In his preface to a selection of Abdellatif Laâbi’s prison letters, the French writer Claude Ollier, who himself had experienced forced labor and prison in Germany during World War II, tells us that “ces lettres de prison sont tout entières tendues vers le poème, non le récit” (these prison letters all strive toward poetry rather than narration). Since the letters collected in Chroniques de la citadelle d’exil (Chronicles of the Citadel of Exile) are not written in verse form, and since Laâbi will later write both a novel based on his prison experiences and poems that evoke them, in this paper I will explore what makes the letters lyric rather than narrative. I will suggest that the lyricism of the letters is in part due to the literary-political work that brought him to the attention of the government before he was imprisoned and tortured in 1972, in part due to the specific conditions of communication with his families and friends during the eight years of his incarceration, and in part due to the relationship between poetry, history and narrative at the center of Islamic-Arab culture.