Huna - A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming

A gripping, deeply moving memoir of survival, education, and resistance by a student protestor–turned–political prisoner in post-revolution Egypt. “I will never be the same after reading Huna.” —Javier Zamora “A beautifully written portrait of a radical political awakening.” —Hanif Abdurraqib In the summer of 2013, Abdelrahman ElGendy was seventeen years old and a budding student activist in Cairo. Two years after the January 25 revolution, hope for a free Egypt had dissipated; that summer’s military coup, led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, resulted in unprecedented massacres of civilian protestors by the police and military, spurring a wave of further outrage and mass demonstrations. Abdelrahman knew he needed to be a part of it, and his reluctant father, fearing for his son’s safety, accompanied him to a major protest. But before they could so much as leave the car, they were swept up in a brutal police crackdown—and their lives were shattered. Abdelrahman would spend the next six years as a political prisoner, shuffled, alongside his father, from jail cell, to pre-trial detention center, to The Scorpion, Egypt’s most infamous prison complex.