I first discovered the Egyptian writer, poet and scholar Iman Mersal through a little book called How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts. I’d heard of Mersal in Egypt, where she is from, and where my husband and I had lived for many years. Several friends there had spoken admiringly of her. By the time I read her book we had moved to Morocco. I had traded a rich social and professional network for life in a city that was calmer, healthier and better suited to raising a child.
My son was around six years old at the time. I hadn’t been consciously looking for a book about motherhood; the genre hasn’t held any particular appeal to me. (My own experience of motherhood had seemed so engrossing and singular that I hadn’t felt the need for outside input.) Yet this book so struck me that I clearly remember where and when I read it: sitting on a thick white and black rug, as close as I could get to the little fireplace in the living room of our house in Rabat, in the quiet, wet, chill evenings of a Moroccan winter.
Published in 2017, How to Mend—like much of Mersal’s work—beautifully melds intellectual inquiry and emotional revelation. It starts out as a scholarly exploration of the violence of motherhood, drawing on the work of women poets such as Anna Swir, Saniya Saleh and Adrienne Rich. It contains a fascinating analysis of “hidden mother photos,” a once-common Victorian genre in which mothers hid behind sheets while propping up their babies (in some cases dead ones) for portraits. What Mersal notices is how often motherhood involves self-effacing sacrifice; how mother figures become invisible, interchangeable or instrumental.
This is all clever and intriguing, but then, as Mersal’s writing often does, the essay moves in an unexpected direction. She turns to her own family history and we fall, as if through a trap door, into a much deeper story. The book, it turns out, features two parallel searches: an attempt on Mersal’s part to see her own occluded mother, and another to understand her own suffering son.
Mersal’s mother died while delivering a stillborn baby. She was 27, Mersal seven. That loss has unsurprisingly shadowed her life and writing. The writer owns a single photograph of herself with her mother, taken in a studio in Cairo. In her poem “The Curse of Small Creatures,” she writes about it:
A woman and a girl, pallid because the acids were not properly washed off the paper. The woman unsmiling (though unaware she was to die exactly forty-seven days later). The girl unsmiling (though unaware of what death was). The woman has the girl’s lips and brow (the girl has the nose of the man who will remain forever outside the frame). The woman’s hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl’s hand clenched (not in anger: it holds half a piece of caramel). The girl’s dress is not Egyptian cotton (Abdel Nasser, who manufactured everything, died years ago). The shoes are imports from Gaza (Gaza, as you’re aware, is no longer a free zone). The woman’s watch doesn’t work and has a broad strap (is that in keeping with the style of 1974?).
This poem has many hallmarks of Mersal’s writing: irony and unsentimentality; mundane details presented with economy and polished into sparkling clues; a compulsion to rescue as much as she can from a past that she knows is largely beyond her reach. Mersal does not recognize her mother in the photograph, and finds herself undertaking “a journey towards what has been excluded from the image,” a journey toward her mother “to save her from becoming a ghost or a silhouette.”
It is not a journey with a final destination or a clear resolution, as Mersal makes clear. In much of her writing, about herself and other women, Mersal creates links of imagination and empathy that are all the more moving for being fragile bridges across vast chasms. She has perfected a form of autobiographical and biographical writing that combines exposure and elision, rescue and renunciation. If she often reveals details of her life, and goes in search of lost women she has loved and admired, she also insists on how partial and imperfect one’s knowledge of others always remains.
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Mersal came of age as a poet in Cairo in the 1990s. In 1998, she got married and emigrated to Canada. There she had two sons, who were raised far from her motherland and family and in a foreign language. She became a professor at Alberta University. And she slowly established herself as one of the most talented, original poets of her generation.
