There is a particular quality to the friendships we don’t remember choosing. Two years ago, also in April, I stood at the back of the packed living room of Laila Soueif’s apartment, familiar to many who have shown up in solidarity with Alaa Abd El Fattah in recent years. Laila was hosting a poetry reading, a makeshift book launch of Curly, a collection of poems by Ahmed Douma, an activist and former political prisoner. The book had been banned by the behemoth of the state. I heard Douma read in Arabic. I had spent the better part of a decade in the United States, and the sound of it felt like stepping into water you didn’t know you’d been missing.
I knew of Douma, of course, but I didn’t know him, at least not personally. By the end of the evening, he had made it seem like we had always known each other, and I went along with it, gratefully, the way you go along with something true.
He is always bright-eyed, unguarded, with something of a child in his sincerity and of a clown in his political piercingness. He works a room with disarming openness. His performativity is translucent. You see straight through his mannerism. His moral courage is clarifying, a mirror in its capacity to reflect. There is no opacity between gesture and meaning. This, I figure, is what Hannah Arendt meant by disclosure: the capacity, through speech and presence, to reveal who one is rather than merely what one does or belongs to.
This is not the disclosure of confession, nor the consuming intimacy that fuses and dissolves, but something rarer: a kind of radical availability to the world and to the people in it.
Arendt distinguishes friendship from love precisely on these grounds. Love, she argues, dissolves the space between people. It consumes. Friendship maintains the distance, holds the between-space open, and it is in that space, kept alive by speech, by attention, by showing up, that something like a shared world becomes possible. This is why she finds in friendship a political category, not merely a personal one. To be someone’s friend is to insist that the world between you is real, worth tending to, worth the labor of return.
Even though it feels like a lifelong friendship, to me, Douma is a “new” friend. Ours is scaffolded by our mutual relationship to Alaa and to writing and has been spurred on by a shared — embodied, political, intellectual — interest in natality. Though our commitment to that interest has taken very different forms. Last year, Douma wrote a two-part essay, “A battle I lost and the lady won,” in which he writes about his desire for fatherhood during his years of imprisonment, the fantasies around reproductive technology, Palestinian prisoners as model and inspiration, the hesitations, the failures, the near-surrenders. Arendt’s concept of natality, “the human capacity to begin,” which we disagree on how to translate (wilada or mawludiyya), runs quietly underneath the essays and our conversations, without ever being named. The child Douma once wanted when he couldn’t was not only, or not even really, a child. He just wanted a beginning, a claim on the future made from inside a present designed to foreclose on it.
He was arrested two days ago, and I find myself returning to the ominousness of conversations in which I, a firm advocate of planning ahead and bracing for the worst, would occasionally encourage him to freeze his sperm, the way a generation of women has been told to freeze their eggs, to hold something in reserve against a future that keeps receding.
But what strikes me today, returning to these particular essays, as I sit with the possibility and imminent risk of his continued detention, is how much they are also about friendship, about who can hold another person’s interior life and who cannot. The desire at the center of these texts is a desire for natality in the most literal sense: to father a child from inside detention, to smuggle something of himself past the walls, to insist on a future when the present has become unbearable. Who held the desire with him and who couldn’t? There was Alaa, his lifelong comrade, who talked it through with him in the early days of their detention together — the only one who did, while the others accused him of selfishness, a verdict he tried on himself, somedays, too. There was the Palestinian comrade, a freed prisoner, who offered to share his decision. There were the prison companions who argued philosophy without knowing what was actually at stake, debating the ethics of the idea in the abstract, while he defended a position whose emotional core he never disclosed. And there was the unnamed woman, whom he had wished would be the mother of his child, who came as an apparition and found only a haunting when she arrived. He was by then an impression, an anxiety scattered across messages, a presence without a body. She couldn’t hold what is unholdable. And after her, he stopped trying altogether. How can the new be born from this? Each of these figures marks a different threshold of holding, of how much of someone’s interior life we are capable of carrying, how much we are willing to enter the difficulty of another, and what it costs us when we cannot.
What I take for granted, most days, is this: that the people I love are reachable, that the friendship is not a document of something that was, but a living practice of address. Douma’s essays are, among other things, a record of what incarceration does to that practice, not only the severing, but the slow erosion of the capacity to believe the world outside is still there, still warm, still capable of receiving you.
Shortly after Douma was released from prison, where he spent nearly 12 years of his life before a presidential pardon granted him freedom in August 2023, he began to be summoned and resummoned and resummoned for questioning before the State Security Prosecution. This week marks the seventh time he has been summoned. The accusation is by now a cliché: “spreading false news.” They ask about an article about prison lighting, a post, a testimony. And across them all the cumulative bail mounts, the pattern never changes. It is always a kind of dress-up game. He showed up once wearing a Panama hat. He has sworn, more than once, that the next time he will show up in flip-flops. He has a deep disdain for shoes. Yet, he always shows up, dressed with intention. And often, though not always, we gather, at the cafe by the arcade, or at the mall with the bird shop and its constant twittering, waiting. There is community in the waiting.
I find myself thinking about how he makes a stranger feel already known. You are already his friend. The friendship is simply waiting for you to arrive. Arendt wrote that the world becomes real through speech between friends. I think what she meant, underneath the philosophy, is something simpler and more frightening: that without it, the world can become unreal very fast, and that nothing about this labor — of writing, of reading, of keeping someone in the room even when they aren’t — is ever only about the person you are trying to hold.The post Dressed with intention: On Ahmed Douma first appeared on Mada Masr.