There are no books published about women prisoners except rarely, and no literature talks about the suffering of women prisoners. Prison literature, which intersects with "Serthati" literature, often reduces the political prisoner to men. Women's prisons remained closed to her secrets and anonymous neglects with a few exceptions with Nawal Al-Saadawi in her book "An ambit other than female prisoners" and "My Diaries in the Women's Prison", or with Zainab Al-Ghazali in the "Days of My Life" in which her memoirs were recounted, or Malika Oufkir who recorded her life in Hassan II Prison and published it entitled "The Prisoner".
Perhaps that scarcity of writing about the suffering of imprisoned women in the Arab world is not related to the scarcity of the prison experience, but to the nature of Arab societies that remain conservative and where women demand concealment instead of exposing their torturers. Film makers rarely convinced ex-female prisoners to tell their experience boldly and without pruning. On the other hand, the imagination was not bolder or interested in these silent experiences, as it has also excluded the approach of these bitter experiences, and we will not understand that marginalization as a reason, and the absence of the document is one of the justifications for this shortcoming in this field of literature.
However, the Tunisian novelist Samir Sassi, in his third novel, "The House of Annakish", published by Sotemedia House in Tunisia, tried to storm this dark building of this dark city made up of women's prisons, to write the suffering of Tunisian women prisoners under the previous regime.
The origin of the text is a coincidence
Contrary to his novel "Burj Al-Roumi", in which Samir Sassi started from a special experience in Tunisian prisons, to narrate the story of the opposing prisoner Fakhr al-Din, which intersects closely with the image of the author. women.
We read in textual thresholds through the writer's statements that Al-Qaddah in writing this novel is a news that the writer read in a newspaper about the death of a female prisoner after she was released from prison because of torture.
This character prompted Sassi to research the matter and collect a number of live testimonies about her material into a literary work; The novel from this angle falls within the so-called documentary narration, which is preoccupied with an issue, crime, or a group of crimes. And the crime here is what female Islamists were subjected to in Tunisian detention centers in the 1990s.
In the novel, Sassi tries to erase the boundaries of the document with the boundaries of imagination, so you are hardly guided by the event of imagination or the person of the character, by dissolving the reference in the imagined story.
Brutal name
The house of Laanaksh (thus pronounced colloquially) is the dungeon in which female prisoners who have been sentenced to death or life sentence from female prisoners of public right are brought together with female prisoners of the Islamic trend.
And Anakish in the colloquial Tunisian means the necks of birds, those neglected parts of chicken in slaughterhouses and a lot of people throw them for cats and dogs, a designation that reflects the violence of the language that the despotic regime envisages in dealing with detention centers.
The launching of this name and its circulation among the people represents the first forms of terrorism practiced by the security services through language, before reaching physical torture. Spiders here are the necks of women awaiting execution.
The most terrible violence we practice in the daily circulation is to write off the name of science from the human and call it to the animal, and here the prisoners are stripped of their humanity and attached to the remains of birds and animals. The truth is that political torture in Tunisia and the Arab world depends a lot on this dictionary related to skinning and cooking chicken. The most common torture practiced on prisoners is what is known as “roti”, which has become a popular situation for those who lived in prison and those who did not live, which is to place a roast chicken in a skewer Iron because of its achievement of the goal of humiliation and insult desired.
Speaking about this method, Maryam (one of the characters of the female prisoner novel) said, describing the situation of the chicken: "The old guard loves to put the chicken in torture, as they have salt in the food, they precipitate it to every expatriate and do not care about its gender, they are scarred by the blue when they raise the face of the prisoner to recede blood About him with a rope of bonds, and with a blue in his hand and in all his body, and they search like beasts for what satisfies their instinct when the expatriate is female, in which what they think drives their victim to silence and confession. Without mercy was the routine.
A group biography of female prisoners in Tunisian detention centers
The novel is a collective biography of Tunisian women prisoners, Jamila, Khadija, Maryam, Laila, Mona and Nour. Each one tells the story of her arrest and takes turns recounting the common participant from their torture in prison through torture and abuse of the executioners and other female prisoners. The “ruler” - as the narrators call it - used to master their torture from verbal to physical abuse, and seeks to destroy everything that is intimate to them. By stripping them of their headscarves, tearing their school clothes, undressing them, and beating them, and using terrible methods, "Calvontos", which tightens their breasts until they rot and are attacked by diseases and cancer.
In addition to using female prisoners from other levels in their space as prostitutes, to harass them and destroy them psychologically, in addition to what the prison headmaster is doing to them, the fierce and big woman.
The novel is not concerned with violence against women, but rather with the violence of the institution against affiliated detainees, because women in the novel represent part of that violence imposed on them through female prisoners, overseers and female guards.
Just as the regime controls the citizens of criminals outside the prisons, it does not need the intervention of the police except rarely, but rather they are assigned dirty tasks until recently; He also used the help of violent female prisoners or patients, such as the mentally ill prisoner "Filta", because she killed her mother, to abuse the beautiful innocent girl who was thrown into the house of Aknak with monsters, according to the novel.