As Robyn Creswell writes in the introduction to a recent English anthology of Mersal’s poems, “The canon of Arabic-language verse from the 1950s through the 1980s is in large part the work of engagé male intellectuals; a passionate articulation of mostly political themes … the verse of latter-day prophets, a poetry whose dominant modes are those of denunciation, celebration, and grief.” Mersal’s poems, on the other hand, are skeptical and self-deprecating; she uses the tiniest, sharpest of needles to puncture political bombast and patriarchal assumptions. She writes poems about her love affairs, trips, old houses, childhood memories, insecurities and failings. Her own poetic prophethood, as she writes in her poem “A Life,” grows out of the confusion and suffering of individual experience:
My life that I’ve lugged with me from city to city, running out of breath while chasing it from school to library, from the kitchen to the bar, from the ney to the piano, from Marx to the museums, from the memory of a body’s smell to the dream of an airport lounge, from everything that I don’t know to everything that I don’t know. My life, whose existence I’ve never been sure of, lies next to me on my bed, opening her eyes after a long slumber and stretching her limbs, like a princess who knows that her father’s palace is magically protected against thieves, and that even if the wars never seem to end, happiness lies just beneath the skin.
This is how I awoke in that strange land the morning I turned forty, and if it weren’t for the fact that God has never once chosen a woman, I’d have said it was the first sign of prophethood.
One of Mersal’s great gifts as a writer is an extraordinary capacity for condensation, for coolly plucking a set of arresting particulars that add up to a moving whole. The third section of How to Mend, a collection of journal excerpts focusing on her experience of motherhood, exemplifies this. Most of the entries are about her son Youssef, who at a young age began suffering from serious mental health issues.
Ten years are crystallized into a dozen pages. The facts come as swift and sharp as arrows. The butterflies that Youssef feels flying in his head and heart and stomach become “a three-page list of diagnoses.” Mersal and her husband hide knives in their house from “a child with an uncontrollable death wish,” a boy whose depression his mother recognizes and fears she has passed on to him; who burns his drawings in the bathroom sink and screams at her in an airport.
As the family scrambles to find treatments for Youssef, Mersal also recounts several dreams. In one, she finds herself on trial. The lawyer for the prosecution “started to read out a list of the child minders who have passed through our life, then a list of my professional accomplishments, then another detailing all my trips abroad, then yet another of all the books I’ve read since Youssef had been born, asking the court how a good mother could busy herself with all these things if not at the expense of her child.” When Mersal finally launches into an inspired defense, she realizes she is speaking Arabic and that no one in the jury can understand her, except for one person from back home—a male poet—whom she loathes.
In another dream, Mersal uses a knife to carefully open the back of the sleeping Youssef’s skull, peeling back layers of his brain, looking for “the thing that is preventing signals from reality reaching the sensory receptor.”
My fingertips hit something solid, the size of a chickpea. I pick it up and hold it beneath the lamplight. A chip of purest diamond. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, I think, then remember that it is the cause of everything that has happened to him, all the misery we had lived through day after day. … I am overjoyed, unable to believe that the operation I had put off from nothing but timidity has turned out to be so simple.
She reaches for the sewing kit, to stitch up the incision; but the kit is gone. She lies her son down on his bed, asleep, head open. She has 27 minutes left to close it before he will die.
The clock gives off a tick with every passing second. The sewing kit has disappeared completely. I tremble with fear. The diamond, glowing in the lamplight. I shout so that my husband will get up and help me then check myself lest Mourad wake and see what I have done to his brother.
Whenever I read this passage, I feel the flutter of triumph and then panic of the mother who thinks she has saved her child, and realizes she hasn’t. I have my own version of this dream—one that every parent probably has at least once. When my son was nine months old, I went on a reporting trip, flying from Egypt to Tunisia for a few days, carrying my breast pump. One night I had a dream that my baby had been gassed (in the kind of chemical attack that the Assad regime was then carrying out against rebels in that country’s civil war, and which I had seen in the news). I held him in my arms, knowing he was dying, and assured him that he was not. After I woke up from this nightmare, I could not shake the knowledge it had given me: exactly how I would feel if my child were dying in my arms. I spent the subsequent days crying uncontrollably on the streets of Tunis between meetings and interviews.
This is what Mersal does: she exposes herself in a way that leads you to bare something of yourself in turn; you look up from the page and lock eyes with your life.
My mother is thankfully alive and well; my child has thankfully never suffered like Youssef. My experience of motherhood has not been lonely or troubled or guilty. And yet—despite my good luck—reading Mersal’s book made me realize it has been a little more of those things than I generally care to admit. It led me to run my finger along some fundamental fears: the fear of losing one’s mother, the fear of becoming a lost mother, the fear of losing one’s child. To contemplate, at a safe remove, the terrifying risk that lurks in the gamble of motherhood—so terrifying that, I think, one generally averts one’s gaze.
