Who Was the Writer?: A book found in a Cairo market launched a 30-year quest

AIDA ALAMI

Crouching over piles of books in a market stall in Cairo one day in the fall of 1993, Iman Mersal stumbled upon a slim volume with a gray cover and a catchy title: “Love and Silence.” Mersal, who was then a graduate student, thought the author might be related to a novelist and prominent anticolonial figure, Latifa al-Zayyat. She bought the book for one Egyptian pound. What Mersal found instead was an intimate, introspective novel, an essential but largely forgotten work by a female writer in early contemporary Egypt. The voice, Mersal later wrote, was “modern, strange, limpid and beyond categorisation.”

The book moved her, she said, and set her on a nearly 30-year journey to learn what she could about the author, a young Egyptian woman called Enayat al-Zayyat who died by suicide in 1963 after overdosing on pills. All she left was a note by her bed for her son, Abbas, that read: “I do love you, it’s just that life is unbearable. Forgive me.” After her death, her writing fell into oblivion.

In “Traces of Enayat,” translated by Robin Moger and to be published on April 2 in the United States by Transit Books, Mersal revives the story of the late writer. The Arabic version, published in 2019, won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award two years later and was a regional success. A mix of literary genres, the book is a subtle and universal exploration of identity.

“A sense of longing for a place and a self that has left you comes through in the pages,” Adam Levy, the book’s U.S. editor, said. The book feels like a biography, he said, but it is more ambitious, and more interesting, than that. “As you read,” he added, “you start to feel Iman’s presence in it subtly.” Mersal, who is now 57 and one of the most consequential Egyptian authors of her generation, grew up in Mit Adlan, a village in the delta of the Nile, in northern Egypt. As a child, she loved language and songs, often shutting herself in her room to listen to music, plays and narrated movies on the radio.

She lost her mother at a young age, and wrote her first poem, a critique of Mother’s Day that started with the phrase “against motherhood,” when she was in fifth grade. She wrote it in anger, she said, and read it out loud during a celebration in the school courtyard. “One of the toughest teachers cried,” said Mersal, who has two sons. “I call myself a writer since.”

Al-Zayyat came of age during a golden era for Egyptian literature, in the 1950s and 1960s, during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government. Many influential writers in that era were driven by the urge to transform society. Mersal, too, socialised with writers who wanted to change the world, and joined a feminist publication, “Bint al Ard,” in 1986. But she wasn’t sure what kind of intellectual she wanted to become.

“The literary scene was controlled by the old guard who believed in Arab nationalism or communism, who believed that literature can change the status quo,” she said. “I was thinking about figuring out my own voice. Expressing my relationship with my father, my relationship with Cairo, my city. It was about individuality.”