The Tale of a Wall: A Palestinian prisoner’s memoir of three decades of ongoing Israeli incarceration

In his remarkable literary memoir, Palestinian prisoner Nasser Abu Srour crafts a universe from the monotonous surroundings of his prison cell.

Srour’s memoir, The Tale of a Wall, was written from within the carceral condition that he has endured since 1993 when he was imprisoned towards the end of the First Intifada.

Accused of being an accomplice to the murder of an Israeli intelligence officer, he was convicted based on a confession extracted under torture and sentenced to life in prison.

Curiously, when Srour’s US publisher tried to access the evidence used to convict him, she discovered that the records for his case had mysteriously vanished.

During the three decades of his imprisonment, Srour has developed a poetics of incarceration that is almost unprecedented in prison literature in its creative reconstruction of the prison experience.

Walls of resistance 

As every aspect of his existence is overtaken by life in prison, a profound relationship develops between the prisoner and his material surroundings, including the wall he faces during all his waking hours across a span of three decades.

Relating to the wall as to a friend, Srour embraces his solitary confinement.

By the time another wall began to be built by Israel across and through the West Bank in 2002, Srour had been in prison for nine years.

The wall to which Srour’s book refers is not therefore the apartheid separation wall that was ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004.

While the association between Israel’s apartheid wall and the wall of Srour’s prison cell may be a matter of chance, Srour’s construction of a universe of prison experience around his wall reads like a prophecy, as if he were telling us that all of Palestinian life bears the traces of the experience of incarceration. 

Letting go of love to keep the heart alive 

The monotony of the prisoner’s days is dramatically broken by a love story mid-way through the book that interrupts the narrative with a new horizon of hope.

The hope is a source of intense joy, but also fear.

The woman whom he loves exists on the other side of his wall. She comes and goes freely, yet chooses to tie her fate to his and unite with him in a bond of powerful love wrought from the letters they exchange.

He warns her not to love him, knowing that such voluntary confinement may lead to disaster.

The romance that develops between them defies the law of most relationships: that intimacy requires physical proximity and the touch of the beloved.

In the end, their love proves impossible to sustain, and Srour returns to the Kierkegaard-inspired understanding that opens the book: letting go of the beloved is the only way to keep that love alive in his heart.

Letting go is an act of faith that requires the surrender of the self.

Echoes of Gramsci

As a reader, I could not refrain from comparing Srour’s voice with that of Gramsci, author of the 20th century’s most probing reflections written from prison.

Both writers were imprisoned by fascist regimes and pressed into lengthy terms of solitary confinement.

Both managed nonetheless to produce brilliant genre-defying works that transgress the boundaries between autobiography, love story, and philosophical treatise.

Both writers developed a philosophical and political consciousness that illuminates our times, while also enabling them to speak as emissaries of the future.

Perhaps the best way to sum up A Tale of a Wall would be to again return to Gramsci.

Srour writes at a similar pitch of poetic and analytical intensity to Gramsci, although with a different historical background and a different destiny.

Gramsci famously described his writing as a project to reconstruct the “infinity of traces” that history has deposited in the individual self.

This vision of writing was picked up and developed more fully by Edward Said, who understood it as a central part of the Palestinian project of recovery imposed by the Nakba’s erasure.

Following in the footsteps of Gramsci and Said, Srour constructs an inventory of himself in his prison memoir. At the same time, he reconstructs the history of the Palestinian people, from Nakba to Oslo and beyond.

As he writes in one of the book’s many stunning passages, condensing the half a century into a few sentences:

“Now that the sense of time was lost, events could only be defined as pre-Nakba or post-Nakba. Everything [Palestinians] sowed, half of what they reaped, anything they left in the ground, and whatever the birds ate—all that was pre-Nakba. Everything they were unable to plant, whatever they were incapable of reaping, and all that they denied the birds—that was the post-Nakba era.”

The call for Srour’s release

I was lucky to have read this book initially without knowing much about its author.

It was only as I approached the end that I learned that Srour was still behind bars and that his book was smuggled out of prison.

From within his prison cell, he approved the final version of the translation and responded to his translator Luke Leafgren’s queries through an intermediary.

Yet for the most part, Srour has no contact with the world outside.

In all likelihood, Srour will experience freedom again only if his name is included on the list of prisoners to be released during a prisoner exchange deal.

This means that the negotiations currently taking place between Hamas and Israel could lead, finally, to his freedom. Or not.

Since Srour is not a member of Hamas, his release has so far, not been a priority in any of the Hamas-negotiated prisoner exchange deals.

Alongside awakening our literary sensibilities and introducing readers to a fundamental dimension of Palestinian existence, I hope that this compelling account of Srour’s three-decade-long incarceration will form the basis of a campaign calling for his long overdue release.

Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is the author of numerous works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, including Erasing Palestine (2023), Writers and Rebels (2016) and The Persian Prison Poem (2021). With Malaka Shwaikh, she is the author of Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine (2023). Her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, and World Policy Journal and her writing has been translated into eleven languages

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