Hazem Hamouda will never forget the emptiness of Cairo airport on the day he was imprisoned by the Egyptian authorities in 2018.
The Brisbane father of six had arrived to his homeland to see his Australian-born daughter Lamisse, who was studying at the American University in Cairo. The duo planned to holiday with family. But as Hamouda stood at the customs counter trying to establish his identity, a plainclothes security officer appeared quietly at his side.
Instantly, Hamouda writes in The Shape of Dust, a memoir co-authored with Lamisse, he knew something was off. When two additional security guards showed up and ordered him into a quiet office, he was filled with terror.
Inside the office, Hamouda tried to comply with their interrogation – he was accused of spreading fake news on social media and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood – but when the officers asked for his mobile phone, he pushed back.
“I said ‘No, this is going too far, I am an Australian citizen, I have rights. I want to talk to my Australian ambassador’,” he recalls now. “They didn’t give a crap.”
Nothing was found on his phone but the officers showed no signs of releasing Hamouda. The 54-year-old marine engineer turned project manager had kept up with the political and security situation in Egypt. He knew full well what could be done to him, but he took comfort in the fact that he was in a public place. Then they brought him to a small cell, and with a gun pressed into the small of his back, he had no other option than to step in.
It would be 433 days before he would be free again.
Lamisse waits – and fights
As Hamouda was being taken into his cell, Lamisse was away for the day at a seaside resort with her brother and cousins. She was looking forward to time with her father when her cousin Yacoub, who was waiting at arrivals, called. Her father had not made it out of customs, he told her. Lamisse was “flooded with excoriating terror”.
She implored her cousin to call her as soon as he had any news of her father’s whereabouts, then lowered her head between her knees – eyes closed. She wanted to “rationalise the trepidation away”.
By the next morning, Lamisse assumed that her father was arrested. She phoned the Australian embassy in Cairo who advised her to wait the 48-hours required by law, but before that time was up, Yacoub called. A security contact at the airport had told him that her father was no longer there – and that no one would say where he was.
Lamisse searched for her father for seven days, struggling against an opaque system in a country that suddenly felt foreign to her. Then she received a short text forwarded to her by her mother. With the aid of a fellow prisoner, Hamouda had been able to secretly send a message to his wife – the only person whose number he knew by heart. “I’m in Tora [prison]. Help me …” it said.
Lamisse emailed the embassy again. Quickly she came to two confronting realisations: one, that any assistance offered by the embassy is “limited and discretionary”; and two, that a dual citizen arrested in a country where they hold citizenship will be treated as a citizen of that country. Consular assistance could not override local law. It was a blow; she had hoped to use her Australian-ness as leverage. The irony of weaponising her Australian identity was not lost on her – how much and whether she, an Arab and a Muslim, was accepted as Australian had been a source of tension for much of her life.
The job of freeing her father was colossal. Lamisse, only in her twenties, had to navigate two systems she did not understand – the Egyptian security state and Australian diplomatic bureaucracy. She struggled with the local language; she was exploited by the contacts that were recommended to her; an ‘it’s-just-the-way-it-is’ attitude seemed to permeate every official conversation in the pursuit of answers; and provisions she brought her father were confiscated by guards at the prison gates. She became sick and had to postpone a visit, which only compounded her anxiety: she feared she was putting his life at risk, and that his death in prison would be her fault.
Befriending the formerly imprisoned Australian journalist Peter Greste and his family offered insight into what she could or could not ask for as an Australian citizen – his case, she says, was used as a “benchmark”. Greste became an advocate for Hamouda. Still, Lamisse was worried that her (and her father’s) racial and religious identity could be detrimental to their cause. At one point, while campaigning for Hamouda’s release, Lamisse’s mother contemplated taking off her hijab, thinking it might help garner public support.
For some time, the young student was her father’s only visitor to the Tora prison (even lawyers weren’t allowed to visit their clients). Then she decided to return to Brisbane, where she felt she could do more. She campaigned and campaigned for months, always mindful that whatever privilege she had should serve not just her father, but those imprisoned alongside him who had no one to fight for them.
