To be seen is to remain

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Mohsen Mohamed
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To be seen is to remain

by Mohsen Mohamed

This work begins with the figure of the witness who is punished for seeing, 

                            for what he refuses or is unable to forget. 


The witness’s body and language directly address authority, exposing the emptiness and absurdity of what it guarantees.

Across borders, prisons, and bureaucratic surfaces, the body and language appear not as testimony but as administrative objects, the only evidence and residue of having been there.

The stamp on the body reflects the procedure of authority inscribed upon it, turning the body into a letter that is always deferred and never arrives.

Kafka’s photographs, the passport, and the partially visible body suspended by strings trace this condition, illuminating the figure that can survive structure but can never escape it.

The wall is treated as an archive, a place where authority writes itself and where counter-memory might still surface. This work does not ask whether witnessing is just, but what happens when seeing is processed, stored, and endlessly delayed. What remains unfinished is part of the work, as justice, too, remains unfinished.
Author

Mohsen Mohamed

Mohsen Mohamed is Rowayat’s Arabic Literature in Translation Editor and Editorial Communications Coordinator (mohsen@rowayat.org). He is an Egyptian poet born in 1994. His debut poetry collection, مفيش رقم بيرد (No One Is On the Line), was published in 2020 by Dar El Meraya for Cultural Production. It won first prize for vernacular poetry at the Cairo International Book Fair and the Sawiris Cultural Award, and the translation published by Laertes Press in 2023 was a finalist at the Eric Hoffer Book Awards.

In 2014, in the aftermath of a student demonstration, Mohamed was arbitrarily arrested during a campus sweep. He began writing poetry during his imprisonment. His work has appeared in publications including Poetry Magazine, Cordite, Mediapart, and NRC.

He is currently working on a new collection of poems exploring themes of identity, gender, and exile, alongside essays and articles engaging with similar concerns.

Outside writing, Mohsen is drawn to the quiet challenge of mathematics—often unsuccessfully—and to travel, which he sees as a way of reclaiming freedom. He sometimes jokes that when he feels low, he tries to solve a mathematical problem, fails, and fails, and feels worse for it.

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