The author’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award-winning book retraces the life and legacy of novelist Enayat al-Zayyat and prompts a discussion about what stories should be remembered and told.

By Chip Rossetti

Iman Mersal’s beautiful and haunting book, Fi Athar Enayat al-Zayyat, doesn’t fit neatly into literary genres: it is at once a memoir, a detective story, a biography, a feminist reassessment, and a work of literary criticism. Ultimately, the book (translated into English by Robin Moger under the title Traces of Enayat) is an act of posthumous reclamation, in which Mersal—an award-winning Egyptian poet, scholar, and translator now living and teaching at the University of Alberta in Canada—delves into the life and legacy of a young Cairo novelist, Enayat al-Zayyat, who took her own life in 1963 at the age of twenty-seven. In sifting through the traces of Enayat’s life, Mersal illuminates questions about the literary canon and what it both valorizes and excludes. The book received glowing reviews on its release and won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Literature category in 2021.

Mersal’s connection with Enayat al-Zayyat began in 1993, when she happened upon a copy of Enayat’s single published novel, Love and Silence (al-Hubb wa-l-Samt) at a stall in Cairo’s famous used book market in Ezbekiyya Square. Intrigued by this obscure novel, Mersal began what became a decades-long research into the life and work of its author, and to discover in particular why her novel had sunk without a trace, absent from any contemporary canon of Arabic literature. “In Traces, I was often working with fragments and silences rather than with a complete text,” Mersal explains. “My true ambition was not to reconstruct Enayat’s life on the page, but to let her emerge through the process of my journey toward her.”

Mersal is a dogged researcher: over the course of Traces of Enayat, she seeks out Enayat’s living family members; interviews her best friend, who was already a glamorous Egyptian film star before Enayat’s death; digs through old magazines and newspaper archives; walks across neighborhoods looking for streets and addresses that no longer exist; and hunts for Enayat’s grave in Cairo’s vast City of the Dead.

Enayat came from an educated bourgeois family and had attended a German-language school, which meant that the standard literary Arabic in which she wrote her novel was almost like a second language for her. The generally accepted story—as repeated in articles written by prominent male authors at the time—was that she committed suicide because her novel had been rejected by the state publishing house. It was that sentimental rewriting of Enayat’s life that led to the novel’s eventual publication in 1967, four years after her death.

But Mersal’s digging reveals more complex realities about Enayat’s life and death: about her prolonged divorce case, which, due to Egypt’s oppressive divorce laws in the 1960s, meant she faced the possibility of losing access to her young son; about social stigmas at the time around depression; and about the second novel she was working on, which her family destroyed after her death, along with the rest of her papers.

For Mersal, the destruction of Enayat’s personal collection of papers and the obscurity of her novel are linked to Michel Foucault’s theory of the “archive,” a term that crops up frequently in Traces of Enayat. For Foucault, an archive is not so much a physical repository, but a system that governs what can be preserved, said, or remembered.

“In my experience, every archive is formed through selection and exclusion, through what is kept and what is allowed to disappear,” Mersal says. But she views her own literary project as a gesture in opposition to the exclusionary logic that erased Enayat from the literary canon. “Writing Traces of Enayat felt like an attempt to work against that logic—not by filling the gaps, which is impossible, but by insisting on their presence,” she adds. “In that sense, an archive can become an act of inclusion, but only if it acknowledges its own limits and remains open to what it cannot fully contain.”

Mersal is the author of five Arabic collections of poetry, selections from which were anthologized and translated into English by Robyn Creswell under the title The Threshold. Her 2016 memoir, ‘An al-umumah wa-ashbahuha (translated into English by Robin Moger as Motherhood and its Ghosts) offers a meditation on motherhood, anchored in her fleeting memories of her own mother, who died when Mersal was a child. As with Traces of Enayat, Mersal probes archives and memories to push back against archetypes and cliches that threaten to blur the reality of the individual behind them. In all of her works, poetry and prose, absence acts not a barrier, but as a guidepost: “Absence in poetry is not simply about loss, but about what remains unspoken, unrecorded, or inaccessible. It is a way of approaching what cannot be fully retrieved or represented.”

Winning the Sheikh Zayed Book Award brought Mersal new readers, especially in the Arab world, she notes. It also drew renewed attention to Enayat as well as “broader questions of literary value and marginalization” that the book raised. On a personal note, she adds, “I was also proud to be the first Arab female writer to receive the award in literature.” The award allowed her to take time off from her university work and focus on her current writing project, a creative nonfiction about Baghdad. “The book traces two personal journeys through the city—the first in 1992 and the second thirty years later—moving between memory, archive, and political consciousness.”

But perhaps the most tangible legacy of Iman Mersal’s thoughtful retracing of the life and legacy of Enayat al-Zayyat is that now, more than sixty years after Enayat’s death, her once-forgotten novel Love and Silence is newly back in print, in no fewer than three paperback Arabic-language editions.