cell to a pre-trial detention center, and then from prison to prison, ea...