Ahmed Naji, the acclaimed Egyptian journalist and literary novelist who was formerly imprisoned in Egypt for “violating public decency,” was appointed a City of Asylum fellow at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute in 2019 and now is continuing his writing career from Las Vegas.
Naji joined the institute in residence in March 2019, accompanied by his wife, Yasmin Hosam El Din, and their infant.
In a case that stirred the international arts community, Naji was convicted in 2016 after a lawyer in Egypt complained to authorities about Naji’s literary novel استخدام الحياة (in English, Using Life). The lawyer objected that the novel caused his heart rate to fluctuate—and had disturbed him psychologically. The prosecutor accused Naji of “misusing writing to create foul stories that serve artistic lust and mortal joy.” Though acquitted by lower courts, Naji was found guilty by a higher court and sentenced to two years. He served 10 months in Tora Prison—“a maximum-security hell,” Rolling Stone reported, in a profile of Naji.
Naji is the fifth fellow in BMI’s City of Asylum program, a first of its kind in the U.S., which now has sister programs in Pittsburgh and Ithica, NY. BMI also maintains a dialogue with distinguished organizations around the world that work to advance awareness and support for persecuted writers and artists, including the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), IIE’s Artist Protection Fund, and Artist at Risk Connection, a program at the PEN America, which collaborated with BMI to bring Naji to Las Vegas.
“Ahmed Naji is a soulful, lyrical, committed writer,” said Joshua Wolf Shenk, BMI’s executive and artistic director. “His persecution reminds us of how vulnerable artists are around the world, and his presence in Las Vegas will buoy and enrich an emerging community in literature and the arts. We are flabbergasted with joy that we’ll be the home for him and his family.”
“BMI’s work is to bring writers and the literary imagination into the heart of public life,” Shenk continued. “The absolute foundation is freedom of expression. So City of Asylum is the soul of what we do.”
“My impression is there is a new oasis for literature and art in the desert of Southern Nevada,” Naji said, “and a new academic and cultural community is being shaped. This will be a great opportunity to connect and contribute in this community, and maybe add a new perspective to it. I don't want to end up in the dull position of the sad writer in exile. I want to keep learning and changing, to continue demolishing and building new things. I hope Vegas will give me the space for that, and maybe inspire me to write something about that unusual city.”
BMI connected to Naji through the PEN America, which advocated for his release, and awarded him, in absentia, its 2016 PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award. A portrait of Naji by PEN caught the attention of a host of distinguished writers, including Zadie Smith, who wrote about Naji, and included the #freenaji hashtag, in The New York Review of Books.
“Some writers, in the face of state oppression will write like Solzhenitsyn,” Smith wrote in NYRB. “Others, like Naji, find their kindred spirits in the likes of Nabokov and Milan Kundera, writers who maintained their instinct for unbearable lightness and pleasure, for sex and romance, for perversity and delight, in the face of so much po-faced violent philistinism.”
Defenders of free speech have noted that Naji’s conviction rings especially loudly in the midst of the rise of extremist regimes, and that his case shows how such extremism can trickle down. “It’s not that Sisi called up this prosecutor,” Egyptian novelist El Toukhy told Rolling Stone, referring to the Egyptian strongman who took power in July 2013. “But the climate of Sisi as the top authority… they are inspired by him. The atmosphere of state censorship and self-censorship, arbitrary detentions of political prisoners and journalists, encourages citizen informants and police dragnets to take petty complaints forward, and then one ambitious prosecutor can make a name for himself by prosecuting a well-known writer.”
Zadie Smith praised Using Life for its movement from “the epic mode—the fantastical analogy for a present political misery” alongside “the intimate, the bathetic, the comic.” And she called the writer’s energy “perverse and brilliant, full of youth, energy, light!”
Shenk observed that “there’s a through-line in Ahmed’s fiction, his activism, and his essays, and that’s thumbing his nose at authority. And it doesn’t feel at all like nihilism, but rather a kind of mischievous love, a love for freedom—including, and maybe especially, the freedom to be impious. So there’s something about his work that connects the individual and the social, the literary and the political, in the most infectious and inspiring ways.”
Shenk also cited what he called a “small manifesto for authenticity” in Using Life:
“I think I understand now,” Naji writes, “that the bullshit inside of us is nothing but a reflection of the bullshit outside. Or maybe it’s the other way round. In either case, the outside bullshit eventually seeps inside, and settles into the depths of our souls.”
While in Las Vegas, Naji is writing his third novel, خفة يد (Sleight of Hand); a memoir on his experience in prison - حرز مكمكم (Rotten Evidence) and a database related to the situation of Egyptian prisons, which will collect writings by Egyptian and Arabic prisoners.
The Arab Fund will support Naji’s web project. His fellowship at BMI is supported by the Rogers Foundation, the College of Liberal Arts at UNLV, Unlikely Collaborators, Amazon Literary Partnership, and Robin and Danny Greenspun.
“I don’t believe the mission of the writer is only writing,” Naji said. “That’s good. But I want even more to be part of the community and society I live in—to give as much as I take from the society, and to learn more than to teach other people. I’m looking for an opportunity to know more. I am happy to learn and develop and get many new skills, and to be able to help this community and give this something back.”
About the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute
The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas brings writers, and the literary imagination, into the heart of public life. BMI activates community from its base in Las Vegas, a unique, vital, and surprising site for creativity and the arts. BMI’s work is both local and international. It is guided by the question of how arts can galvanize community, support open societies, and facilitate creative approaches to the most vexing problems of our time.
On the ground, in its hometown, BMI facilitates intersections between distinguished artists from around the world with local talent and emerging voices. BMI pays special attention to underrepresented populations in Las Vegas and to the students of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, BMI’s home, which U.S. News and World Report calls the most diverse campus in the country. (UNLV hosts both BMI and a distinguished Creative Writing International program, which offers three-year MFAs and PhDs.)
BMI’s home in downtown Las Vegas is at The Lucy, a one-of-a-kind urban arts complex, where BMI fellows live alongside an artist-in-residence in the visual arts and The Writer’s Block bookstore. The Writer’s Block is one of the top independent bookstores in the country and the retail home of BMI’s journal of essays, interviews, and humor, The Believer.
BMI’s work is in three primary areas.
- Live experiences. The primary face of BMI to its home community, BMI LIVE features Nobel Prize winners, breakout writers, and local talent. Several distinguished writers—recent ones have included Tayari Jones, Sally Denton, Walter Kirn, and Hanif Abdurraqib—are in residence for extended periods. BMI is known for events that re-imagine what fresh feeling can arise in a shared space when it gathers around writers and their honest, artful expression. BMI eschews panels and other typical forms, holding faith that innovation in expression should be joined to innovative ways for people to gather and interact. BMI LIVE’s core offering each year is a festival of literature, music, and visual arts called The Believer Festival.
- Innovative media. BMI presently supports three significant journals: Interim, a journal of poetry and poetics; Witness, a magazine of fiction and poetry that asks after the writer’s role as witness to her times; and The Believer, the premier journal for literary non-fiction in the world, also known for its comics, interviews, and humor.
- Literary activism. BMI began with the first-ever City of Asylum program in the U.S., offering creative refuge in Las Vegas to writers persecuted in their home countries. From this spine of the institute has grown a variety of programs that ask how arts institutions can effect meaningful change in society, intervene against injustice, and promote the freedom of expression that is the foundation for the arts.
