McManus, Anne-Marie

The Networks of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality and Making Narrative in Assad’s Syria

in: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 25.1, 2023

This article argues for a new reading of collectivity – in both narrative voice and scenes of shared experience – in works of Syrian prison literature. Although these texts were published and are interpreted as the products of single author figures, the wider narrative field from which they emerge is shaped by numerous collective practices, from the oral and written to the digital. Breaking disciplinary boundaries around prison literature, this article introduces the term “prison narrative” and foregrounds diverse efforts by Syrian writers and former prisoners to imagine alternative formations of national experience and community under the Assad regime (1970-2024). Drawing on postcritical methods, it reads texts for their dual roles as representations of sociality (in this context, of group cells in Syrian prisons and between Syrians under dictatorship) and as objects that circulate in the world. 

As such, prison narratives imagine social bonds as they were shaped under the Assad’s carceral logic. Transgressing political ideologies, the socialities that prison narratives depict are rooted in a shared vulnerability to violence and the severing of familial ties. Moreover, as objects that circulate, published prison narratives enact and demand new practices of sociality. Even as these works pluralize the archetype of Syrian prison literature across gender, prison location, and experiences of violence, they retain a commitment to mapping non-hegemonic bonds of collectivity for Syrians that were founded in carceral logic but exceed the walls of prisons.

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Part of the special issue “Comparative Approaches to Prison Literatures in the MENA and its Diasporas”, edited by Anne-Marie McManus and Brahim El Guabli. 

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