Episode: 131 — "Express Yourself and Become a Hero — Mansour Bushnaf" · Full Episode #131
Date: 9 April 2023
Language: Libyan Arabic
Mansour Bushnaf (منصور بوشناف) is a major Libyan playwright and novelist. He is the author of Chewing Gum (العلكة, 2008) — a short novel set in Tripoli that was banned in Libya shortly after its publication — and The Golden Dog (الكلب الذهبي, 2012). He spent twelve years in three of the worst prisons in Libya — Kuwaifiya, Black Horse, and Abu Salim — from 1976 to 1988, for writing a play titled When the Rats Rule (عندما تحكم الفئران) at the age of approximately twenty-one. He is one of the most consequential figures in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century Libyan literature.
He is also, in his own narration, a man who taught himself English, French and Italian inside the prison cell, who read Garcia Marquez, Hemingway and the modernist European canon in their original languages, and who has spent decades walking the Libyan desert — by his own estimate roughly ten thousand kilometres in total — documenting rock art, pyramidal structures and pre-Islamic Libyan civilisations whose archaeological record is, in his account, systematically under-researched.
At the age of ten, Mansour wrote a letter to Khadija Al-Jahmi — the pioneering Libyan broadcaster and editor, founder of the country's first children's magazine and one of the most significant women in twentieth-century Libyan public life. The letter was a piece of writing from a child to the most prominent woman in the country's media. Al-Jahmi responded. The exchange functioned, in Mansour's own retrospective framing, as the early validation that a Libyan child's writing was, in fact, writing — that the act of producing it was not a private fantasy but a public address.
The detail is offered not as foundational myth but as biographical fact. The man who would later be imprisoned for writing a play had, by age ten, already established a writing practice and an early correspondence with the country's most important literary patron.
At approximately twenty-one, Mansour wrote When the Rats Rule (عندما تحكم الفئران) — a play whose title alone announces its political content. The play was not a coded allegory that required interpretive labour to decode. It was a young writer's direct interrogation of the question of what happens when bad rulers come to power.
He was arrested. The arrest was the start of a twelve-year prison sentence.
See: The Rats Rule
Mansour served his sentence across three of the most notorious prisons in Libya:
The sentence ran from 1976 to 1988. He entered the prison system at approximately twenty-one and left it at approximately thirty-three. The twelve years were the years that conventional biography assigns to early career, marriage, the establishment of professional foundations. Mansour spent them inside.
See: Twelve Years, Three Prisons
The most striking biographical claim Mansour makes is that the prison saved him from a death of a different kind — the death of being a young Libyan writer absorbed by the surface of his country's politics without the deep reading required to write anything that would last. Inside the cell, he taught himself English, French and Italian. He read Garcia Marquez in Spanish. He read Hemingway in English. He read the European modernist canon in the languages it had been written in. He treated the cell as a reading room with a long stay.
His line — "A cell saved me from death" — is the formulation through which he refuses the conventional prison-survivor narrative. The cell was not a hiatus from his life. The cell was the period in which his life as a writer was made.
After his release, Mansour wrote two novels that have established his international reputation:
Both books were banned by states that had different ideological positions but identical reflexes toward literature that did not flatter them.
Mansour has spent significant portions of the post-release decades walking the Libyan desert. His own estimate is approximately ten thousand kilometres in total. The work has been a sustained piece of amateur archaeology: documentation of rock art, of pyramidal structures, of pre-Islamic Libyan civilisations whose record is — in his account — systematically under-researched by the formal Libyan archaeological establishment.
The walking is presented on the episode not as eccentricity but as a continuation of the reading he had begun in prison. The Libyan past is, in his framing, a library that has not been read because it has not been mapped. The walking is the mapping.
"A cell saved me from death." (EP 131)
"I read Garcia Marquez in Spanish in the cell. I did not have a teacher. I had time." (EP 131)