Layan Kayed: The Prison as a Text

by Black Ink

Translated by Roba Alsalibi

Since its establishment in 1948, the Israeli settler-colonial state, like other settler-colonial contexts, has employed incarceration as a tool of subjugation against the Palestinian indigenous population. In fact, many of the prisons now used by the Israeli settler state to suppress Palestinian resistance were first established under British colonial rule for the same purpose. Since then, political imprisonment in the Palestinian context has played an integral part in wider Israeli settler-colonial policies of eliminating the Palestinian body and any form of resistance to the Zionist project, as well as destroying the formation of a collective Palestinian political community.

Palestinians face some of the highest rates of incarceration of any global population; one in five Palestinians has been imprisoned by the Israeli colonial regime at some point in their life. Since 1967 and the military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, over 800,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned by the Israeli colonial regime (UNHRC). In November 2023, there were around 8,300 Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails, including 350 children and eighty-five women (CNN). It should be mentioned that Israel is the only state that prosecutes children in military courts, and that the regime usually arrests them in violent night-time raids and even subjects them to torture and abuse (AP News). Moreover, more than 3,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons indefinitely without charge or trial under a procedure known as “administrative detention,” which can last months on end (CNN). All Palestinian prisoners are subjected to various forms of systematic torture and physical and psychological violence, including severe beating, sexual abuse, long interrogation hours, sleep deprivation, and threats of detaining and torturing family members, among others.

Israel’s carceral violence and prison policies essentially aim to strip Palestinians of their political agency and subjectivity, and to isolate them from the Palestinian community and the collective struggle for liberation. Importantly, incarceration racially positions Palestinians as always already “terrorists” upon whom injury and punishment should be inflicted. Despite the unimaginable brutality and dehumanization of the Israeli carceral regime, Palestinian detainees have turned the prison into a site of confrontation where they assert their political agency and will to live. Hunger strikes, collective actions to improve prison conditions, escape, and the smuggling of political writings are some of the means through which Palestinian prisoners resist their confinement, challenge the status quo of the prison system, and join the wider struggle for liberation.

The following translated text is one example of Palestinian prison literature, which has long engaged in confronting captivity and in offering imaginaries and visions for liberation. Layan Kayed, a former detainee and a university student, wrote this text in August 2021 while she was incarcerated by the Israeli settler regime. Her piece is a powerful and a beautifully written account of the prison experience and one that destabilizes the dichotomy of humanization versus heroism. She describes the various kinds of loss that Palestinian detainees experience in Israeli prisons and the psychological impact of prisoners” structural isolation from their communities. The humanization of prisoners in the text does not mean to negate their political agency and resistance to Israel’s carceral regime. Rather, the author speaks of prisons both as sites of loss and grief and as sites of confrontation and protest. The text’s conclusion is that it is not only the freedom of Palestinian prisoners that is central to the Palestinian struggle for liberation, but the abolition of prisons altogether.

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Maysoon does not take the claim that incarceration inspires one’s instinctive literary and artistic senses seriously. She is responsible for the prison “wing library,” has a good sense of humor, and attributes prisoners” enthusiasm for reading fiction to their need for an escape, and to the scarcity of stories. She sees that the space and time of stories allow events to progress and develop at an imaginative pace.

The text and the prison exchange roles; the text is a document which encloses the prison, and the prison is a document ripped by the text.

