Chapter 16
The opening tableau of fluorescent light “that never penetrated the prison walls” establishes an unrelenting surveillant environment, erasing the natural diurnal cycle and foregrounding a perpetual present that enforces a Brechtian alienation effect. The narrator’s fragmented self‑designation—Basil, Abu al‑Izz, Hamza—functions as a polyphonic register that destabilises a unified subjecthood and mirrors the institutional practice of renaming inmates as a means of control.
A second‑person address to “Hani” recurs throughout, creating a dialogic echo that collapses narrative distance and summons the reader into the inmate’s conspiratorial discourse. This heteroglossic strategy interweaves personal vendetta (“I tore out one of the officers’ eyes”) with political jargon harvested from Salih’s lecture (“pragmatism”, “demagogy”, “compradorism”), exposing the porous boundary between lived violence and ideological intoxication. The citation of “Elias” and the Red Cross intertextually references external rescue narratives, while the mock‑technical pause (“We apologize for this brief technical hitch”) metafictionally foregrounds the performative nature of the prison’s oral ritual.
The chapter’s soundscape oscillates between brutal realism and absurd chant (“Tum‑tarum, lum‑lalum”, “Bou, bou, ba‑rum”), a sonic polyphony that displaces the listener from any single register and underscores the simultaneity of hope, ridicule, and despair. The material economy of cigarettes—Umar’s “rotten cheap brand”—and the communal redistribution of them function as a micro‑political economy where scarcity, addiction, and solidarity are negotiated, echoing earlier depictions of barter in market scenes.
Salih’s didactic monologue, replete with Marxist‑leaned terminology, is reproduced verbatim within the prison setting, illustrating the circulation of revolutionary discourse even in containment. The narrator’s reflexive plan to “copy” Salih’s vocabularies reveals a performative mimicry that both critiques and perpetuates the very ideological apparatus he despises, extending the chapter’s self‑reflexive critique of knowledge acquisition under occupation.
Finally, the recurring motif of “naming” and “celebratory chanting” operates as an ambivalent rite: it momentarily empowers the inmates (“All present”) while simultaneously reinforcing their categorisation as objects of state surveillance. This duality amplifies the chapter’s central paradox—collective empowerment through ritualised self‑alienation—continuing the trajectory of dissonant realism that has progressively mapped interior monologue onto expanding sociopolitical topologies.