Mersal conveys all this straightforwardly, with touches of humor and a magical economy. Her writing is incredibly intimate without seeming confessional. She chooses the things she tells us very purposefully—not to play on our emotions or relieve hers, but to help us arrive at a recognition that parallels her own. And while she does share devastating personal details, there is no voyeurism, no sense that one is rubbernecking at the disasters in someone else’s life or being called upon to feel shock or pity.
Nor is one prodded to identify with the writer. If I am so moved by How to Mend, it is not because I can “relate” to Mersal’s experience, but instead because I feel painfully and surprisingly expanded by it, honored with a handful of true confidences. The effect of her writing is like having a curtain pulled back and catching a deep, arresting glimpse that you’ll never forget.
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If Mersal is able to produce this effect, it’s because she has experienced and explored it so deeply herself: “Sometimes a piece of writing can shake your very being,” she writes. “This doesn’t mean it has to be unprecedented in the history of literature or the best thing you’ve ever read. It is fate, delivering a message to help you make sense of whatever you’re going through—and at the exact moment you most need it, whether you realize it or not.” Mersal is describing how she felt in 1993, when in Cairo’s main used-book market she came across Love and Silence, a novel published in 1967 by a female writer she had never heard of, Enayat al-Zayyat.
It was like nothing she’d read before. Enayat’s voice, Mersal writes, is “a hesitant, melancholy, unconfident murmur, like weeping heard on the other side of a wall.” Told from the point of view of a young woman, Najla, whose brother’s death has just shattered her family, the novel offers “a taxonomy of the different routes to freedom—employment, love, political consciousness—but each attempt carries within it the inevitability of her return to a cycle of depression and isolation. It is as though there is something wrong with Najla, a flaw she carries with her as she shuttles back and forth, in and out of life, and which poisons everything she tries.”
Mersal would spend decades searching for answers about the author of this transfixing book. Eventually, she wrote about this quest. The outcome, Traces of Enayat, was widely celebrated when it came out in Arabic in 2019 and was just released in the U.S. in an English translation by Robin Moger this April. With al-Zayyat, once again we find ourselves before a mother who died young. She killed herself in 1963, at the age of 26, not long after the manuscript of Love and Silence was rejected by a state-run publisher. At the time of her death, she was trying to obtain a divorce, which her husband refused to grant, while claiming custody of their six-year-old son. She wrote her suicide note to the boy: “My darling son, Abbas, farewell. I do love you, it’s just that life is unbearable. Forgive me.”
Traces of Enayat begins as an investigation. Mersal wants to know who al-Zayyat was, and why she killed herself. “A happy woman cannot kill herself over a book,” someone opines. “But what does it mean, a happy woman?” Mersal wonders. Love and Silence was published four years after al-Zayyat’s death. For some time Mersal believed that Enayat al-Zayyat was related to the famous Egyptian feminist writer and activist Latifa al-Zayyat, whose novel The Open Door—a story of personal emancipation, romantic fulfillment and national liberation told along parallel lines—set the template for women’s writing in Arabic for decades. In fact, there was no relation, and Enayat came from an altogether different background: she was from a bourgeois family, educated at a German school, disconnected from the cultural and political circles of the time. Her subject and style didn’t fit the prevailing literary trends. Enayat was an outsider, someone different and singular. Certainly, what drew Mersal to her was a sense of their affinities. Al-Zayyat suffered from depression, just as Mersal does. And Mersal and al-Zayyat both faced an overwhelmingly male literary establishment that did not take them seriously. Mersal’s relationship to al-Zayyat seems both filial (the excitement of finding a literary forerunner) and maternal (by the time she wrote her book, Mersal was quite a bit older than al-Zayyat would ever be).
