Prison Epistolarity and the Crisis of Politically Motivated Incarceration in the Letters of Abd al-Azim Anis

Abstract

On 1 January 1959, Egypt witnessed a nationwide mass arrest of the political opposition. University Professor Abd al-Azim Anis (1923–2009) was among the hundreds of Egyptian activists detained in what came to be known as the 1959 Detention Campaign. This paper reads the published prison letters Anis wrote during his politically motivated incarceration between January 1959 and April 1964. The first section of the paper traces the epistolary practices Anis adopted and/or abandoned to subvert the repressive prison conditions and the violation of his right to correspondence. The paper contends that a key point of departure into prison epistolarity is recognising how the material conditions of the crisis situation command the performance of the epistolary act and the production of the prison letter as a testimonial object. The second section of the paper discusses the public afterlife of Anis’s prison letters as crisis narratives and counter public records on the 1959 Detention Campaign. The paper investigates Anis’s prison letters as primary sources of historical memory and knowledge on the gradual construction of the punitive logic regulating the citizen-state relationship in Egypt. The paper argues that it is particularly the epistolary mode of mediating the crisis that allows Anis’s first-hand account to date and dissect the accumulation of politically motivated punishment.