The cell had no ventilation. At the top of the door, at the highest point, there was a window set close to the ceiling, covered with a perforated metal sheet. The tiny holes in the sheet would allow the thinnest strands of sunlight to promise morning, and as the sun’s golden rays disappeared, they would signal the coming of night.

The most delusional element of solitary confinement is time itself. The hands of the clock are gone; day and night pass without measure. Time becomes nothing but a narrow beam of light slipping through the small holes in a metal sheet. I didn’t dare take an afternoon nap, because I would lose my grip on time entirely. In the outside world, such a nap might last only minutes – but inside the cell, within the confines of my shackled mind, it felt as though years had passed. When I woke up, I didn’t know if it was still today, if I had slipped back into yesterday, or if I had already arrived at tomorrow.

I don’t think anything in this world compares to the density of a cell, and inside that density, time feels compressed and wrinkled. When you stare at the tiny holes in the metal sheet, hoping to catch the slightest change to remind you that time is passing, nothing shifts. There is no sign of movement. It’s as if time itself is standing still, staring back at you. You sit, stand, walk, sit, stand, walk – again and again – but time doesn’t move at all.

When night falls, it feels as if you’ve lived a whole year – as if this stretch of time you’ve endured cannot possibly belong to a single day; it must surely be the sum of many. In a cell, time itself can drive a person to madness.

Occasionally, the ringing of a bell shattered the cell’s abrasive silence and broke through the long, echoing loneliness of the solitary confinement corridor. When the interrogators come for their victim – their accused, their prisoner – they do not enter the women’s corridor; they are men. Instead, they ring the bell, and a female warden retrieves the prisoner and escorts her towards the interrogation rooms in another part of the prison.

～

Solitary confinement is one of the great unknowns – and once it envelopes you, it fills you with terror and dread. Before my arrest, one of our activities had been protesting the use of solitary confinement against our family members.

Among our group of activists was the wife of a detainee. She was a well-known psychiatrist with detailed knowledge of what was to be known as “white torture.” She shared precise information about her husband’s condition and, drawing on her professional expertise, explained how solitary confinement systematically breaks a person down psychologically through isolation, fear, and sensory deprivation. It attacks the mind rather than the body, leaving deep and long-lasting trauma.

Now it was my turn.

*

Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd.

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