The Egyptian prisoner

What courses through Huna, a memoir of revolution, prison, and becoming, is your relationship with your father, your baba? He and you arrested together in 2013 when you were 17, you eager to join street protests against the burgeoning Sisi dictatorship.

He's there to protect you, to keep you out of trouble.

And you carry this guilt that if not for you, the nightmare that descended would not have happened.

Can you talk about the relationship with your Baba? And is Huna, in a way, an expiation for the guilt that you felt?

Yeah, I really love the question because I remember one of the earliest readers for Huna when it was just a manuscript.

Once she read it, she told me, you know what this book is? And I told her what? And she said, I think this is a love letter to Baba.

And it was so interesting to me because I've never thought about it like in that way precisely.

But it struck me that, yes, this is one of the things at least interesting.

And if you read Huna, you'll kind of see this kind of underlying, sort of like underlining like commentary on Arab masculinity through sons and fathers and that kind of relationship.

I think Baba and I have always struggled to express affection to one another, at least verbally.

And there were so many, I guess, failures to translate each other's love.

And because, as you said, the guilt thing begins because Baba was very apolitical.

This was not really his thing.

And this whole thing started because Mama basically forced him to accompany me to this major protest to chaperone me.

So, you know, he would protect me, look out for me, so nothing would happen.

And obviously...

The turn of events does not end up being that way because I get arrested because of photographing that march that we went out to join.

And then Baba tries to wrench me away from the officers that arrested me.

And so they arrest him as well.

And the whole thing begins from that kind of incident.

And Baba would not have been there if it hasn't been for me, basically.

So there's the throughout the whole book.

There is this there is the kind of baseline torture of having to witness one's father and certain positions being hurt in certain ways, being harmed, being physically hit, which is it's very difficult when when the father is constantly, you know, throughout your life.

He was the guardian figure.

He's the figure that you used to being there to protect you, to take care of you, to provide for you, et cetera.