Traces of Enayat – Iman Mersal

[Transit Books; 2024]

Tr. from the Arabic by Robin Moger

Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat did not publish in her lifetime, but she briefly became a public figure after her novel, Love and Silence, appeared in 1967, four years after her death by suicide at the age of twenty-seven. Thirty years later, Love and Silence had mostly disappeared from public consciousness when Iman Mersal found it in a Cairo book stall and bought it on a whim for a pound. She was first intrigued and then obsessed, both by the novel and by its mysterious author. The result of that obsession is Mersal’s hybrid work of memoir, biography, and criticism, Traces of Enayat, originally published in 2019 and translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.

In the decades since first encountering Love and Silence, Mersal sought out every mention of Enayat in the public record, including newspaper articles, death notices, and published interviews with friends. She wandered the streets of Cairo where Enayat walked, observing the houses and courtyards, watching children playing in the streets, and looking for friendly strangers who might help her find her way. She visited the schools, workplaces, and apartments where Enayat spent her days and made several attempts to find her burial place. She interviewed remaining members of her family and her friends. She spent many hours learning about the world in which Enayat grew up and contemplating why she fell out of historical and literary accounts. What was it about her writing that made her invisible to readers, even those sympathetic toward women writers of her era?

Traces of Enayat takes the reader through the years Mersal conducted her research, years in which Mersal sometimes left the work behind for extended periods and other times took advantage of trips from her home in Canada to Egypt to return to it. The book invites the reader to follow the same steps Mersal followed and to experience the process of discovery and change along with her, seeing and feeling the mistakes, false leads, and dead ends, as well as the moments of revelation. It’s an immersive book, one that begins with the word “but,” as though Mersal is in the middle of a thought: “But Paula hadn’t gone to the funeral. She didn’t know where the grave was.” It plunges the reader directly into the puzzle that is Enayat’s life. The first few chapters are somewhat disorienting; as Mersal once did, the reader must piece together who Paula is, why she is so elusive, and why the cinema is important to her story (Paula was the birth name of Enayat’s closest friend and the film star who later called herself Nadia Lutfi). 

As the book proceeds, the puzzle pieces fall into place, and the shape of Enayat’s life becomes clearer. Traces of Enayat moves in roughly chronological order following Mersal’s detective work, so we experience her discoveries as she does. But within that framework, the narrative digresses into different subjects and time periods to fill in the political and cultural context of Enayat’s life. We learn, for example, about changes in cinema in the 1950s and 60s, about administrative offices that hold Cairo’s history within their back rooms, and about the early twentieth-century development of psychiatric hospitals of the kind where Enayat stayed. Researching Enayat leads Mersal in so many directions that she begins to question whether she has followed the right ones. All this abundance shows how any existence, examined closely enough, leads eventually into almost every area of social and political life.

Mersal keeps control of all this material by returning again and again to her longing to know more about Enayat herself. It’s this love and curiosity that keeps the book’s momentum going. Chapters and sections within chapters frequently begin by immersing readers in unfamiliar contexts or new information and then move toward resolution as the new material is integrated into the story of Mersal’s quest. Her straightforward, plain syntax, in Moger’s fluent translation, serves her well as it keeps the focus on the many narrative strands. Mersal is an able guide through this complex web: warm, knowledgeable, and informative while also full of a passion for her subject that is likely to inspire a matching enthusiasm from readers.

Even with decades of research, however, Mersal cannot create a “full” picture or a coherent narrative of Enayat’s life, and this failure of narratives becomes the subject itself. For one, Enayat never fit neatly into the culture around her or the critical accounts later written about her time. As Mersal describes it, she came of age in the 1950s and 60s when the arts began to thrive under the encouragement of President Abdel Nasser. In 1952 the Ministry of National Guidance was established to promote arts and culture and had as one of its jobs “to churn out propaganda.” As a result, women experienced new artistic freedoms, finding themselves now able to be writers and painters and film stars. As Nadia Lutfi explains, “There was a revival of music and dance and women were welcomed in. There was an equality there. Enayat and I, we were pioneers. We were believers; we truly believed in Abdel Nasser.” 

But while Nadia went on to find success in the cinema, Enayat’s writing career never took off in her lifetime. As Mersal writes, “her fate would be intertwined with the fortunes of the Nasserist cultural machine,” but she did not benefit from it. Instead, she had to fight for a divorce after years in an unhappy marriage and then fear she would lose custody of her son because of divorce laws biased against women. Struggles with depression haunted her for years. Then the news that her novel had been rejected by a publisher came just hours before her suicide. Her posthumously-published book and a few other scraps of stories and journals are all that survive.

