“We love the country
Like no one else does
We make pilgrimages to it
Alone and together
At dawn
At dusk
And on Sundays.”
Every day, my short life flashes before my eyes as I follow the case of Dr. Laila Soueif, who has been on hunger strike for more than five months. For a little over a decade, I have watched members of this family be publicly humiliated, imprisoned, and have years of their lives stolen—just like the thousands upon thousands of others who have suffered the same fate. Some we have heard of, but many remain unknown, and perhaps we will never know their names.
Despite all the tragedies this family has endured, I sometimes felt a pang of jealousy. I wished I hadn’t been born to a religious extremist father. Why wasn’t I born into a leftist family? That question later transformed into: why was I born at all? At other times, I felt ashamed of myself because of prisoners of conscience in general. What do our security harassments amount to compared to what they face? Harassments I had grown accustomed to because of a father I never really got to know, as my greatest concern at the time was escaping from him. I failed once and miraculously succeeded the second time.
Between my dreams of fighting for freedom, my nightmares about a childhood lost under the guise of piety, and my encounters with state security, I spent my teenage years wondering who actually survives in this country. I laugh bitterly when I think that my dreams at seventeen were to spend a night in a National Security office; not because of who my father was, but because I had demanded justice or called for human rights to be upheld.
The regime believes that excessive repression will eventually silence all opposing voices, yet the reality is that the oppression we grow up witnessing pushes new generations to speak out, something I relate to myself. Whether you have personally endured it or simply grown up surrounded by it, such scenes stir feelings of injustice and humiliation—emotions that drive some people to dedicate their lives to defending others, whether they know them or not.
Now, as a young woman in my early twenties, my dreams have come true. I stand in the streets alongside my friends, demanding justice, calling for the release of prisoners, for a ceasefire in Gaza, for the border to be opened for Palestinians. Once again, I find myself stuck in between—neither a celebrated activist carried on shoulders, chanting before being thrown in prison, nor one of those who simply pass by protests, unaffected. I am neither a well-known figure nor completely anonymous. I think this is true for many in my generation; we exist in the middle, unseen.
And so, I remain suspended in this in-between space. I don’t speak out, yet I get detained. I go to express my opinion, but I am not imprisoned. Instead, a friend two years younger than me is taken, standing just a few people away. Then another friend, the one who had been standing shoulder to shoulder with me. Again, I see the tragedy of the Seif family playing out before my eyes. I watch as young lives are stolen, as mothers spend their days outside prison gates, waiting to see their children. The only difference this time is that my friends have become Alaa and Sanaa, and all their mothers have become Laila Soueif.
The regime refuses to consider that a modicum of reform, or the release of this country’s sons and daughters, might bring them some respite from our voices. Instead, they choose the easier solution: locking them all up. But that is precisely what creates more of us. Those left behind—brothers, sisters, families—will keep calling out their names until they return. And if they are killed, they become martyrs of the nation. The cycle continues, spinning endlessly between spreading injustice and generation after generation resisting, just to reach the bare minimum of what it means to live.
For the second time in my life, I managed to escape a dark fate. Despite the travel bans that restricted me from leaving the country and the limits on my movement within Egypt—confined to just two cities—I was able, through what felt like divine intervention, to leave. I needed a breath of air away from the paranoia that had started to follow me everywhere, yet I found myself unable to move from my bed, paralyzed by fear of the outside world.
I had planned to return within two months, no more. But then, a close friend of mine was arrested for the third time in less than two months. He was thrown into prison without trial, his name added—like so many others—to a fabricated terrorism case. In Egypt, sooner or later, everyone becomes a terrorist, whether they are armed fighters or just people standing in the streets calling for justice. In a cruel twist of fate, my friend was sent to the same prison that holds Alaa Abdel Fattah.
After consulting with friends, I was advised not to return to Egypt. The truth is, my nervous system could no longer endure the constant police stops, the restricted movement, and all the suffocating constraints. So I stayed outside, watching the news from Egypt while also witnessing the horrors unfolding in Palestine. I became a walking embodiment of survivor’s guilt, a lifeless body moving aimlessly through the world. The months that followed my departure were chaotic, devoid of any real purpose. Suspended in limbo, I saw no future, had no past, and numbed my present in every possible way. For months and months, I sought refuge in sedation, unable to endure, unable to cry out, unable to weep. How could I complain about my suffering to a friend whose family was trapped under bombardment in Gaza? Or to another friend stuck in Egypt, waiting to be arrested at any moment?
I tried to write, but no words seemed to do justice to what was happening on either front. I felt that hundreds of articles would never be enough to capture even a fraction of it. I found myself in what international organizations call “voluntary exile.” Every time I am forced to use that term, I seethe with anger. I did not choose this exile. The options available to me and those in my position were either exile—with an unknown future and the loss of everything we had ever built—but at least a chance at survival, or returning home to face prison and the total loss of life itself. How is that a choice? Why does the world insist on calling it voluntary, in our writing, in official documents?
The truth is, from where I stand, there is no real difference between the two. In both cases, we end up as lifeless bodies, stripped of any soul. Our spirits remain trapped in some kind of purgatory—we are neither dead and at peace, nor alive and leading even a semblance of a normal life. Our suffering is not the worst, but it is suffering nonetheless.
And yet, despite everything, we insist that we will return. And those still inside insist that they will welcome us home soon. I’ve realized that this feeling is shared across the region—it is the same for Palestinians, Yemenis, and all those from oppressed and devastated lands. I wish my friend from Gaza a happy holiday, and she responds, “Next year, we’ll celebrate in Gaza.” She knows better than anyone that Gaza no longer exists, but when you are stuck in this purgatory, all you long for is to return home—even if that home has been wiped off the face of the earth. Just take us back to our land.
