"When Danny was first imprisoned, I called my friend Ahmed Naji, a writer who had been imprisoned by Egypt's authoritarian regime for nine months in 2016. He told me that the experience of unjust imprisonment can be worse for people on the outside; you care about the detained but have no information about what's happening. I'm not sure I believe him, but I did appreciate Ahmed's validation that the not knowing was a special kind of torture."
Danny Fenster, an American journalist, was jailed as a political prisoner during Myanmar's 2021 coup for six months. He endured his imprisonment through meditation and podcasts on an SD card smuggled by his girlfriend Juliana. Nearly five years after his release, Fenster collaborated with his cousin Amy Kurzweil, a New Yorker cartoonist and graphic memoirist, to create a long-form interactive comic for The Verge about his experience. Kurzweil, whose work often explores family history and trauma, was motivated to document Fenster's story in detail. She drew inspiration from conversations with Ahmed Naji, a writer imprisoned by Egypt's authoritarian regime, who described how uncertainty about detained loved ones creates psychological torment for those outside prison.
Read at The Verge
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]