For years, in her visits back to Cairo, Mersal sought information about Enayat, trying to solve her riddle—interviewing friends and relatives, visiting the office where al-Zayyat worked, the clinic where she was treated for depression, the tomb where she was buried. But the archives that Mersal dreamt of finding—Enayat’s journals, drafts, her unfinished second novel—turned up missing. The young woman’s personal papers were destroyed by her bourgeois family, acting on an instinct to protect their privacy and reputation (and perhaps to protect themselves from the pain of her death). Al-Zayyat is also almost entirely absent from the official archive, which in modern Egypt has been heavily distorted by censorship, propaganda and neglect. In this vacuum, Mersal found that others stepped in and cynically invented whatever suited them. A famous male literary critic wrote repeatedly about al-Zayyat, claiming falsely to have promoted her work, using her as a stand-in for whatever point he wanted to make about tragic young female writers. An unknown government official seemingly appended a final page of propaganda to Love and Silence when it was published posthumously, in which the 1952 Free Officers’ Coup is suddenly celebrated as a happy ending. After that, al-Zayyat and her lone, strange book were almost completely forgotten.
Mersal could very easily have presented her rescue of al-Zayyat’s memory as a simple, redemptive act of feminist solidarity. In the autumn of 1962, al-Zayyat wrote in her journal (one of the thirteen pages of it that survived): “I don’t mean a thing to anybody. Lost, found, it’s all the same: here is as good as gone. The world wouldn’t tremble either way. When I walk I leave no tracks, like I walk on water, and I am unseen, invisible.” Mersal proves her wrong. If I know Enayat’s name and own a copy of Love and Silence—reissued in Cairo in 2019, and bought at a book fair in Amman in 2022—it is only because of Mersal’s book, of her determination to honor her own reaction and interest, to pay attention to a woman and writer others had ignored. Yet Mersal does not make any grand statements about the value and purpose of that attention. She lets what she has learned (and failed to learn) about al-Zayyat speak for itself. And Mersal does not just see herself as al-Zayyat’s champion, or rescuer. She sees herself as in al-Zayyat’s debt; their relationship is reciprocal because the search for al-Zayyat introduced her, Mersal, writes, to new parts of herself.
As I read Traces of Enayat I couldn’t help comparing it to the many biographies of rediscovered and underappreciated women artists that assert their broader significance, their genius; promise full discovery, unique insight; claim to define the importance and meaning of their subjects’ lives. Mersal maintains a tender, respectful distance: “To trace someone does not mean filling all the gaps or searching out every fact in the quest to document it. It is to take a journey towards someone who cannot speak for themselves.” She has a great amount of empathy and affection for Enayat; but she does not lay claim to her or make claims on her behalf; she does not identify with her or presume to truly know her; if they had lived at the same time, she says, they would most likely not have been friends.
At one point, Mersal addresses Enayat directly: “You will be in my steps on the roads of this city which we have loved and hated. You are present in the alienation we both have lived, each in our time. And you are a part of the writing, which has given to us and taken away.” Yet Mersal also finally accepts the impossibility of “finding” al-Zayyat—she comes to see this acceptance as a liberation for them both.
I feel the same mixture of gratitude and respect for Mersal as she does for al-Zayyat, the same sense that I do not know her and do not need to. I know things thanks to her, things I’ve learned (about motherhood, womanhood, writing, memory, loss) accompanying her on her journeys, walking alongside her and her ghosts. Mersal’s writing is about reaching out rather than grasping, searching rather than finding; it opens a space in which to imagine other individuals, to make a connection with other women, other writers, other mothers, while accepting their distance and mystery. There is no facile sisterhood here; but there are chains of transmission, circles of commonality, echoes across time.
Take a passage toward the end of Traces of Enayat, one of my favorites. In it, Mersal permits herself a small leap of imagination. A neighbor remembers al-Zayyat, a few hours before she killed herself, looking like she had just come from the hair salon. Mersal finds this unlikely and suspects that al-Zayyat cut her own hair, in one of those moments in which “a woman doesn’t know what to do with herself. She doesn’t want to go out or talk or write or scream, not even to shatter the mirror which tells her she is there, that she exists.” In fact, Mersal notes, one could write a whole a book about the times Arab women writers have cut their hair. She then shares her synopsis of this imagined book, a page and half that could also double as a brilliant prose poem:
Warda al-Yaziji cropped hers when she heard the rumor that her father and brothers wrote her poems for her.
Malak Hifni Nasif snipped hers away every time her pride brought a fall, like the time the women of the Riyah Bedouin in the Fayoum mocked her for being barren, or when her husband, the Bedouin grandee Abdel Sattar al-Basil, resumed relations with his first wife behind her back, or the time she found out that, after all this, it had been her husband, not her, who was infertile.
