An insider’s view

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An insider’s view

Tuesday, 09 October 2018 | AP

An insider’s view

Dissenter Yassin Mohammed turned painter to beat away  boredom since 2013, when he was sent to prison in Egypt

In Yassin Mohammed’s sketches and paintings, he and other Egyptian prisoners are crammed into tiny cells, feet in each other’s faces and their few belongings hanging from the walls.

The cramped scenes, defined by bars and closed cell doors, capture the claustrophobic reality of Egypt’s prisons, where tens of thousands have been locked away, often for months or years without charge, in the heaviest crackdown on dissent in the country’s modern history. “One day, all this pain will go away,” one watercolour proclaims.

Mohammed, who walked free last month after serving a two-year sentence for taking part in a protest, chronicled daily life in his cellblock offering an intimate look inside Egypt’s prison network. He has been in and out of prison since 2013, when the military overthrew a freely elected but divisive Islamist president. Since then, thousands of Islamists have been jailed, as well as a number of secular, pro-democracy activists.     Under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who as defence minister led the 2013 military takeover, authorities view even mild dissent as a threat.

For the two years he was in prison, Mohammed shared a 6by15-meter (yard) cell with nearly 30 inmates — Islamists, jihadis, liberal leftists and people who were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Mohammed says he wasn’t physically abused, other than occasionally being pushed or slapped by guards. He says the real torment was the unending boredom and lack of privacy. His only escape was through art. He managed to paint in a corner of his cell where the guards couldn’t see him. Fearing that the guards would destroy the art if they found it, he smuggled the paintings out.

One piece that landed him in trouble was an unflattering caricature of el-Sissi, which guards seized in a surprise raid on his cell. Prison authorities chose not to press charges, instead sending him to solitary confinement. A self-portrait inspired by that experience shows him sitting in the corner of a gray-black cell, slumped in resignation as a solitary ray of sunlight shines through the barred window.

In another painting, cardboard boxes turned into flower planters hang from the iron bars above a corridor. Mohammed says the prisoners save the cardboard boxes that their families use to deliver food and gather soil from sacks of potatoes they get from the prison’s kitchen. “Plants and flowers there are like life in the midst of death,” said Mohammed.

Since his release on September 20, he has been traveling across Cairo collecting the works he smuggled out. He would like to put on an exhibition of some 50 pieces, but Egypt’s few remaining art galleries are unlikely to display his work for fear of angering authorities.

Instead, he plans to display them in his apartment in downtown Cairo.

“I don’t want to go back to prison. It does not take much these days to be sent to prison,” he said. “So, I will silently listen, watch and observe, and when I feel like I want to express a political opinion, I will talk to myself while alone in the privacy of my room.”

 

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