Imprisoned for His Writing, Ahmed Naji Found Freedom in Literature

For my millennial generation of Arabic writers, Ahmed Naji is a name we associate with play and risk. Naji is a practitioner of humor and sarcasm, profanity and sex positivity, all interwoven with a politics of despair. He is terrified of melancholia and nostalgia, but through this fear, a close reader can feel the warm presence of a vulnerable man. At the age of 40, his career consists of many chapters already: an anonymous blogger, a cultural journalist, a music and arts critic, a novelist, and now a memoirist as well.

In February 2016, Naji was sentenced to two years in prison for “violating public decency” with his novel Using Life. In his new memoir Rotten Evidence, he recounts his experience of incarceration. In honor of PEN International’s annual Day of the Imprisoned Writer, I talked with Naji about life in prison, the many personas of memoir, and about the debates on incarceration and literature in Egypt.

Mona Kareem: There is a rich tradition of prison . What made you decide to write about your prison experience in the memoir form instead of the novel? A reader can notice that your memoir, at a certain