May Ziadeh cut it times without number. When her mother died, when she was being treated for insanity at the Asfouriya Asylum, and again when she was discharged and no one came to see her. Bitterest of all, when she realized that she had wasted her life in literary salons with men who called her “beautiful,” and that she should have shut herself away instead, and written.
Galila Rida cut it when the doctor informed her that cerebral atrophy meant that her son Galal would be three years old for the rest of his life, or when a Sudanese Arab-nationalist poet publicly humiliated her because she refused to marry him.
Doria Shafik cut hers after the great Taha Hussein shamed her for leading a strike to agitate for the inclusion of women’s rights in the revolutionary constitution, describing her and her colleagues as unserious and fame-hungry.
Alifa Rifaat cut hers when she heard them whisper that she promoted lesbianism.
I have been writing about Arabic literature for twenty years; I know of most of these women and their works. But I’d never heard any of these stories, and each one jolted me like a brief lightning bolt. Mersal adds no commentary to her precise list of moments of rebellion, grief and humiliation. She presents the facts as carefully as she has collected them, letting us see each woman in her vulnerability and dignity. And yet by bringing them together on the page this way, establishing a relation between them and herself and her readers, Mersal make them, and us all, a little less alone.
Art credit: Minoo Emami, 4 Walls #2, 2023. Clear acrylic, ink, copper tubes and hardware. © Minoo Emami, all rights reserved.
I first discovered the Egyptian writer, poet and scholar Iman Mersal through a little book called How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts. I’d heard of Mersal in Egypt, where she is from, and where my husband and I had lived for many years. Several friends there had spoken admiringly of her. By the time I read her book we had moved to Morocco. I had traded a rich social and professional network for life in a city that was calmer, healthier and better suited to raising a child.
My son was around six years old at the time. I hadn’t been consciously looking for a book about motherhood; the genre hasn’t held any particular appeal to me. (My own experience of motherhood had seemed so engrossing and singular that I hadn’t felt the need for outside input.) Yet this book so struck me that I clearly remember where and when I read it: sitting on a thick white and black rug, as close as I could get to the little fireplace in the living room of our house in Rabat, in the quiet, wet, chill evenings of a Moroccan winter.
Published in 2017, How to Mend—like much of Mersal’s work—beautifully melds intellectual inquiry and emotional revelation. It starts out as a scholarly exploration of the violence of motherhood, drawing on the work of women poets such as Anna Swir, Saniya Saleh and Adrienne Rich. It contains a fascinating analysis of “hidden mother photos,” a once-common Victorian genre in which mothers hid behind sheets while propping up their babies (in some cases dead ones) for portraits. What Mersal notices is how often motherhood involves self-effacing sacrifice; how mother figures become invisible, interchangeable or instrumental.
This is all clever and intriguing, but then, as Mersal’s writing often does, the essay moves in an unexpected direction. She turns to her own family history and we fall, as if through a trap door, into a much deeper story. The book, it turns out, features two parallel searches: an attempt on Mersal’s part to see her own occluded mother, and another to understand her own suffering son.
Mersal’s mother died while delivering a stillborn baby. She was 27, Mersal seven. That loss has unsurprisingly shadowed her life and writing. The writer owns a single photograph of herself with her mother, taken in a studio in Cairo. In her poem “The Curse of Small Creatures,” she writes about it:
This poem has many hallmarks of Mersal’s writing: irony and unsentimentality; mundane details presented with economy and polished into sparkling clues; a compulsion to rescue as much as she can from a past that she knows is largely beyond her reach. Mersal does not recognize her mother in the photograph, and finds herself undertaking “a journey towards what has been excluded from the image,” a journey toward her mother “to save her from becoming a ghost or a silhouette.”
It is not a journey with a final destination or a clear resolution, as Mersal makes clear. In much of her writing, about herself and other women, Mersal creates links of imagination and empathy that are all the more moving for being fragile bridges across vast chasms. She has perfected a form of autobiographical and biographical writing that combines exposure and elision, rescue and renunciation. If she often reveals details of her life, and goes in search of lost women she has loved and admired, she also insists on how partial and imperfect one’s knowledge of others always remains.
