Love That the Prison Cannot Hold: Laila Soueif and the Abolitionist Fight for Life

Laila Soueif is starving herself.

Not as a metaphor, not as a symbol — literally.

Now, 245 days into a hunger strike, her body is shrinking, her voice softening, her movements slowing.

Her demand is simple: that the state honors its own law. That her son, Alaa Abd El-Fattah – writer, techie, political prisoner – be released. His five-year sentence ended on the 29^th of September, 2024. He should have walked free. But he has yet to see the sun.

This is not just one mother’s desperate act – it is an emancipatory intervention. As Angela Davis writes, “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.” But someone, somewhere, always has to carry the weight of that disappearance.

The prison does not end at the prison gate.

It extends outward, its weight borne by women – the mothers who wait in visitation lines that stretch for hours, only to be turned away with no explanation; the wives who navigate a labyrinth of bribes, paperwork, and bureaucracy, bargaining for the smallest scraps of dignity; the daughters who grow up knowing their fathers only through smuggled letters and fleeting glimpses.

The carceral system cannot function without these women – it thrives on their labor, their grief, their endurance.

In Egypt, an estimated 60,000 political prisoners – at least – have been swallowed by the abyss of the prison industrial complex. The state does not provide for them because it does not have to – it has outsourced that labor to the very people it seeks to break.

It is women who raise money for legal fees, deliver food their loved ones may never receive, document the disappearances that officials refuse to acknowledge.

The prison does not need to put shackles on women to make them prisoners.

It only needs to take their sons, their husbands, their brothers.

Laila Soueif knows this intimately.

Though she has never been imprisoned, her husband, friends, and two of her three children have been. No decade has passed without the unjust incarceration of a loved one.

For decades, she played her assigned role – the devoted mother, the loyal woman, the tireless organizer.

But now, Laila refuses. She will not feed the system with her labour. Instead, she starves it.

Hunger strikes have always been a weapon of the oppressed when every other means of resistance has been stripped away. The British watched Irish hunger strikers die in prison rather than recognize their humanity. In occupied Palestine, hunger strikes remain one of the few tools available to prisoners who have no trial date, no legal rights, and no certainty that they will ever be free. At Guantánamo, in Megiddo, in Abu Ghraib, force-feeding was not a means of preserving life but of annihilating agency.

Hunger is never just hunger. Starvation is not passive.

It is the refusal to participate in one’s own oppression. It is the transformation of the body into a battlefield. Laila Soueif’s body is now a site of struggle.

Her body, which the state expects to endure, now turns that expectation against it.
She is making visible what the state tries to disappear.

But this is not just about Alaa. It is about the logic of the carceral state itself.

What does this say about a regime that allows a mother to starve rather than free her son?

This is why Laila’s hunger strike is so threatening. Because she is not just demanding her son’s release — she is exposing the injustice of the system that imprisoned him in the first place.

Laila is not the first mother to fight this way. The mothers of the disappeared in Argentina’s Dirty War marched on the Plaza de Mayo, refusing to let their children be erased. Palestinian mothers wait outside the Israeli occupation’s Ofer and Negev prisons, passing food through metal bars, memorizing the faces of the guards who beat their sons, and singing soft lullabies to pass messages or offer comfort.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions…abolition's goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people over profit, welfare over warfare, and life over death.”

Laila’s strike forces us to confront this; an entire industry built on the logic of slow death.

In a 2014 essay titled ‘Graffiti for Two’ – co-written by Alaa and his long-time friend poet Ahmed Douma during their incarceration at Tora Maximum Security Prison II – Alaa wrote, “From my mother, I inherited a stone cake and a love that pierces through prison walls.”

In a world structured around carcerality, disposability, and premature death, to insist on love —deep, stubborn, militant love—is to insist on life itself.

Over her decades as a political dissident and university professor, Laila Soueif has loved and been loved by hundreds of youth. Her revolutionary pedagogy is grounded in radical love.

Radical love does not negotiate. It does not beg. It does not ask, how much suffering is enough? It knows the answer: no amount is ever enough. The state only frees those it can no longer hold, only concedes when forced, only breaks when made to.

But love – real love – has always known how to break things.

The carceral state survives by controlling not just bodies, but bonds. It not only imprisons—it isolates. It tries to turn love into loss, connection into absence, presence into memory. It counts on time to do its work: to exhaust families, to make the vigils smaller, to turn names into echoes. It believes that if it can hold someone long enough, the world will forget they were ever meant to be free.

Radical love is what pulls the disappeared back into the world. It is the refusal to let the prison dictate who is remembered and who is forgotten.

It is love as an act of sabotage.

And this is what makes it dangerous.

Love that obeys the law is no threat. Love that conforms to the boundaries of the state is no revolution. But love that resists – that insists on itself in the face of repression, that says I will not let you take him, that says I will not outlive him, that says you will have to kill me too—this is the love the prison cannot hold.

This is the love that tears holes in walls, as Alaa wrote.

Laila’s love is abolitionist because it does not just demand Alaa’s release, but a world in which no mother has to fight this way.

It is a rupture.

It is the love of the enslaved who burnt the plantations to the ground. The love of the dispossessed who tore up their eviction notices and refused to leave. The love of the mothers who carried the names of the executed in their mouths until history was forced to listen.

Radical love does not wait for justice. It makes justice.

The carceral state can disappear a prisoner. But what does it do with a mother who refuses to let him be disappeared?

What does it do when confronted with love that does not break, that does not fade, that does not obey?

It cracks.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.