In 2018, Australian-Egyptian Hazem Hamouda was arbitrarily detained in Cairo following his journey to join his family on their holiday. His detention would last 433 days in total, sending his daughter, Lamisse Hamouda, on a long pursuit of justice. The Shape of Dust (2023) is Lamisse and Hazem’s first book, co-written to recount the experience from both perspectives. The memoir —an incredible commentary on Egyptian and Australian politics — won the National Biography Award this year. I had the immense honour of interviewing Lamisse Hamouda and here’s what she had to say
E: From the very first page, your memoir is truly impressive. How did you piece together such a meticulous account of your experiences?
L: A key thing was starting to write the memoir six or seven months after Dad came out of prison. Lexhurst, my publisher, had approached me at that time asking if I was interested in creating a book out of the experience, and that prompted me to take that process seriously and start writing. When I was doing those first drafts, the memories were fresh and sharp. That formed the skeleton of the book and allowed me to flesh it out. If I had written the book five or ten years later, I would not have the same clarity and memory of detail, especially with traumatic memories, where the narrative is broken. The sensory memory was really strong; senses of smell, the pictures of a place, these flashes and images, that’s what I felt as I was writing and recording. Later when I was editing, I could lay over reflections and analysis to frame the sensory, to frame the rawness of the emotion.
E: What was the process like writing and reliving these experiences with your father?
L: Writing it with Dad was a lot. When I first got approached to write the book, I felt very strongly that I could not write it without Dad anyway. It’s not my direct lived experience; it’s Dad who went to prison. I just felt like a collateral part of that story; that I was in Egypt, that I had some skills to offer to try and get him out; that I was his daughter; but Dad is at the centre of it. With my own ethics and politics around abolition and prisoner rights, I felt like I couldn’t conscionably write the book without Dad’s involvement. Luckily, Dad saw it as an opportunity to be able to tell his story. He initially wrote by himself, and I wrote by myself. Then he would finish drafts, send them to me, and I would compare his recollections with my own. That’s when I started piecing together this dual narrative approach rather than turning his writing into prose or changing his words. There’s something special about Dad, who has English as his second language – writing in English and sharing his experience and all its little quirks — I didn’t want to smooth that out or take that away. It was also challenging, sitting with a deeply traumatic experience and triggering each other throughout it. At the same time, it was an opportunity to get closer. Once Dad stopped writing, because [in the book] it goes from the dual narrative to the interviews, I included a chapter where I talk about how Dad couldn’t write any further. It was through those interviews that we really found a lot of healing together by writing the book. It was an opportunity to have conversations in a safe container of the book and if things got too hectic, we’d be like “well we just have to say this because of the book” or “we need to explore this really difficult part.” It gave us this comfort of distancing that allowed us to sit with really painful emotions and process them. To understand what we wanted to tell publicly, and what we needed, just for us, to heal our relationship and ourselves.
E: Throughout the book and in the epilogue, you touch on the continued effects of this experience and prison as a construct. Do you think your perspective and your Dad’s perspective is still changing post-publication as time passes?
L: As new information arises and you gain new experiences, new clarities, and understandings about yourself and what you’ve been through. These things change. For me, the sharpness of the experience has definitely dulled over time, but I’ve noticed that with Dad, it hasn’t. I really think that’s attributed to the fact that Dad spent a year and a half inside prison while I was only there once a week for an hour. I could make sense of the trauma a lot faster than Dad. I thought I had an understanding of abolition and the politics of the prison. There is the theoretical component to understanding it but there is also the layer of lived experience, of the deep threads and echoes that prison has through your life. It’s been six years and it still haunts him. That has forever shifted my understanding of what prison really does on a deep emotional level to a person and their family.
E: Something so pervasive throughout the book is the sense of hope and also disillusionment with Australian media. You speak to your, almost, battle to control the narrative and combat the way the media plays into the binary of innocence versus guilt, marketability, and dehumanisation of the prisoner accompanied by their ability to spotlight your case. Do you feel that your relationship with the media has since changed?
L: Irrevocably. I’ve had media experiences since that haven’t done much to restore my faith. It was already coloured by my experiences, and I talk about this in the book. Growing up Muslim and trying from a very early age when I was sixteen to have my narrative or tell my story, [I was] really buying into this idea that I could speak back and assert myself [within] the multicultural narrative of diverse voices, where I can have my space. I already had these experiences of being framed a certain way… this hostility and weariness of the media. It’s just so hard to occupy a nuanced position and to have enough space for complexity. There are limitations of the medium itself. If you’re live on TV on The Project or Sunrise, you really only give sound bites. By necessity of the medium, you have to oversimplify yourself or make yourself marketable to fit those moments and capture attention. It’s a fine line between “I want to stay human and be true to myself and all this experience with its complexities” but also “I have to entertain, I have to reach this audience quickly because this is really urgent and this is advocacy…” I can’t do it all in just one moment. In the years since, I’ve decided that engaging with formats like TV don’t work for me. I don’t like not having the space to ramble or have some nuance or complexity or dive into a point.
E: Throughout the book you’ve demonstrated that, while awful, your father’s case was not exceptional but part of an entrenched global power system. Do you think this experience changed your perspective of global politics?
