Poet Iman Mersal’s book ‘Traces of Enayat’ seeks answers: NPR

As a young literature student in the 1990s, Egyptian poet Iman Mersal came across a copy of Love and silencea forgotten 1967 novel by a writer named Enayat al-Zayyat, who died by suicide in her twenties, a few years before her book was released.

Mersal was drawn to the book’s “fresh and refreshing” language and emotional intensity; it exerted such power over her that by the time she finished reading it, she “turned around and started again…(copied) passages, little self-contained texts like lights to illuminate my state emotional”. At the time, Mersal established herself as a reader and writer and felt the need to “personally celebrate the books that “touched” her, as if she needed to define herself by annexing her discoveries to the canon.”

Decades later, she remains committed to this project, at least as far as Enayat is concerned. Now an established poet living in Canada, Mersal decided to learn as much as possible about Enayat’s life and death – enough, ideally, to write the story of the other woman’s life. Although she did not discover enough to achieve this goal, she nevertheless presents the resulting book, Traces of Enayat, as a kind of biography. This is not the case. Traces of Enayat is a memoir of Mersal’s search, a slow, idiosyncratic journey through a layered and changing Cairo and through Mersal’s mind.

Mersal is a cool and understated writer. His prose, in Robin Moger’s translation, comes across easily, so that his moments of blazing emotion stand out. On the other hand, the extracts from Love and silence it includes hot descriptions and feelings. In one of them, Enayat describes feeling “both imprisoned by this life and drawn towards new horizons. I wanted to free myself from the sap of my environment and release myself into a larger world.” It seems obvious that Mersal chose this passage for its echo of Enayat’s story. Certainly, this evokes one of the Traces of Enayat“Was it (Enayat’s) decision to end her life that attracted me to her,” writes Mersal, “or the thought of her unrealized potential” – the wider literary world than Enayat does ever reached? Even more vexing is not the question of what attracts Mersal to Enayat, but why Enayat’s hold over her is so powerful. At the end of the memoir, it is still not clear.

Of course, Traces of Enayat is not designed to satisfy. It’s there, in the title: we’re only going to get glimpses and fragments of his subject — or, really, his subjects. Mersal hides behind his search for Enayat; Enayat herself is hiding in the past. Her best friend, actress Nadia Lutfi, remembers her well, but she was too busy working to be fully present during some of Enayat’s most bitter disappointments; Enayat’s surviving relatives, meanwhile, remember her painful divorce and the rejection of her book by the publisher she hoped would publish it, but they never felt as strongly about her as Nadia.

Even Enayat’s tomb is hidden. She turns out to be buried in a side wing of a family member’s mausoleum and, after much investigation, Mersal manages to visit her. This is the emotional climax of the book. Mersal cries, not out of grief but because “standing there in front of her headstone was the high point of our relationship…the grave was the only place she really was.” For her life, I had to return to the archives, to the memories of the living and to my own imagination, but I felt now that she finally trusted me, that she had allowed me to reach her. For the first time here, Mersal allows her interest in Enayat to blossom on the page into an almost mystical connection before quickly moving away from the tomb and the stage. For the reader, this is a kind of answer: Mersal’s connection to Enayat somehow goes beyond the explainable. We cannot experience it for ourselves.

What we can experience is Mersal’s investigation of Egypt after the 1952 Nasserist revolution, the context of Enayat’s book and his disappearance. Enayat’s work and life do not fit neatly into the dominant narrative that “Arab women writers (of the time) were primarily concerned with nationalism, and that there could be no women’s liberation without the liberation of the nation. Love and silence talks about heartbreak and romance; its author, for her part, had to fight against sexist Nasserist divorce laws to free herself from her husband and failed to get the court to grant her full custody of her son.

Mersal slowly pieces together this story, speculating on the role of Enayat’s divorce and subsequent romantic relationship late in her life. She does archival work and visits the surviving sites of Enayat’s Cairo, superimposing the post-revolutionary city in which Enayat lived – full of new hopes and colonial legacies – with the contemporary city she describes. These moments are, like the other parts of the book, fragments and flickers. Mersal glosses over geography in the same way that his prose tends to gloss over emotion, never lingering long enough in one place to describe it in depth.

Mersal is a poet and this is fundamentally a poet’s strategy. A poem is, more often than not, a peek through a cracked window, a fleeting experience rather than an interminable one. But Traces of Enayat is a complete book, and the extent to which it seems hasty and partial is both a literary achievement and a frustration. In his final passage, Mersal writes that Enayat “wants to remain free and weightless.” Maybe. But by letting Enayat get what she wants, Mersal deprives the reader of a deeper experience of her own obsession.

Lily Meyer is a writer, translator and critic. His first novel, Short warwas released in April 2024.