Traces of Enayat
Iman Mersal, Robin Moger (translation)Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English.
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When Iman Mersal stumbles upon a great – yet forgotten – novel written by Enayat al-Zayyat, a young woman who killed herself in 1963, four years before her book was published, Mersal begins to research the writer. She tracks down Enayat's best friend, who had been Egypt's biggest movie star at the time; she is given access to Enayat's diaries. Mersal can't accept, as has been widely speculated since Enayat's death, that a publisher's rejection was the main reason for Enayat's suicide.
From archives, Enayat's writing, & Mersal's own interviews & observations, a remarkable portrait emerges of a woman striving to live on her own terms, as well as of the artistic & literary scene in post-revolution Cairo. Mersal touched on everything from dubious antidepressants to domestic abuse & divorce law, from rubbish-strewn squats in the City of the Dead to the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema.
Blending research with imagination, & adding a great deal of empathy, the award-winning Egyptian poet Iman Mersal has created an unclassifiable masterpiece.
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Cairo, 1963: Enayat al-Zayyat’s suicide becomes a byword for talent tragically cut down, even as Love & Silence, her only novel, languishes unpublished. Four years after al-Zayyat’s death, the novel will be brought out, adapted for film & radio, praised, & then, cursorily, forgotten. For the next three decades it’s as if al-Zayyat never existed.
Yet when poet Iman Mersal stumbles across Love & Silence in the 1990s, she is immediately hooked. Who was Enayat? Did the thought of her novel’s rejection really lead to her suicide? Where did this startling voice come from? And why did Love & Silence disappear from literary history?