The prison then acquires a further dimension which is dominated by meaning, for there is no such thing as a completely objective world devoid of symbolism and meaning. Expressions relating to the dichotomy of freedom and imprisonment are not invented or monopolized by a person or a specific nation, even as they bring this dichotomy to life. Rather, these expressions allude to a collective imaginary that is constantly reinventing itself and that regularly expands with photos of new prisoners, or with the addition of years to their old photos, and with prisoners” stories or those of their family and friends. This collective imaginary is ingenious enough to leave us confused about which led to which: the “Oh, Prison Darkness’ poem [written by Syrian journalist Najib al-Rayyes in 1922 when he was exiled by the French colonial authorities for his engagement in the anti-colonial resistance movement], or the act of defying the prison guard’s subjugation. It is ingenious enough to convince us that “the detention room will not last forever, nor yet the links of chains” (Darwish), and it has enough of that sweet naivety to make us laugh while we burn under the scorching heat: “it’s the sun of freedom.” Or, as Khaleda would say, “freedom disappeared, and its sun remains.” The collective imaginary can also be a romantic feeling whose gentle sails can’t withstand the ice of reality. Khaleda and Amal share their food with the free birds, placing a piece of bread on the cell’s window to be “food for an immigrant bird.” After long hours of waiting, cold and hungry, they look for that piece again.

In imprisonment we draw our letters and our poems from the same linguistic intensity of the collective imaginary. Language is the suitcase of hope and the only window for sadness. And writing is oscillating between the constrained reality, “without being dragged by it,” and the expansive horizon, without indulging in it. We therefore live the prison as a text because it makes us have wide-open conversations with the people and things around us, at times, and people and places far away, at others. Writing is fascinating in both its presence and its absence. When it arrives, it takes us on a magic carpet to see and talk about peoples and trees and about crisis and cities, so that when we return to the prison, we have broken from its familiarity to see it for the ugly truth it has always been. When writing descends, it helps us spill out the day’s residues and the “ordinary grief” [Journal of Ordinary Grief is a collection of prose essays written by Mahmoud Darwish], and it makes us more intensely pure.

Writing offers us a ladder to glance from above, to assemble the random and small events into a bigger and more meaningful puzzle. Through it we disrupt our isolation and its psychological, social, and intellectual manifestations, and we become, at least in our minds, subjects and objects amid events. We live the prison as a text, whilst exceeding its narratives of valor or suffering and by transcending self-identifications as merely “prisoners” to wander through the sources of our identities and causes.

Formulating the prison as a text is the most subjective of acts; for the energetic and passionate university students, the prisoners” transfer truck is a prospective rendezvous with the sea. Ruba and Shatha write the text as a journey full of folkloric songs and of chasing the blue. The transfer truck, however, does not mean the same thing for prisoners transported to the “Ramla prison clinic.”

The prison walls, which a new prisoner considers a symbol of her dispossession, are not the same for Rawan, who, for example, tells us about her forced transfers from one prison to another. “Sometimes we get used to the walls,” she says. As recurrent transfers bring about a feeling similar to permanent estrangement, the miserable prison sections are a dream for those who live in interrogation cells! Yasmeen tells us, as her lawyer told her, that a prisoner described his arrival to the prisoners” section after interrogation as a trip to a hotel in Antalya.

The prison also does not hold the same meaning for those who have a certificate of release, even in the distant future, and those who have nothing but their conviction. The text is the documentation of the prison’s necessity in that it conserves the scene you wish to disappear. Meanwhile, the “death” of the prison’s necessity is the discovery of ordinary beauty amidst this exceptional ugliness and misery besieged by the normality of the everyday.

On 4 April 2021, a flock of birds flies above the prison’s sky, breaking the dullness of its shades. Nourhan writes down the visit in a notebook which she keeps for rare events. To her surprise, she finds out that the birds flew over the prison on the same day last year. There is no map which Nourhan uses to track the route of the birds, nor can she watch them beyond what she can see when she stands on her tiptoes and stretches upwards. She nevertheless documents the birds” migration from one year to the next from the very same spot. Who, then, will document the misery of this world?

Outside the text, a quarrel between humanization and heroism takes place. Prisoners’ self-humanization is posed as a tradition that allows them to delve into their subjectivities and express themselves. It is also a means which enables detainees both to move forward and to stumble, and to speak eloquently as well as hesitantly. Humanizing turns the prisoner into a neighbor and a friend that others know and love; they leave their reflections in him, and he leaves them his message. Humanizing is thus essential against the cliche of slogans—but can it happen through the text?

