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Illustrated portrait of Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed

A character in The Queue

Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed

Yehya is a thirty-eight-year-old sales representative and the injured man around whom the story turns.

The book

Cover of The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz
The QueueBasma Abdel Aziz, 2013

An endless queue waits before a bureaucracy that controls permits, medicine, information, and official reality.

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Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Yehya is a thirty-eight-year-old sales representative and the injured man around whom the story turns. He is not a revolutionary organizer; curiosity places him near the Disgraceful Events, and a security-force bullet makes his private survival dependent on an official lie. He joins the queue because he still believes persistence may force the system to process his request. As his pain worsens, his body becomes evidence the Gate cannot admit exists. The novel leaves his fate deliberately uncertain.

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