Episode: 131 — "Express Yourself and Become a Hero — Mansour Bushnaf" · Full Episode #131
Guest: Mansour Bushnaf
Date: 9 April 2023
At approximately twenty-one — in the mid-1970s, several years after the Gaddafi regime had consolidated power — Mansour Bushnaf wrote a play titled When the Rats Rule (عندما تحكم الفئران).
The title was the political claim. The play did not bury its argument inside layers of allegory that would require interpretive labour to unpack. It announced its subject. The question the play asked — what happens when bad rulers come to power — was a question that the Libyan state of the mid-1970s did not permit to be asked in public.
Mansour wrote it anyway.
The cost was twelve years.
He was arrested. The sentence took him through three of the worst prisons in Libya — Kuwaifiya, Black Horse, and Abu Salim — from 1976 to 1988. He was released at approximately thirty-three, having spent the entirety of his twenties and the beginning of his thirties inside the Libyan prison system.
The cost was not unique to him. The Libyan political-prison archive of the period contains many cases of writers, students and dissidents whose first significant adult work was punished with a sentence of similar length. What is unusual about Mansour's case is the public visibility of the trigger work. The play's title is a piece of evidence that survives — a piece of documentation that the prosecution was, in literal terms, a prosecution of writing.
Rat metaphors in political literature have a long history. The rat is the figure for the rulers who emerge from below the floor when the regular order of things has been compromised. The rat is the figure for opportunism, for predation, for the takeover of a space that other species had previously occupied. Mansour's title applies the figure to a specific political situation: rulers whose presence in power is illegitimate, and whose tenure represents the kind of inversion that the rat metaphor classically marks.
The play's content has not been widely circulated. The title, in 2023, is in some ways the document of the prosecution. The play is the play. The title is the public artefact.
The story is a case study in a particular kind of regime calculation. A play written by a twenty-one-year-old produced a twelve-year prison sentence. The disproportion is the message. The Libyan state of the mid-1970s did not arrest Mansour because the play was an existential threat. It arrested him because the play's existence demonstrated that the state's monopoly on naming the rulers was not absolute, and the prosecution was the demonstration that the state would respond to such demonstrations with a cost calibrated to deter future ones.
The deterrent did not fully work. The Libyan literary archive across the subsequent decades contains many works that produced similar costs for their authors. The deterrent did, however, shape the careers of those authors in particular ways — most obviously, by removing twelve years from the centre of those careers and converting the years into prison time.
Mansour returned to writing after his release. His novels — Chewing Gum (2008), The Golden Dog (2012) — were both banned by the regimes in power at the time of their publication. The pattern of work that triggers a state response has continued across his career. The play at twenty-one was the first in a sequence.