In his introduction to the posthumously collected short stories of the Syrian journalist Jamil Hatmal, Abdalrahman Munif describes the underlying tone of the author's stories as one of sorrow—a sorrow that also is inherently tied to the author's biography. Born in 1956 in Damascus, Hatmal was briefly imprisoned in 1982 for a period of four months due to his membership in the Syrian Communist Action Party. He was released early for a heart condition that was greatly exacerbated under the conditions of his detention that reportedly included torture. Subsequently, Hatmal began a life of itinerant exile, working as a reporter for major Arabic newspapers. Having undergone several heart operations in Paris, he died in exile in a hospital in Paris in 1994. Nonetheless, in Munif's reading, many of Hatmal's fictional narratives on exile and imprisonment retain what he terms an inevitable "redemption". Accordingly, Hatmal's works show that exile, like the experience of detention, despite or because of its physical and psychological turmoils, can provide a space for transgressive or subversive creative production. Hence, Hatmal's stories, like several works of prison literature of his generation, tend towards formal experimentation and eschew the dominance of social realism that marked an earlier generation of Syrian literature. In addition to ambiguously describing the spaces of both exile and imprisonment in such a way that they appear to be one and the same, many of Jamil Hatmal's stories consciously interrogate the critical dilemmas and productive potentialities of writing. In this paper, I offer an investigation of the thematic triad-- prison-exile-writing-that consistently emerges throughout Hatmal's short stories. First, through the lens of Abdalrahman Munif's introduction to Hatmal's collected works as well as the critical literature on exile, I will trace the critical links between prison literature and literatures of and on exile more broadly with special attention to the notion of exilic redemption-as-resistance. Second, I will examine how Hatmal metafictionally scripts both exile and imprisonment as inherently intertwined with and through the problematic process and act of writing. In doing so, I will show that the metafictional aspects of Hatmal's stories provides us with a cautionary tale. The act of inscription cannot merely be a path of redemption or a means of resistance; rather, writing, in and of itself, can come into question as another space of exile or detention.