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Mersal came of age as a poet in Cairo in the 1990s. In 1998, she got married and emigrated to Canada. There she had two sons, who were raised far from her motherland and family and in a foreign language. She became a professor at Alberta University. And she slowly established herself as one of the most talented, original poets of her generation.
As Robyn Creswell writes in the introduction to a recent English anthology of Mersal’s poems, “The canon of Arabic-language verse from the 1950s through the 1980s is in large part the work of engagé male intellectuals; a passionate articulation of mostly political themes … the verse of latter-day prophets, a poetry whose dominant modes are those of denunciation, celebration, and grief.” Mersal’s poems, on the other hand, are skeptical and self-deprecating; she uses the tiniest, sharpest of needles to puncture political bombast and patriarchal assumptions. She writes poems about her love affairs, trips, old houses, childhood memories, insecurities and failings. Her own poetic prophethood, as she writes in her poem “A Life,” grows out of the confusion and suffering of individual experience:
One of Mersal’s great gifts as a writer is an extraordinary capacity for condensation, for coolly plucking a set of arresting particulars that add up to a moving whole. The third section of How to Mend, a collection of journal excerpts focusing on her experience of motherhood, exemplifies this. Most of the entries are about her son Youssef, who at a young age began suffering from serious mental health issues.
Ten years are crystallized into a dozen pages. The facts come as swift and sharp as arrows. The butterflies that Youssef feels flying in his head and heart and stomach become “a three-page list of diagnoses.” Mersal and her husband hide knives in their house from “a child with an uncontrollable death wish,” a boy whose depression his mother recognizes and fears she has passed on to him; who burns his drawings in the bathroom sink and screams at her in an airport.
As the family scrambles to find treatments for Youssef, Mersal also recounts several dreams. In one, she finds herself on trial. The lawyer for the prosecution “started to read out a list of the child minders who have passed through our life, then a list of my professional accomplishments, then another detailing all my trips abroad, then yet another of all the books I’ve read since Youssef had been born, asking the court how a good mother could busy herself with all these things if not at the expense of her child.” When Mersal finally launches into an inspired defense, she realizes she is speaking Arabic and that no one in the jury can understand her, except for one person from back home—a male poet—whom she loathes.
In another dream, Mersal uses a knife to carefully open the back of the sleeping Youssef’s skull, peeling back layers of his brain, looking for “the thing that is preventing signals from reality reaching the sensory receptor.”
She reaches for the sewing kit, to stitch up the incision; but the kit is gone. She lies her son down on his bed, asleep, head open. She has 27 minutes left to close it before he will die.
Whenever I read this passage, I feel the flutter of triumph and then panic of the mother who thinks she has saved her child, and realizes she hasn’t. I have my own version of this dream—one that every parent probably has at least once. When my son was nine months old, I went on a reporting trip, flying from Egypt to Tunisia for a few days, carrying my breast pump. One night I had a dream that my baby had been gassed (in the kind of chemical attack that the Assad regime was then carrying out against rebels in that country’s civil war, and which I had seen in the news). I held him in my arms, knowing he was dying, and assured him that he was not. After I woke up from this nightmare, I could not shake the knowledge it had given me: exactly how I would feel if my child were dying in my arms. I spent the subsequent days crying uncontrollably on the streets of Tunis between meetings and interviews.
This is what Mersal does: she exposes herself in a way that leads you to bare something of yourself in turn; you look up from the page and lock eyes with your life.
My mother is thankfully alive and well; my child has thankfully never suffered like Youssef. My experience of motherhood has not been lonely or troubled or guilty. And yet—despite my good luck—reading Mersal’s book made me realize it has been a little more of those things than I generally care to admit. It led me to run my finger along some fundamental fears: the fear of losing one’s mother, the fear of becoming a lost mother, the fear of losing one’s child. To contemplate, at a safe remove, the terrifying risk that lurks in the gamble of motherhood—so terrifying that, I think, one generally averts one’s gaze.
Mersal conveys all this straightforwardly, with touches of humor and a magical economy. Her writing is incredibly intimate without seeming confessional. She chooses the things she tells us very purposefully—not to play on our emotions or relieve hers, but to help us arrive at a recognition that parallels her own. And while she does share devastating personal details, there is no voyeurism, no sense that one is rubbernecking at the disasters in someone else’s life or being called upon to feel shock or pity.