Many times, I feel defeated. I tell myself I should just book the next flight back to Egypt and let fate take its course. At least if I am imprisoned, it will be on my own soil, the soil I know well. I try to console myself with the thought of a guaranteed meal in prison, and if I am hated enough, perhaps even a solitary cell for life. But then I remember the suffocating feeling of detention, of losing all connection to the outside world—and I abandon the idea.
Official records estimate my age at twenty-three, but I feel as though I am ninety. My friends object to both numbers, insisting that I should have been dead long ago. I can’t argue with them—especially when someone asks me when I left Egypt, and I find myself answering: I left a year and a war ago.
The thought of that “free meal” never crossed my mind during the war on Lebanon. The war hit me like a brutal slap, reminding me that I had never truly lived through a real catastrophe. Once again, I felt as though suffering had no meaning. Every night, I heard the sounds of bombardment. I forgot what the world sounded like before the drones. I survived airstrikes three or four times—only out of sheer stupidity—but I didn’t die. I watched a missile obliterate the area next to the bridge I was crossing at that very moment. But what does any of that compare to my friend who spent the entire war under relentless shelling? Or the one whose home stood beside a targeted building? Or those who lost their friends and families?
As the war raged on in Lebanon, mass arrests resumed in Egypt. Even purgatory was no longer enough for our souls. My friends refused to leave their homes despite the bombings, just as I refused to leave the country that embraced me and that I had come to love. Others had their own reasons to stay. I stood there, bewildered by this human insistence on remaining in a place that had already ended, an insistence that could only be described as absolute foolishness. How does one explain humanity’s love for the homeland?
“And if they kill us,
as they have killed us before,
and if they drive us away,
as they have driven us before,
and if they banish us
to the ends of the earth,
we shall return as conquerors
to this land.”
The shelling across the country eventually subsided, retreating to the south. And then, before we could even process it, we woke up to the news of Bashar al-Assad’s fall. Thousands of Syrians who hadn’t seen their homeland for years—some for decades, some never at all—returned in disbelief, finally standing on their own soil. Even I, who had grown up watching the Assad regime mirror Egypt’s repression, still cannot believe he is gone.
It was a joy laced with pain—perhaps even a broken joy. I was happy because this moment carried a fragile hope that one day, everyone would return to their homelands. But how long would they be able to stay? That depends on whether the new regime can sustain the positive image it’s so desperate to build, conveniently forgetting what the Islamist factions did in Syria, or perhaps believing that everyone else has forgotten. And so, we turn the page.
At the same time, I still can’t grasp that the bombings have stopped. I am jolted back to reality by videos of prisoners being released from Assad’s jails. I fear a day like this in Egypt—a day when the prisons we know of, and those we don’t even dare to imagine, are finally thrown open. Our worst nightmares feel insignificant compared to the horror of a human crushing machine built for execution.
This tiny flicker of hope dies a little more each day as I follow Laila Soueif’s health updates—the woman sacrificing her life for her son, fully aware that if she continues her hunger strike, she may never live to see him free. I want to scream, “Why isn’t anyone saving her?” But then I remember that the world has stood witness to a genocide for over a year and a half and has done nothing to stop it. That there are tens of thousands locked away in our prisons, and no one cares to free them. The real terror lies in realizing that even if a miracle happened and those prison doors opened, we may never truly know if everyone made it out—just as is happening in Assad’s dungeons.
Each morning, I wake up to the remnants of the Beirut port explosion through the window of my room—the only window in my apartment that offers a view of the sky. Fittingly, it is made of iron bars, like a prison cell, only wider.
I stare at the port and wonder: Will it explode again? And if it does, will those fighting for justice and accountability ever find it? The hum of drones and helicopters fills the air, while a United Nations warship drifts into my surreal morning view. Every day, drones violate the ceasefire, and every day, UN aircraft and ships arrive to confirm that the ceasefire has not been violated. The UN then declares that the ceasefire has been breached. Europe and the US acknowledge it too—but they do nothing to stop the drone that joins me for breakfast each morning. Or the one that bombs my Christian friend’s village in the south under the guise of striking a Hezbollah base.
I reach for my phone, anxious to check Laila Soueif’s condition, afraid of the day I wake up to find that the world has lost her. Then, I try to piece together what remains of my future—a future that has lost all shape.
I don’t know how much longer divine interventions will keep saving me at the last second. And I don’t know why I keep having to escape in the first place. But one thing is certain: whatever comes next, I no longer fear it.
Some might read this article as mere words arranged side by side. But for me, these disjointed, heavy lines are the closest thing to a summary of the last year and a half of my life—a life still unfolding, a nightmare that has not ended. I, along with so many others, continue to live it. And I don’t know how long we’ll remain trapped in the never-ending tragedy of this script.
Hundreds of articles wouldn’t be enough to capture what it means to be born on this cursed stretch of earth. Some say hellfire awaits us in the afterlife. Others argue that nothing exists beyond death. But one thing is certain: On this journey, we have already died a thousand deaths before the final one—without ever having lived.
I’ve often wondered why we love our homelands, why we insist on fighting for change, despite never knowing justice within them. This toxic relationship between us and our countries—why do we love them so much and long to return, despite everything? Some might say it’s a philosophical question requiring studies in identity, humanity, psychology, and so on. But I have found my own answer: We love our homelands because we love life. And we still dream of seeing it within them.
And so, from my place here—one of the many souls suspended in the purgatory of the Global South—I ask the inhabitants of what they call the “First World”:
When will you stop stealing our lives?
When will the decision finally be made—that we, too, have the right to exist?