In the absence of the conditions that give humans their humanity, there arises the necessity to summon valor. And when valor is rendered trite by eliminating its causes and persecuting it as provocation, there is also a need to summon valor, albeit without modesty. The valor we speak of is the highest lexicon of the psyche and one of its unintended manifestations. As a restoration of humanity, valor is what makes interrogations, prisoners’ transfer trucks, repression, and isolation sites for confrontation; it is your only plan against being rendered a monstrous object to be dragged and chained. Valor is your unyielding decision against all of theirs: where to sit, when to stand, when are you allowed to leave the cell for five hours and no more, when to take a bath, the ten TV channels you are allowed to watch, the books you can read, and the number of minutes you can see your mother. Valor is your refusal of these numbers and your refusal to be a number. And valor is the only answer to questions like: what explains prisoners’ steadfastness in incarceration one year after another, and what makes them wake up in the same place with the same things and people, even though each has a different program for each day?

Amal whispers to herself, and since the space is small, we can hear her: “We are steadfast because we’ve got nothing but steadfastness.” Despite her humble statement, Amal transforms existence each morning into something meaningful. Heroism is the bridge that connects the demands of women detainees for better living conditions—such as public telephones, removal of surveillance cameras, and tackling humidity—to their absolute refusal of prisons. It links the prisoners” dream of reclaiming the land to their inability to own the cell they live in or even to change the color of its walls. And by way of a summer’s joke, valor binds your desire to taste watermelon with your desire to taste freedom. Valor is the need to forge an opposite to today’s reality, to fashion an alternative paradigm, to create an imaginary that exceeds the tangible present. It is the prerequisite for a thread to bind our geographic, intellectual, and social dispersal … and to link the legacy with the future. Tahar Ouettar [the acclaimed Algerian writer who took part in the Algerian liberation struggle against French settler-colonialism] fears the return of martyrs, and he fears the martyrs and prisoners we recognize from the pictures where they anxiously look at their mothers” tears on the list of forbidden items.

The Prison’s Text

The prison has its own text and tune, which it dictates whenever the chance appears, and its willful text is its excessive presence. The prison is dumb for its rude explicitness and clever as it leaps ahead.

The space of the prison slips into the space of thought, for the prison is the breeding ground of small details; if the most imaginative of writers or artists were left before a single painting, they would become preoccupied by its details and wouldn’t be able to produce anything else.

Besides this, the prison imposes the amount of time you are forced to stay in your room, which is equal to the hours of your miserable awaking in the morning, your luck with transport, the hours of working and learning, the company of family and friends, and the time for neighborhood troubles and those of life. Therefore, the details and events here need to be magnified so they can cover the most time and compete with the events of the real world.

The prison imposes itself as a fact, which we reject entirely, although we get used to its details and sounds. With the passing of time, the cell becomes your “room” which you tend to with attention and care. All the women detainees, for instance, talk about their longing for the prison wing whenever they are taken to the court or the hospital, for they consider the wing their final stop and their image of comfort. They replace the meaning of the word tarweeha [“going back”] to indicate their return to the prison wing and not to their homes outside.

We can live in prison because we have distorted and infiltrated its meaning, refusing to let it be a “coffin.” We dress up each morning pretending the foura [one-hour permitted daily walk in the prison yard] is a trip. We imagine that when we are sitting on the stone steps we are seated on a balcony, and we prepare tea and seeds for it. The water bottles became dumbbells for the “gym” we opened. One of the rooms was turned into a theatre to celebrate our communal evenings, and a few books became a library.

The prison wants to isolate you from your people and your homeland, just as it wants to estrange you from your dream of believing “imprisonment” to be the resort of dreamers. It likewise wants to alienate you from fellow prisoners and their legacy by claiming that the withdrawal of any privilege is the result of other prisoners’ misuse of it. But you, enormously grateful, know that without the years of struggle and sacrifice, prison life would have never been bearable.