L: One of the things I found the most shattering about my Dad’s experience is the fact that it’s common. I find that more disturbing than when something is an exception; when something is a pattern. The challenge is that when violence is normalised, you necessarily need more violence at some point because otherwise people numb out. One of the things that has really impacted me is seeing the pattern replicated across different countries and different circumstances for many many years: with Palestinian prisoners, and the narratives coming out of the American prison system. I wanted to include some of that research in the book but it didn’t really fit. But, you know, [there is] direct influence between the American prison system and the Egyptian prison system. There are new prisons being built in Egypt being modelled off the ‘justice’ and the ‘human rights’ of the American prison system. These are not models we want to copy and yet we know that they share with each other. There’s also the fact that Egypt and the state of Israel do share intelligence, methodologies of torture, and state repressive tactics. It’s really devastating and that’s something I have not been able to reckon with, but it has deepened my commitment to ideas and practices around abolition.
E: I think your Dad also mentioned in one of his passages that Tora Prison was first established by the British in the 1800s, and it’s interesting to think about colonial tools that are re-appropriated.
L: Totally — and that it was established for political dissidents. That’s been its purpose since it was built.
E: Prison literature has such a strong presence in Egypt’s literary scene. Do you see yourself as part of this tradition? And similarly, how do you see your work in relation to the Australian literary scene, especially as we have the same system that impacts Indigenous communities here.
L: I would like to. I’m also very aware of my subject-location as diaspora and living in Australia in a settler-colony and the politics of that. I think it exists in continuity with Egyptian prison literature. It is my intention to attempt to make a contribution to that body of work and keep record. That’s what is so powerful to me about that body of work; it is a refusal to let those injustices go unrecorded. I think that was really important because it always felt disingenuous to picture myself solely as Egyptian or solely as Australian, or to subscribe to reproduced narratives that frame East-Bad, West-Good, so I really tried hard to make sure that nuance was there, embedded in the story. In the Australian literary scene, I’m not really sure where I sit. People seem to keep picking up my book and liking it, so that’s a good sign.
E: Do you have any recommendations for further reading?
L: Did you come across Ahmed Naji’s book at all? He was also imprisoned for his creative writing and short stories. I recently read his book Rotten Evidence (2020), from the Egyptian prison literature space. Also, shout out to Hasib Hourani’s new poetry book, rock flight (2024).
E: You touch on the title The Shape of Dust in a passage. Could further speak to the meaning of the title?
L: I used to be able to bring some books in for Dad. One of his requests was that I bring in some Islamic and Sufi philosophy for him to read. One of the books I found at a book fair was called The Shape of Light by a famous Sufi philosopher, called Suhrawardi, and that was Dad’s favourite book. When he was released from prison, that was the only book he brought out with him and he left all the other books I gave him in this makeshift prison library that he set up with one of his cellmates. The book was dog-eared, underlined, [and] is a meditation on the question of ‘Who is God?’ Then, when we [discuss] what we think the book is about, Dad and I discuss that it is about how to hold onto your humanity in the face of dehumanisation. In the Islamic worldview, human beings are made from dust, so I was like: What if we have an homage to his favourite book and a reference to that idea from Islamic cosmology? That became our title — the shape of being human.
E: Something that really resonated with me, as someone who is mixed-race and the product of different cultures, was this question you posed to yourself when you were reflecting on your past trips to Egypt: “Had I unwittingly engaged in a vapid experience of developing my own diasporic practice of colonially possessing ‘The East’ for my own ends?” How do you view this now?
L: That’s a question that’s made me incredibly more sensitive and self-critical about how I engage with connecting to culture… my culture. What symbols am I appropriating? What am I ignoring as inconvenient and too hard to deal with? What is giving me social and cultural capital and how am I exploiting it? What is my genuine experience and connection to my culture and how am I interacting with that? It gave me a lot more sensitivity and an awareness of my own internalised colonial gaze. I am Egyptian but I’m also not — I’ve walked through my own country with a colonial gaze because I grew up in the West and digested white-colonial narratives. It made me more aware in questioning how I engage and how other people may engage with their culture, and how we can do it more sensitivity.
E: It’s such an important part of internal reckoning with yourself, and unlearning.
L: So much, and it’s humility. That’s the thing I realised was probably one of the whitest things about me when I went to Egypt: this kind of arrogance that because I’d grown up in the West, I just knew things better. I didn’t even realise I was behaving in that kind of way, I was confronted with it. I get to pick and choose: “I like this part of the culture but I don’t like that because it’s inconvenient.” It’s a long journey and don’t be judgmental on yourself about it.
E: I did some research in the Honi Soit archives and I know you’ve written a few articles for Honi. What was your Honi and broader USyd experience like? Do you have any advice for reporters, and students with dreams of writing professionally?
L: I had a really good time at Sydney University. I had a really rough time through university [in general], I had dropped out twice and went to two different universities before I got to Sydney. Even though I was 25, at the time I was a ‘mature aged student’ but I had such a good time. It was a great learning curve, and the foundation of my anti-racist politics. I was involved in ACAR and the Autonomous Muslim Women’s Collective, had a brief foray into student politics, and with the Honi Soit team. The one thing I loved was just having these opportunities to throw myself out and to learn in an environment where it’s pretty low-stakes to fail. It’s okay if you don’t win some election, you keep going. Extra-curricular experiences were so great, and being able to write for Honi and be friends with people who are editing, and getting to understand how editing works — just do it! Use your time at university to experiment. That’s what is most valuable; experimenting with different writing styles, articles, ideas. Use it to explore your voice. That’s what’s so valuable about a student newspaper. It’s your place to practise.
**This interview has been edited for clarity.