Nor is one prodded to identify with the writer. If I am so moved by How to Mend, it is not because I can “relate” to Mersal’s experience, but instead because I feel painfully and surprisingly expanded by it, honored with a handful of true confidences. The effect of her writing is like having a curtain pulled back and catching a deep, arresting glimpse that you’ll never forget.
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If Mersal is able to produce this effect, it’s because she has experienced and explored it so deeply herself: “Sometimes a piece of writing can shake your very being,” she writes. “This doesn’t mean it has to be unprecedented in the history of literature or the best thing you’ve ever read. It is fate, delivering a message to help you make sense of whatever you’re going through—and at the exact moment you most need it, whether you realize it or not.” Mersal is describing how she felt in 1993, when in Cairo’s main used-book market she came across Love and Silence, a novel published in 1967 by a female writer she had never heard of, Enayat al-Zayyat.
It was like nothing she’d read before. Enayat’s voice, Mersal writes, is “a hesitant, melancholy, unconfident murmur, like weeping heard on the other side of a wall.” Told from the point of view of a young woman, Najla, whose brother’s death has just shattered her family, the novel offers “a taxonomy of the different routes to freedom—employment, love, political consciousness—but each attempt carries within it the inevitability of her return to a cycle of depression and isolation. It is as though there is something wrong with Najla, a flaw she carries with her as she shuttles back and forth, in and out of life, and which poisons everything she tries.”
Mersal would spend decades searching for answers about the author of this transfixing book. Eventually, she wrote about this quest. The outcome, Traces of Enayat, was widely celebrated when it came out in Arabic in 2019 and was just released in the U.S. in an English translation by Robin Moger this April. With al-Zayyat, once again we find ourselves before a mother who died young. She killed herself in 1963, at the age of 26, not long after the manuscript of Love and Silence was rejected by a state-run publisher. At the time of her death, she was trying to obtain a divorce, which her husband refused to grant, while claiming custody of their six-year-old son. She wrote her suicide note to the boy: “My darling son, Abbas, farewell. I do love you, it’s just that life is unbearable. Forgive me.”
Traces of Enayat begins as an investigation. Mersal wants to know who al-Zayyat was, and why she killed herself. “A happy woman cannot kill herself over a book,” someone opines. “But what does it mean, a happy woman?” Mersal wonders. Love and Silence was published four years after al-Zayyat’s death. For some time Mersal believed that Enayat al-Zayyat was related to the famous Egyptian feminist writer and activist Latifa al-Zayyat, whose novel The Open Door—a story of personal emancipation, romantic fulfillment and national liberation told along parallel lines—set the template for women’s writing in Arabic for decades. In fact, there was no relation, and Enayat came from an altogether different background: she was from a bourgeois family, educated at a German school, disconnected from the cultural and political circles of the time. Her subject and style didn’t fit the prevailing literary trends. Enayat was an outsider, someone different and singular. Certainly, what drew Mersal to her was a sense of their affinities. Al-Zayyat suffered from depression, just as Mersal does. And Mersal and al-Zayyat both faced an overwhelmingly male literary establishment that did not take them seriously. Mersal’s relationship to al-Zayyat seems both filial (the excitement of finding a literary forerunner) and maternal (by the time she wrote her book, Mersal was quite a bit older than al-Zayyat would ever be).
For years, in her visits back to Cairo, Mersal sought information about Enayat, trying to solve her riddle—interviewing friends and relatives, visiting the office where al-Zayyat worked, the clinic where she was treated for depression, the tomb where she was buried. But the archives that Mersal dreamt of finding—Enayat’s journals, drafts, her unfinished second novel—turned up missing. The young woman’s personal papers were destroyed by her bourgeois family, acting on an instinct to protect their privacy and reputation (and perhaps to protect themselves from the pain of her death). Al-Zayyat is also almost entirely absent from the official archive, which in modern Egypt has been heavily distorted by censorship, propaganda and neglect. In this vacuum, Mersal found that others stepped in and cynically invented whatever suited them. A famous male literary critic wrote repeatedly about al-Zayyat, claiming falsely to have promoted her work, using her as a stand-in for whatever point he wanted to make about tragic young female writers. An unknown government official seemingly appended a final page of propaganda to Love and Silence when it was published posthumously, in which the 1952 Free Officers’ Coup is suddenly celebrated as a happy ending. After that, al-Zayyat and her lone, strange book were almost completely forgotten.