A Text on Loss

The moment you are arrested, you lose the supposed sequence of your life: an unfinished discussion; a book you’re reading; an appointment with a friend over tea tomorrow; your relation to your family and to your big and small projects. Remembering is the only thing you can do as an antithetical act to loss. The eponymous stranger in Albert Camus’s novel says: “a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored” (79).

In prison we can recall any scene and deconstruct it, and you will be surprised by your ability to recall things and events you didn’t pay attention to before. But after a while, you lose your ability to remember and to pretend to forget. At the beginning you think it’s a technique which you can switch on and off as you wish, but it suddenly scatters the features of your parents and of your home. Shorouq and Nourhan tell us how they trick their dreams by looking at their families’ photos before going to sleep so that they might enter their dreams. The other technique to defeat loss is to undermine its temporality, and to perceive it as a memory. Tomorrow everything will become a memory, and so you experience the prison as a dialogue—as stories and tales you tell the ones you love and long for.

Loss is not limited to losing our loved ones; we also lose the partial control we had over our lives. In prison, you lose your ability to be angry—that anger which is only evoked by your belief that nothing immediate will be able to change the course of things. You lose your quick access to information (Google) and can’t check simple information without extreme difficulty. On the one hand, you feel the significance and the difficulties of knowledge, as well as of change, which are far more serious than your own opinions and wishes. On the other, you feel the estrangement of the whole world when a song enters your mind and you can’t play it. You don’t only lose having control over your life, but you lose your reactions and emotions too; you can’t cry or be alone in such a small space.

Loss in prison is endless. You miss your parents the minute you finish writing them a letter, and so you continue to turn everything around you into a conversation with them. You lose every time you put down the phone in the visiting hall after you or one of your family members has said, “Don’t go.” We lose every time a prisoner we love is released, and when we leave through the last door of the prison. You lose friends that it becomes impossible to see or hear from for years. It is even impossible to see pictures of them as they get older inside the prison walls. It is impossible to invent a language to preserve the friendship and image from the scourge of distance, impossible to understand the peculiarity of what’s happening when today you ask a friend, “want to have tea?” and then tomorrow arrives and you do not see her again for ten years.

Loss is the constant fear that our loved ones will pass away while we are incarcerated, hence our relentless analysis of the cadence of their voices through the radio phone, as well as of their words, which we consider a puzzle to solve. True loss is that of your dearest loved one: your mother; your father; your sister; your brother; your son; your young daughter whose sudden departure will anguish the whole world … “and she will say goodbye to her with a rose.”

And while you live through the loss of the world, others live in your absence. You feel your mother kissing your picture and your father making sure you have a seat as he prepares the dining table. You blame yourself for your absence while they overwhelm themselves with worry over it. You also exaggerate, and things get mixed up in your head. Moments shouldn’t be generalized or projected into the whole experience. You don’t know if you’re the one who’s away from the goings-on of the world or if it’s the world that has disappeared because you can’t see it anymore. And in the midst of it all, you are unaware if it’s because of delirium or snobbery that time stops at the date of your detention and that you feel the shortness or length of events according to that date, and you estimate people’s age the same way too.

Many prisoners were shocked when they saw their siblings” and children’s faces, because “they grew up too much.”

You are dispossessed of the most intimate familial moments; some prisoners can’t discern who the children in the family pictures are. And you are missing from the public events which you watch with enthusiasm from inside the prison—except for the war, which will always make you feel weak and helpless. Your incarceration, and that you are “paying the price for your freedom,” will not at all lessen your feeling of powerlessness. This is the case for Nisreen, whose children live under bombardment as she watches the war terrified of a possible strike that will change this unbearable life.

