Boring courses, intense activism, arrests, a journey, a return, and then activism once more. The result: failing grades in eight out of ten subjects (the two subjects in which I passed my examinations were unrelated to the field in which I had chosen to specialise); the other result was less ruinous — or, let us say, more usefuclass="underline" my having taken refuge in cooking gave me a skill that, if worse came to worst, might qualify me for work as a cook, and in fact for better pay than that of an engineer just starting out on a career!
My father was angry about my failure and upbraided me severely. Hamdiya came to my defence: ‘Let her alone, for heaven’s sake — what a rough year she’s had! Those arrests, the anxiety, the fear, a trip she hadn’t expected or prepared for — what is she, made of stone?’ She patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘God willing, you’ll pass with distinction next year.’
But that ‘next year’ in which my father’s wife looked forward to my distinguished performance came with its own surprises and distractions. I switched to the College of Humanities, and my studies in the French Department, in which I had enrolled, seemed easy, since I was fluent in French and loved literature, finishing in two or three nights reading assignments that it took some of my classmates weeks to understand. But I didn’t pass with distinction — in fact, most of my subjects I barely passed at all; two of them I actually failed, and had to repeat them the following term.
It was a year replete with interesting developments, starting with the appearance of three students from the College of Medicine before the disciplinary board on charges of having written for the wall newspapers, of contacting other groups of students, and of causing unrest. Then fifty-two students were taken into custody. So we began concerted action in seeking an appeal and the students’ release, as well as an assurance that further roundups wouldn’t prevent us from continuing to voice our demands. We held meetings, issued statements, contacted the unions, and staged another sit-in at Cairo University’s Central Celebration Hall. Classmates of ours from the College of Engineering and the College of Medicine at Ain Shams University held sit-ins as well. Then they moved the sit-in to the Za‘faran Palace, the seat of Ain Shams University’s administration. There was another roundup.
This time I didn’t go to France.
The knock on the door at dawn.
My father woke me up. He whispered, ‘Do you have any papers here?’ I gave him the papers. He took them, folded them, leapt lightly and calmly on to a chair, and hid some of them in the wooden frame around the glass of the door to the balcony, while others he concealed in the window frame, in the slight crack into which the pane of glass was inserted. Then he whispered in my ear as he turned to open the door, ‘Deny everything, even things you think don’t matter, and refuse to talk unless a lawyer is present.’
He opened the door. Two men in civilian clothes entered (later it became clear that they were officers), followed by three soldiers or informants. Three men in police uniforms stayed by the door, holding rifles at the ready. They searched the house, but found nothing. One of the officers said, ‘We’ll take her for just an hour or two.’
My father went quickly into my bedroom and returned with a small suitcase into which he had put a few everyday items for me.
As I was getting ready to leave, I said, ‘I won’t need the case, since I won’t be staying with them more than an hour or two.’
‘Take the case!’
I didn’t notice Hamdiya there until she placed her own coat around my shoulders, with a large woollen shawl over it. She said, ‘Look after yourself.’ Her face was red, and wet with tears.
My father escorted me to the door of the building, where two police cars were waiting. They put me into one of them.
I hadn’t been afraid when they were coming into the house and searching it, nor did the appearance of the two armed security officers standing by the door of the flat frighten me, nor the three armed men I found unexpectedly at the bottom of the stairs near the entrance of the building. But when I was sitting between the two officers who had taken me in, watching the dark, deserted streets, I was engulfed all at once by a feeling that I was suffocating. I asked the one sitting to my right to open the car window. I didn’t tell him that I needed air in order to breathe, but this was in fact the case, no exaggeration.
Chapter ten
The Panopticon
It is fitting for me to open this chapter by explaining the title, which may seem cryptic and elusive, as well as hard to pronounce. Pan/opticon is Greek, actually a compound word the first of whose two components means ‘all’ or ‘the whole of’, while the second means ‘vision’ or ‘observation’. The expression is a term used by the English thinker Jeremy Bentham, in a report on prison reform which he published at the end of the eighteenth century. Bentham suggested that prisons be constructed so as to allow segregation of the prisoners, and surveillance of all of them by one or several guards. It was an economic project that would ensure through architectural methods a reduction in the cost of consolidating power whose hold on a large number of individuals requires dealing with them collectively.
The proposed prison would have a circular building consisting of several levels. On each level would be a number of adjacent individual cells, and at its centre would be a guard tower assuring continuous surveillance of all the prisoners, for each cell would extend lengthwise to the innermost portion of the building, from the façade looking toward the core housing the tower, to the outside wall of the prison. Each cell would have two openings, the first an iron-barred aperture looking on to the tower, and the second a window in the opposite wall to allow light to penetrate the cell so that the prisoner would be visible throughout the day to the guard on duty in the tower. Bentham suggested that the windows of the tower, in contrast to the cell windows, be enclosed with wooden screens, enabling the guards to see without being seen. He likewise proposed a design that would lay out the tower rooms in something much like a small labyrinth, preventing the prisoners from knowing by either sight or sound the position of the guard or in which direction he was looking. Thus it was all the same whether the guard was present or absent, whether he was conducting surveillance or not, for the presence of the guard would be a reality that the prisoners would internalise — it would be foremost in their consciousness and govern their conduct over the course of each day.
Bentham was well aware of the psychological and economic value of his invention, which he described as ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’.
Bentham’s idea was regarded as a clear model for reform and was implemented in the construction of prisons, hospitals, schools, and factories; I encountered it in the course of reading another book sent to me by my mother when I was in the fourth year at university — Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
From Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’, Foucault borrowed a metaphorical representation of the relationship between power and the citizens in modern society, and how power permeates their lives, to the point where it becomes a part of their very being, ruling them from within as well as from without.