The cover art for MER issue 312, “Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams,” is titled “Suspended Souls,” by Egyptian artist Yassin Mohamed.

It depicts a scene from the third and fourth floors of Ward B in Egypt’s maximum security Tora prison in 2017, where the artist was imprisoned.

Serving two sentences of almost four years for his participation in the revolutionary uprisings that began in 2011, Mohamed used ink pen and paper to pass the time while in prison and capture his day-to-day life. As he has described it, “I used to draw what was happening in the cell around me. How I lived, how I ate, how I drank. Just my life. It was like my diary, but instead of writing it, I would draw it.”[1] His sketches were smuggled out by family members in food containers and kept for him until his release in September of 2018. In its material existence, then, the image represents both carceral realities and freedom dreams.

Various elements of the image also evoke the themes of this issue. The monotonous beige, the overwhelming presence of bars, the emptiness, all point to the oppression of confinement, to a sense of being suspended (as the image title states) in space and time. To quote the artist again, “Prison is all waiting.”[2] But the blue clothes hanging beyond the bars and the plants growing between them are signs of life. They do not just gesture to life beyond the prison but hint at how resistance to the slow death of imprisonment can be enacted within the carceral reality of prison itself. “When I would see people playing chess in prison, sitting around entertaining themselves, passing the time—to me that scene is beautiful so I drew it,” Mohamed has said. “When I saw people using the seeds from their meals to plant vegetables or fruits in cut-out egg cartons or cups and taking care of their plants every day, that’s something I drew.”[3]

This issue of Middle East Report, Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams, has been produced in partnership with the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Security in Context.

Read the first article in MER issue 312 “Carceral Realities & Freedom Dreams.”

Endnotes

[1] “‘Prison Everywhere Is the Same:’ An Interview with Artist Yassin Mohamed,” Inkstick, May 2, 2024.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.