Day 250

In a Facebook post from 2012, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who had just spent time in Tora prison, south of Cairo, begs us not to accept as normal the fact of someone, anyone, being in prison. Insist, he urges, that prison is not normal.

Laila Soueif never normalised her son’s incarceration. Through three arrests and three trials she fought for him in the courts, in legal depositions, appeals, marches, protests. For more than ten years my sister and our family have existed within the parameters into which having someone in prison moulds your life. Then, on 29 September 2024, she effectively pushed away the board, the dice, the cards, the whole set of games the state had trapped us in for over a decade, and stepped away from the table; I’m tired, she said, tired and bored of these games stacked against us. No more. She declared a hunger strike. Laila had given ten years of her life to fighting for her son, and now, in what she decided would be the final act of the fight, she put her life on the line.

A friend tried to explain to me why Trump, Iran and Gaza meant it was not the right moment to embark on such an action. ‘She chose to start,’ I said, ‘the day they did not release Alaa after he’d finished the second five-year sentence.’

‘Then we are in the realm of poetry,’ he said, ‘not politics.’

It’s also the realm of logic and probability – and Laila is a mathematician. When the system is against you, it’s not going to allow you any real means to fight it. Alaa’s latest stretch in prison started in September 2019 when he was kidnapped from inside the police station where – under a surveillance order – he was spending his nights. After a few months, with the Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, the prison withheld his letters. Laila camped outside the prison gates. Her daughters, Mona and Sanaa, joined her and thugs were sent to beat them up. She went to lodge a complaint with the public prosecutor and Sanaa, her youngest and the most badly injured, was abducted from the prosecutor’s door, tried and sentenced to a year and a half in prison. When the authorities eventually, in December 2021, got round to trying Alaa, the court withheld the case files from his lawyers till he was sentenced – to five years. When September 2024 ended without his release, his lawyers lodged legal memoranda – but Laila quietly binned the master’s tools.

The state has robbed Alaa of his thirties; of that intense decade of work and pleasure and achievement, of raising children and making your mark on the world. Laila has countered the magnitude of that injustice with an act of comparable magnitude: she is ready to pay for her son’s coming decades with whatever is left of her own life.

Everyone who knows Laila knew that once she had announced the strike she would see it through. The accusative case, in Arabic grammar, has a starkly descriptive name: the done-to. My sister has never, in all the years I’ve known her, consented to be parsed as a done-to; she will twist and turn until she finds the action that restores her agency. It’s a trait she shares with her son. Alaa, in the glass cabin of the prison visiting room, through the crackly handset, asked if hers was a ‘decision decision’. When she said yes he knew not to argue. He resolved his own need for agency by joining his mother’s strike the day she was first hospitalised. He has now been 98 days without nutrition.

Most hunger strikes are undertaken by prisoners. But unlike Alaa, unlike the 9000-plus Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israel now, unlike Bobby Sands and his comrades in the 1980s, Laila is able to play out her drama in public. Announcing a hunger strike that she will end only if her son is released, she stepped away from a labyrinth of dark paths, dead ends and treacherous undergrowth into a space of sunlight. A hunger strike is not just an act of protest, it is an act charged with the hope that it will cause change, it will bring something to pass, and it fell to the family and friends who quickly gathered round her, to the campaign they created, to amplify her action, to make political capital out of it, to insist that this dramatic act of resistance will produce a result in the world of politics: will win Alaa his liberty.

A small movement has formed around my sister. A groundswell of public support in Egypt expresses itself through letters, messages and appeals. In Paris, Berlin, Rome and Washington DC, there have been protests and readings from Alaa’s book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. In London there is a vigil every evening at seven. People bring flowers and children’s drawings: they speak of her and of their own prisoners in countries around the world, and they form a web of understanding and solidarity that stretches far beyond their spot at her hospital door.

Inside, 250 days into her strike, Laila moves between a bed and a wheelchair. Once robust and stormlike, she is now small and frail. She has lost 41 per cent of her body weight. Her blood sugar levels have dropped to a point where nobody understands why she hasn’t passed out. But her grip on consciousness and conscience remains firm.

A few days ago, when her blood sugar dropped more steeply, she explained it was because she’d stopped sucking some lozenges that were helping with the taste of her mouth. She’d discovered they had a trace of sugar in them.

‘We need you to hold on for a bit longer,’ I said, ‘so just suck the stupid lozenges.’

‘I can’t do it.’ She paused. ‘I can’t cheat myself.’

So I sit by her bed. We talk. I wheel her out into the fresh air. I am part of a hive that is busy around her, but we are sisters and we have known each other the longest. Sometimes now I confuse her with our mother. Sometimes I panic. Sometimes, away from her, when people talk to me, my tears startle us. I wonder a lot: about how her three children will do without her, about travelling with her on a plane back to Cairo, about the size of the crowds that will come to offer angry condolences and respect, about whether she would have embarked on this enterprise if her husband, Ahmad Seif, had not died in 2014 – a year into Alaa and Sanaa’s first imprisonment. I wonder. But mostly I try to pump out hope, hope that all the work and all the heart that have gone into her campaign will bear fruit soon, very soon; hope that we will see Alaa outside the prison gates, hope that Laila will get through rehabilitation without the refeeding killing her, hope that we will spend this coming summer by the sea, surrounded by our grandchildren.