A traditional language that tends towards pragmatism
This novel, which did not exceed 140 pages, appears to be coherent and constructed according to a clear narrative program developed by the writer to distribute the text to the characters, and the knowledgeable narrator through a smart adventure ranging from the art of confessions on the one hand, which takes us to the worlds of autobiographical writing from notes and diaries to imaginative writing based on the principle of playing, cutting and setting And postponement.
Samir Sassi also proposed the language of his narration of religious heritage and narrative heritage, which is in harmony with the topics of the novel he writes, and with its heroes and their ideological and cultural affiliations, without neglecting that the writer states more than once that he belongs to what is called "Islamic literature".
However, the language in the novel “House of Anakish” seemed less allegorical and symbolic than its predecessors, and approached the pragmatic language required in the writing of the novel, and perhaps the borrowed language in his novel “Burj Al-Roumi” was one of the constraints of imprisonment and censorship that pursued every written within the prison.
It remained that this language, which remained a language refraining from accurately conveying the linguistic and material facts, but rather was saying it in hints, as Sassi sometimes chose not to convey scenes of torture, nor scenes of rape, nor did he transmit language violence, but rather spoke about it.
The narrators remained conservative, and the novelist says in a radio interview with him that he chose this and chose to decorate the ugliness and not transfer it, so he pleaded with literary language, something that is discussed in writing the novel that most theorists know about it as a literary practice that aims to delude realism.
Therefore, the novelist tries to dress himself with his characters and release their tongues to them in what the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called "the fundamental" that allows the appearance of levels of language according to the moral, cultural and social levels of their owners, so that the image becomes clear and the meaning appears, especially since this type of narration is based mainly on the idea of shaming, exposing Methods of repression and levels of violence against a political opponent or his family.
The metaphor that the novelist got rid of in this work compared to his previous texts, has jumped from metaphor in the language to the image and the event, so we became in front of a metaphor at a time when we need scenery, and if the scene appeared a diminished reality.
The truth is to avoid direct transmission here on the grounds that literature is coded and inspired and that it is not necessary to rewrite the scenes with their details, and that this is not a matter of literature, it is not true; Because the novelist is performing an imaginary process, he did not attend these scenes, and from there, it is represented in his mind and text, which is at the heart of the imaginary process itself, to reveal the brutality of the police work in these systems.
If the novelist succeeded in passing from poetry and symbolism - a poet - in his new work towards linguistic pragmatism, he did not pass with him towards the required linguistic pluralism, so the work remained predominantly monologic.
Indeed, such texts re-ask the question of what literary itself is. Some writers - including apparently Samir Sassi - see that the literary of the text is borrowed language and rise from the language of commoners, and that literature has to be written in an eloquent and rhetorical language, and another party adopts an opposition idea The literary work in the novel is illustrated by the novelist's ability to reincarnate and manage that linguistic diversity from rhetoric in classical to resonant and dialects.
Ideological and humanitarian start
It seems that the distance between the pain of experience and reading reality began to be formed in the experience of Samir Sassi through the personality of the uncle of Ahmad, head of the Guard Center, the first hand of power to capture opponents. In prison literature, without a desire for revenge, the head of the center is nothing but another victim of the police system that pushes him to execute orders, and he performed them reluctantly and with much pain at times.
However, it seemed to us that the novelist deals cautiously with both directions in the so-called political Islam and their reading of the religious text, as the Sheikh of the mountain, with his salafi and literal reading of the text, remained far from the goal of criticizing Abdullah, the representative of the renewed Islamic trend, dealing with him with caution without taking from him a decisive stance, even though Khattab The sheikh of the hardline mountain is the pretext of the regime in abusing Islamists.
It remains to be noted that Samir Sassi opened an important chapter in the Tunisian novel and in prison literature, which is the world of female prisoners, after he made an important addition to prison literature in general in his secret novel "Borj El Roumi".
He revealed the atrocity of a system abused by youth and did not exclude the female, hitting the wall of laws, ethics and religion in our dealings with women, to claim a beautiful and innocent soul due to brutal torture.
Will he do so in his next novel, "The Madness of a Great Man", and breaks that barrier between the ideologically close and fundamentally different personalities, and leaves it room for her to wrestle without fear that she will be weakened against other currents? Does the imagination of the owner of the "Rumi tower" relieve his fear of passing the novelist from the captivity of ideology to the spaciousness of the human idea? As happened with the great Uruguayan writer Carlos Lescano?
Or is it that Samir Sassi still needs other texts to settle his account with his prison experience and other heterogeneous experiences, and it is still not time to settle the account with the ideological experience as some of the novelists did when they wrote their reviews of their left and nationalist affiliations, such as Ali Mesbah in “Saint Denis” And “Haret Al-Safha’a” and Khair al-Din Jumah in the novel “Chase Pages”? But is the writer inevitably required to really get out of his own convictions to please everyone? Does the demand for societal coexistence withdraw from literary and artistic speeches?