‘I used to hear the walls screaming’
It was more than 20 days before Hamouda was delivered from a holding cell to Tora Tahqiq, a remand facility within Tora prison reserved for political prisoners still being investigated. Like Hamouda, many inside were dual citizens who had expressed anti-government opinions on social media in their adopted countries, or young Egyptian men who had agitated for a reformed Egypt. Hamouda has always denied any support of Muslim Brotherhood or spreading fake news. He waited out the rest of his sentence at Tora Tahqiq, occasionally leaving the prison for non-public court hearings where he wasn’t allowed to speak, and which sometimes lasted five minutes though covering the cases of 12 or so men. He would never be convicted of any crime.
In those first weeks, he was haunted by the fact that his family didn’t know where he was. But he was also extended courtesies from those trapped within Tora’s walls much longer than he had: in his first week in prison, a fellow prisoner gave him his only clean towel; on another occasion, a broken toothbrush and some shared toothpaste. Later, a jacket for his first visit with Lamisse, from a prisoner who had a spare; tips on smuggling in letters; and tricks for making phone calls.
“The prison environment makes us see each other naked,” Hamouda says. “The most important part is these gestures of empathy and giving what you don’t have. That towel was the last thing that person had, and he had to wait one week for another.
“Those gestures brought me to understanding my human self and [people’s] good nature, and that gave me hope.”
Not knowing how long he’d be imprisoned for, he started thinking that one of his inmates would make a good Muslim husband for his daughter, Amira.
“That was Dad’s desire to still experience himself as a father,” Lamisse says. “It was a reflection of the connection he was making inside the prison, with these young men who were unjustly imprisoned. Genuine, kind, good people who were making their way into Dad’s heart, and his greatest expression of love is ‘Here’s my daughter’. It sounds silly or fantastical or ridiculous, but so much of the prison experience is stripping you of everything you know to be true and real and grounding, so you need to experience that [normality], otherwise you break irreparably.”
Hamouda did come close to feeling broken. The “surreal” experience of being inside was compounded by the untimely deaths of fellow inmates – young men who slit their wrists in solitary confinement, who ingested hand sanitiser, and in the case of Egyptian-American Mustafa Kassem, who went on a hunger strike that lasted a year after repeated attempts by both Barack Obama and Donald Trump to have him released failed.
“I never imagined it to be what it was like when I went in,” Hamouda says. “I couldn’t accept the reality of how horrific it was. Sometimes I used to hear the walls screaming with the screams of the prisoners who were there before me. It’s not the place itself, but the intentional and deliberate act of contaminating the place with sewage for days on end, the systematic process of breaking human beings physically and psychologically. I would not have imagined that there were human beings who would do this to other people.”
The release
Throughout it all, Hamouda held on to his faith.
“Faith was the first thing I reached out for, from the moment I was taken [and] pushed into that cell,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Allah help me, I am powerless now’. I felt as if my heart was shattered. I knew I had … to walk that path.”
And walk it he did, until, on 18 February 2019, his family received word of his release from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. But it would be nearly two more months before he would actually be released. First he disappeared again to the panic of his family, and then he was released but farcically charged at the airport with over-staying his visa.
Finally, after an appearance before Egypt’s military court and a personal escort through airport security from Glenn Miles, the Australian ambassador in Cairo, Hazem Hamouda left Egypt bound for Australia.
“I literally crashed … with a sense of relief,” he told Lamisse at the time. Then he detailed the merits of a transit hotel’s buffet.
Back home in Brisbane, father and daughter set about rebuilding their lives. Lamisse was angered by the lack of support offered to people in their situation – there was trauma, bills, exhaustion. There was so much more to rebuild than people realise.
What has the experience taught them, I ask over Zoom, as they share breakfast together in a hotel room after sharing their story at a writer’s festival.
“That the world isn’t a fair place,” Hazem says, as Lamisse reaches over to pat him affectionately, a true, supportive teammate. “That there is a lot of injustice, and I will have my peace when justice prevails.”
The Shape of Dust by Hazem and Lamisse Hamouda is out now through Pantera Press.