Not only are you away from your family and your homeland, but the prison itself is removed and exiled from the planet and its geographic and environmental contexts too. The biggest of lies is to see the prison as an address: we are in Haifa, but we don’t see it; we are on this ground where trees and flowers grow but we don’t watch them, and where animals live but we can’t look at them. A cat visited us from time to time. The degree of love we had for her was disputed and controversial despite Yasmeen’s desperate efforts to make the cat popular. We were nonetheless happy that a living being had infiltrated the walls to see us and that we could see her in return. The poor cat, however, unintentionally exposed gaps in the fence, so they were “fixed,” and she stopped visiting. That cat would remain our last proof that we were on the same planet as her, even as she sometimes glanced at us from above the fence without crossing it.

What helps to fill the void created by loss is the letters we write. We have to be mindful when writing them of the way they will be received; happiness over the most trivial matters is omitted because it reveals your scant and precarious life. And of course, there is your family’s voice through the radio: “We need nothing but your presence’, which is the unusual response to the question, “How are you?” to which the answer is typically, “We are fine as long as you are fine.” Another phrase of solace is, “The prison doors will eventually open.” Fighting against loss is also when Nourhan’s dad, after receiving her sentence letter with a date of release years in the future, told her with incomprehensible sincerity and devotion during a visit that some prisoners received their letters with the box of the release date marked with nothing but zeros: 0-0-0000.

The worst thing about loss—the thing that language cannot erase—is when conversational subjects disappear, and our capacity to keep up with events outside and to narrate what happens here, however rare, shrinks. It is being clueless about when this loss will be over, or worse, reaching a point where you fear its end and are afraid of coming face to face with a life you have forgotten and which in turn has forgotten you, as if you had never existed: “You are not the same anymore, and nor is home.”

A Final Text on Loss

I am now in prison.

Nourhan is placing a chair in the middle of the room to comb Yasmeen’s hair, who is passionately describing to Nourhan what has changed in Jerusalem. Aisha and Israa are sitting on the threshold of the room greeting those in the courtyard and drinking coffee. Malak is spinning in her new dress after a visit from her mother. Malak’s face, untouched by life’s blows, still holds its baby features. Rawan describes what’s in front of her, and everything she says becomes poetry without her realizing it. Anhar is walking back and forth through the yard, her hand on her belly and expected baby. Shorouq is celebrating her twenty-fourth birthday by writing a letter to her mother, and Kitham is teaching the ladies needlework while listening to them speak about their worries in life.

Now, I say goodbye to the prison and the text—the prison which, for me, acquired features and characteristics and became associated with people and narratives. It is not my departure that is sad. Rather, sadness is that the prison remains, regardless of whether I know the women inside it or not. Misery is the existence of prisons, even if everyone were released.

I also say goodbye to this text, which remained faithful despite its powerlessness.

Notes

Layan Kayed was re-arrested by the Occupation Forces in the early hours of 7 April 2024, from her home in Ramallah, the Occupied West Bank.

Works Cited

1. AP News. “Nighttime Israeli Arrests Haunt Palestinian Kids, Families.” 13 Jan. 2023. Accessed 12 Dec. 2023.
2. Camus, Albert. The Stranger. 1942. Translated by Matthew Ward. Knopf, 1988.
3. CNN. “Who are the Palestinian Prisoners on Israel’s List for Potential Release?” 24 Nov. 2023. Accessed 12 Dec. 2023.
4. Darwish, Mahmoud. “‘An Insan [On Man].” Awraq al-Zaytun [Leaves of Olives]. Matba‘at al-Ittihad al-Ta‘awuniyya, 1964.
5. UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council). “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese.” 9 June 2023. Accessed 12 Dec. 2023.

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Top: Family and friends of Layan Kayed receive her outside the gate of the zionist Salem checkpoint, in the West Bank city of Jenin, Thursday, September 9, 2021. Kayed was released from the Damon prison after having been held hostage for fifteen months. Photo by Nasser Nasser.

Below: Layan Kayed just after her release from a month of interrogation in a zionist prison, July 3, 2023.

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