Galal El-Behairy is an Egyptian poet and 2025 PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award honoree who has been in jail since March 2018 for his poetry and song lyrics. Following the completion of his initial three-year sentence, he has been held in what amounts to indefinite pretrial detention by Egyptian authorities. This letter was shared with PEN America on August 8, 2025 and translated by PEN America staff.
Eighty-eight months, maybe a little more…
A whole lifetime, wasted. A child born seven years ago would by now know the name of everything, maybe even the names of a few stars and planets. He’d have his own dreams by now: to grow a mustache, to become a doctor, or a firefighter.
A lifetime in isolation, moving from one prison to another, from one stone-hearted jailer to an indifferent one, from one judge with no role to play to another with just as little.
My beard has gone gray, the flame in my heart has burned out, and so many feathers of the imagination have fallen away that flying itself is now nothing but a vague, distant memory.
Was I ever truly free? Or has this been my life since my very first cry at birth?
A question that might seem naïve, yet it strikes me on so many mornings that it almost feels entirely reasonable.
I was never truly happy… but I was full of ambition, charged with revolution and anger at the meager little I had managed to accomplish in the twenty-seven years before this wretched journey began. And it still hasn’t ended, even now that I’ve reached the age of thirty-five. Is that number even real?
I lost a professional life that once seemed so promising, so full of potential. Friends scattered like autumn leaves. And the beautiful woman, with a bright face and a heart wide enough to hold both earth and sky, withered like a rose plucked mid-journey, choosing to depart rather than die of longing, waiting for a “Godot” who would never, ever come.
This is not exactly a plea for life, nor a request to be saved, it’s simply an unburdening, confined to what a paper tissue can hold, or to the five millimeters of ink left in this smuggled pen. A pen that, outside, could buy a hundred like it, yet here is almost never—never—found. And that is why I write now.
This hunger strike began on June 16, not for freedom. What is “freedom,” anyway?
Not for the stolen years, with all their possibilities and what-ifs, no one, as far as I know, can ever give them back.
No, it is for simpler, more attainable things:
For a real pen and a stack of writing paper.
For the right to a long-delayed medical procedure to remove a small tumor, no bigger than a grape, from inside my mouth.
For the right not to beg and grovel just to be allowed a book—any book—during a visit, even if it’s a children’s story.
For the guarantee that my parents will not be subjected to crude, animal-like searches, sniffing, groping, and stripping before they’re allowed to see me.
For the chance to be moved from under the mercy of a sadistic, deranged officer to a prison that is not a torture chamber, not a place of isolation, as has been the fate of so many before me.
It is for these “trivialities” that I refuse food, skip court sessions, and turn away from the pills meant to regulate my racing heartbeat (not for any physical ailment, the doctors say, but for “psychological” ones), as well as the pills prescribed to treat those very psychological wounds.
Galal El-Behairy
Badr 1 “Torture Center”
July 2025