Mersal could very easily have presented her rescue of al-Zayyat’s memory as a simple, redemptive act of feminist solidarity. In the autumn of 1962, al-Zayyat wrote in her journal (one of the thirteen pages of it that survived): “I don’t mean a thing to anybody. Lost, found, it’s all the same: here is as good as gone. The world wouldn’t tremble either way. When I walk I leave no tracks, like I walk on water, and I am unseen, invisible.” Mersal proves her wrong. If I know Enayat’s name and own a copy of Love and Silence—reissued in Cairo in 2019, and bought at a book fair in Amman in 2022—it is only because of Mersal’s book, of her determination to honor her own reaction and interest, to pay attention to a woman and writer others had ignored. Yet Mersal does not make any grand statements about the value and purpose of that attention. She lets what she has learned (and failed to learn) about al-Zayyat speak for itself. And Mersal does not just see herself as al-Zayyat’s champion, or rescuer. She sees herself as in al-Zayyat’s debt; their relationship is reciprocal because the search for al-Zayyat introduced her, Mersal, writes, to new parts of herself.
As I read Traces of Enayat I couldn’t help comparing it to the many biographies of rediscovered and underappreciated women artists that assert their broader significance, their genius; promise full discovery, unique insight; claim to define the importance and meaning of their subjects’ lives. Mersal maintains a tender, respectful distance: “To trace someone does not mean filling all the gaps or searching out every fact in the quest to document it. It is to take a journey towards someone who cannot speak for themselves.” She has a great amount of empathy and affection for Enayat; but she does not lay claim to her or make claims on her behalf; she does not identify with her or presume to truly know her; if they had lived at the same time, she says, they would most likely not have been friends.
At one point, Mersal addresses Enayat directly: “You will be in my steps on the roads of this city which we have loved and hated. You are present in the alienation we both have lived, each in our time. And you are a part of the writing, which has given to us and taken away.” Yet Mersal also finally accepts the impossibility of “finding” al-Zayyat—she comes to see this acceptance as a liberation for them both.
I feel the same mixture of gratitude and respect for Mersal as she does for al-Zayyat, the same sense that I do not know her and do not need to. I know things thanks to her, things I’ve learned (about motherhood, womanhood, writing, memory, loss) accompanying her on her journeys, walking alongside her and her ghosts. Mersal’s writing is about reaching out rather than grasping, searching rather than finding; it opens a space in which to imagine other individuals, to make a connection with other women, other writers, other mothers, while accepting their distance and mystery. There is no facile sisterhood here; but there are chains of transmission, circles of commonality, echoes across time.
Take a passage toward the end of Traces of Enayat, one of my favorites. In it, Mersal permits herself a small leap of imagination. A neighbor remembers al-Zayyat, a few hours before she killed herself, looking like she had just come from the hair salon. Mersal finds this unlikely and suspects that al-Zayyat cut her own hair, in one of those moments in which “a woman doesn’t know what to do with herself. She doesn’t want to go out or talk or write or scream, not even to shatter the mirror which tells her she is there, that she exists.” In fact, Mersal notes, one could write a whole a book about the times Arab women writers have cut their hair. She then shares her synopsis of this imagined book, a page and half that could also double as a brilliant prose poem:
I have been writing about Arabic literature for twenty years; I know of most of these women and their works. But I’d never heard any of these stories, and each one jolted me like a brief lightning bolt. Mersal adds no commentary to her precise list of moments of rebellion, grief and humiliation. She presents the facts as carefully as she has collected them, letting us see each woman in her vulnerability and dignity. And yet by bringing them together on the page this way, establishing a relation between them and herself and her readers, Mersal make them, and us all, a little less alone.
Art credit: Minoo Emami, 4 Walls #2, 2023. Clear acrylic, ink, copper tubes and hardware. © Minoo Emami, all rights reserved.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.