Enayat’s uneasy relationship to her time continues with the novel itself. Love and Silence is very different from celebrated works by Enayat’s contemporaries—for example, the novel The Open Door by Latifa al-Zayyat. The common argument about Enayat’s era is that women’s writing was primarily concerned with nationalism and that liberation for women is linked to national liberation. But Love and Silence is a much more personal work, one concerned with loss, grief, and depression. In the context of The Open Door and similar more politically-focused works, Love and Silence is anomalous and easy to ignore, and, Mersal’s interventions aside, it remains largely unknown to this day. 

Enayat herself is an elusive figure, not only ignored by literary history but partially erased by time and a family that grieved but also needed to move forward. With very little available in public archives, Mersal turned to Enayat’s private ones, her journals, letters, and drawings, but found that many of those artifacts had been destroyed or withheld. All that remained of the journal entries available to her are thirteen pages, or a mere 1,820 words. This destruction was not malicious but a result of a family deciding what will matter in the future. As Enayat’s sister says, “We didn’t think anyone would be interested.”

What does make someone interesting? Personal archives usually exist for the famous, for those who might be studied in the future. That decades after her death Enayat should be the source of someone’s obsession surprises and, at times, concerns her family. It seems to surprise Mersal and might surprise her readers as well. But what sparks obsession isn’t always logical and who “deserves” to become a part of history is not always clear. 

Mersal’s reasons for her obsession, hinted at in various passages throughout her book, seem to center in part around questions of chance. So much in Enayat’s writing life and posthumous reputation was outside of her control, from who read and recommended her manuscript to who was assigned to write the introduction to Love and Silence after her death. Mersal’s encounter with Love and Silence was also a matter of chance, an entirely unexpected event that changed the course of her life. Traces of Enayat is filled with a sense of contingency. Why did this happen and not that? Exploring Enayat’s story is one way of coming to terms with the uncertainty that is a part of any writer’s life, Mersal’s included, and that is a part of every life.

Mersal’s deep interest in Enayat is also about her writing as a woman and a mother. Both women struggled to care for their children while following their own interests and desires. In Enayat’s case, her desire for a divorce meant that she might lose custody of her son. Mersal feels guilt for pursuing her research when that work means she’s not always available for childcare. During her years researching Enayat, Mersal worked on an essay called “On Motherhood and Violence” that led her to contemplate “my own experience with motherhood and its guilt, terror, selfishness, and conflict.” During this time, she says, Enayat was always on her mind, as was the protagonist of Love and Silence, who also thinks about questions of motherhood and patriarchy. Traces of Enayat is, among other things, a tribute to women writing amidst unfair expectations and obligations and trying, often unsuccessfully, to make their mark as artists. Writing about Enayat is an effort to remind us how many women like Enayat there have been, similarly talented and also forgotten, or nearly so.

Enayat’s story is also an opportunity to contemplate archives and memory. As Mersal points out, writing historical accounts and maintaining archives, whether public or private, is about deciding what to omit or destroy as much as it is about what to recover and preserve. Someone has to make the decisions. On the private level, a person is at the mercy of a family that might decide to destroy or remove materials from one’s archive for personal or ideological reasons. The best one can hope for is a “fragmented family,” “the family without an image or cause to fight for,” who would allow the archive to linger or disburse, making it possible later for a researcher to dig up the pieces. 

Mersal feels uncertainty about her own role in the future of Enayat’s archive: “I cannot decide if it is ethical to claim that the traces of all these things—the family, Enayat’s relationship with her mother, her friendship with Nadia Lutfi—should have to be reconstituted and placed into her story.” Resisting the very idea of “her story”—the narrative of her life—becomes her way forward. It is not Mersal’s task, she decides, to tell Enayat’s story, but to be in dialogue with her, as much as such a thing is possible. Her task is “to take a journey towards someone who cannot speak for themselves.” 

Traces of Enayat asks what it means to write a biography as opposed to following the traces of a person’s existence. Even while containing many of the elements of a traditional biography, it actively resists the biographical mode, arguing for and embodying a more provisional, uncertain, scattered, and personal approach to life-writing. It’s an anti-biography, a work that undermines the objectives and assumptions of its genre. It’s simultaneously a tribute to a remarkable writer, an account of the vagaries of curiosity and obsession, and an interrogation of why we remember, and why we forget.

Rebecca Hussey is a teacher, writer, and critic living in Connecticut. She is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and serves as Vice President of Technology and Membership. Her writing has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Kenyon Review, Atmospheric Quarterly, The Rumpus, and more. She is a co-host of the One Bright Book podcast and author of the Substack newsletters Reading Indie and #KateBriggs24. She can be found at @ofbooksandbikes on Twitter and Instagram.