Episode: 131 — "Express Yourself and Become a Hero — Mansour Bushnaf" · Full Episode #131
Guest: Mansour Bushnaf
Date: 9 April 2023
Mansour Bushnaf entered the Libyan prison system in 1976 at approximately twenty-one. He left in 1988 at approximately thirty-three. The twelve years moved him through three of the worst prisons in Libya:
The trigger for the sentence was a play. Its title was When the Rats Rule (عندما تحكم الفئران). The play had been written when Mansour was approximately twenty-one — a young man's direct interrogation of the question of what happens when bad rulers come to power. The Gaddafi state, which had been in power since 1969, did not require an interpretive theory to read the title. The arrest followed quickly.
The conventional script for a long political imprisonment is the script of survival: the years are framed as a period to be endured, after which the surviving prisoner emerges with damage and with testimony. Mansour rejects the conventional script.
His framing is that the cell was the room in which he became a writer. He had been writing since he was a child — the letter to Khadija Al-Jahmi at age ten had already established the practice — but the cell was the period in which his reading caught up to his writing. He taught himself English. He taught himself French. He taught himself Italian. He read Garcia Marquez in Spanish, Hemingway in English, the European modernist canon in the languages in which it had been written. The cell did not interrupt his career. The cell built the foundation his post-1988 career was built on.
The line he delivers in EP 131 — "A cell saved me from death" — is the compressed form of this argument. The death he is referring to is not physical. It is the death of being a young Libyan writer who absorbs the surface of his country's politics without the deep reading required to write anything that would last. Most young Libyan writers of his generation did not have access to the languages or the time. He had both, in the cell.
The three prisons are not interchangeable. Each carries its own archive in Libyan public memory.
Kuwaifiya is a Benghazi facility that held a significant portion of the eastern political prisoner population through the 1970s and 1980s.
Black Horse was a prison whose name has accumulated, across decades of survivor testimony, an unusual weight in the Libyan public imagination. Its conditions were notorious.
Abu Salim is the prison most associated with the 1996 massacre. It is the prison in which Hisham Matar's father is believed to have died. It is the prison referenced repeatedly across Libyan literature, music, and oral history of dissent.
Mansour cycled through all three. The movement between them was, in the Libyan prison system of the period, a normal administrative event. Prisoners were transferred for various reasons, often without explanation, between facilities that had similar architectural designs and different reputations.
He left the system in 1988 at approximately thirty-three. The Libya he re-entered was a country halfway through the Gaddafi regime's full duration. He had been inside for twelve years. He would publish his major novels — Chewing Gum in 2008, The Golden Dog in 2012 — only after another two decades. Both novels would be banned by the regimes in power at the time of their publication.
The story is not, primarily, a survivor's narrative. It is a study in what is possible inside an imprisonment that is most often documented through its damage. Mansour does not deny the damage. He locates a second register alongside it: the cell as the period in which a writer's serious education was conducted.
The story sits inside a Damiri pattern that includes Hisham Matar's father at Abu Salim, Anonymous (EP 106)'s father across seven years at Abu Salim, and the broader Libyan archive of political imprisonment. Mansour's case is the survivor who came out and continued to write — and who refuses to allow the imprisonment to be the only thing the writing is about.