Traces of Enayat
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From one of the preeminent poets of the Arab-speaking world, a brilliant work of creative nonfiction retracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature’s tragic heroine.
Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. For the next three decades, it’s as if Enayat never existed at all.
Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat’s long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.
In this luminous biographical detective story, Mersal retraces Enayat’s life and afterlife though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies—from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal’s own past—a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms.
With Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Egyptian poet Mersal (Threshold) recounts in this haunting report her quest to uncover the life story of writer Enayat al-Zayyat (1936–1963) after stumbling upon al-Zayyat's posthumous 1967 debut novel, Love and Silence, at a Cairo bookstall in 1993. Mersal was taken with al-Zayyat's startlingly modern tale of an Egyptian woman's search for personal freedom amid disillusionment with work and love, shocked the book had gone largely unheralded, and shaken by the discovery that al-Zayyat killed herself four years before the novel's publication. Setting out to unearth the circumstances of al-Zayyat's life and death, Mersal tracked down the writer's surviving friends and family, their fragmentary perspectives revealing an introspective, depressed young woman who in the days leading up to her death was discouraged by a publisher's rejection of Love and Silence and feared losing custody of her six-year-old son in a contentious divorce. Mersal's meticulous research occasionally breaks the spell of her otherwise hypnotic storytelling, as when she reproduces the full seven-page obituary for a German Egyptologist that al-Zayyat apparently intended to write her second novel about, but the prose shines (Mersal, in Moger's sensitive translation, describes al-Zayyat's voice as "the whisper that never speaks to the masses... like weeping heard on the other side of a wall") and the central literary mystery will keep readers turning pages. This beguiling volume captivates. Photos.
