This essay was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities,” edited by Michelle Chan Schmidt. Subscribe at our Patreon page to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here.
[Transit Books; 2024]
Tr. from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Literary treatments of the historical archive are hardly new. From Jacqueline Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath to M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, literature frequently opens a peripheral space of excess and alterity, from which to expose the limits of an archive’s claim to truth, and to speculatively unearth a suppressed subaltern past. A spate of recent contemporary fiction, much of it translated, inherits these questions: We might include, in this corpus, Justin Torres’s Blackouts, John Keene’s Counternarratives, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men, Dorothee Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory, and Carlos Fonseca’s Austral. The Egyptian writer Iman Mersal’s Fi ‘Athar Enayat al-Zayyat, brilliantly translated into English by Robin Moger as Traces of Enayat, now joins this family tree and extends its elaboration of archival poetics to perambulations through the dusty streets of Cairo.
Traces shares with some of these predecessors an undecidability of genre, faithful to the difficulty of telling truth and fiction apart. At once city symphony, detective story, (auto)ethnography, and literary criticism (among other things), Mersal’s unclassifiable work refuses to be reduced to any one trait. In an interview, Iman Mersal spoke of the difficulty of writing Traces. No form would suffice; it could not work as a biography or a novel. But, in her words, “there was a moment of clarity when I visualized my own journey, my own search, as the protagonist itself.”
Let us attempt to take this seriously. One way might be to map these terms in Arabic. “Search” could be bahth, which Emily Drumsta has theorized as a poetics of investigation in the twentieth-century Arabic novel. She frames these self-reflexive variations on the detective genre as responses to crises of truth and language; literature itself had to hunt for new modes of expression while thematizing the process of knowledge production as highly contingent and susceptible to manipulation. Mersal’s text certainly makes fun of the “policier” and, at one point, compares a guard locking a gate to someone “departing the scene of a crime.” Masterfully, Traces refuses to conform to generic conventions and highlights the search, or the bahth, as a gradual unraveling of the narrator’s unknowing, an interrogation of literary authority.
Beside this we should place “journey,” or rihla in Arabic. Rihla indexes both the act of voyaging and the entrenched literary genre recording these voyages in the Arabic textual tradition. Its original impetus derives from the Islamic injunction to seek knowledge and spiritual advancement in faraway lands, stitching disparate geographies into a “genealogy of Muslim cosmopolitanism” in Roxanne Euben’s phrase, grounded in shared epistemological horizons. Through the traveler’s mobility and contact with alterity across transnational nodes of the umma, or global Muslim community, the rihla not only destabilized regional borders but brought into visibility the interpretive procedures involved in any act of knowledge production and meaning-making.
Indeed, the entirety of Mersal’s text unfurls as a rihla in search of the truth about the forgotten female writer Enayat al-Zayyat. The facts are plain: Enayat published only one novel and committed suicide in 1963. But unlike the travelers of yore, who crossed oceans to chart untold wonders, Mersal’s narrator (whom I shall call Iman) moves not through space but through time. Her object is the sediments of history deposited in the same soil. Traversing the streets of Cairo, where she came of age, she thrills with preternatural alertness to every tree, every balcony and signboard. A question recurs: Why does she know so little about the built environment to which she has belonged? What has conspired to make these buildings appear immutable, as if they have stood for eternity in the same corner?
The famous opening line from L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between resonates: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” We might read an ethnographic implication into this, given anthropology’s own complicity in consigning the non-Western world to backwardness. Time could be an alibi to proclaim: We’ve traveled a long way from the past, with its unfamiliar mores and barbaric conventions. Yet far be it from Mersal’s intention to exoticize what came before her, or to parade the present as an apotheosis. The passage into postcolonial modernity can never represent a linear, unadulterated good. Rather, as her recursive and often discontinuous writing attests, the drive toward progress tends to entail an imperfect erasure, whose traces might resurface—as if through a palimpsest—if only one cared to look.
Just last year, Cairo made headlines for destroying hundreds of mausoleums in the City of the Dead. The sprawling necropolis, which quite literally houses centuries of tradition, has no place in the neoliberal authoritarianism of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government. On these ruins, the plan was to construct highways and flyovers, some of which would feed into the gleaming capital city being conjured from scratch on Cairo’s outskirts. “Pharaonic” seems a fitting designation for such a project, megalomaniacal in its lavish desire to transform the desert, elitist in the proliferation of gated communities for the wealthy. One might even characterize these outsized, god-like ambitions as a legacy of Gulf futurism’s aesthetic of hyperbolic sleekness and magisterial glass.
In my previous essay on Traces, I noted this “asphalt fever” by way of introduction to Mersal’s wanderings. Retrospectively, we might imbue her rihla with a premonitory note, a foreshadowing of disappearance to come. I rehearse it here not only to suggest the continuing necessity of Mersal’s recuperative gesture, but also to mark my own rereading of her work, my persistent dwelling within its address. Text and city mirror one another; through their cracks we might glimpse the presence of energies and ghosts unseen. By shifting my attention to the afterlives of spaces and names in Cairo, between geographies of the urban and the personal, I want to rethink how Mersal figures the materiality of unexpected archives. Across her journey emerges a story of dis(-)appearance.
*
What’s in a name? Many things, one could argue, especially when it comes to urban space. A name could be a metonym for a whole cluster of generational psychic and social investments, or it could function as shorthand for something more private and inconspicuous. Iman sets out to find a creamery named Astra and a street christened Abdel Fattah al-Zeini in Dokki, a residential neighborhood on the Nile’s west bank, to locate where the house of Enayat’s father used to be. She’s received the information from Enayat’s best friend, Nadia Lutfi, who last visited the precinct decades ago.
Unsurprisingly, neither of these landmarks rings a bell in the passers-by Iman encounters, until a doorman fortuitously reports that Astra has now become Egypt Dairy. Only one as stalwart and aged as he could have borne witness to the reshaping of an entire geography, the eradication of abbreviated intimacies heralded by the loss of a name. Its overdetermined replacement, Egypt Dairy, is nearly a caricature of itself. Under Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the economy, even a milk company could no longer preserve the effulgence of its unique moniker; it was now duty-bound to redistribute its light, to stand for the idealized geo-body of the nation. Neither is all this information easy to come by; Mersal dramatizes the Kafkaesque absurdity of the government’s bureaucratic gatekeeping, summed up in the austerity of the Name Changes form she must fill in.
Latent in this repurposing, these Name Changes, is perhaps a kind of parable for Enayat’s own tragedy, defaced and wrought into mythic proportions by the patriarchal literary establishment. In a devastating twist late in the book, Iman discovers that Enayat’s novel, Love and Silence, was likely altered by her publisher after she committed suicide, to conclude on a falsely optimistic note. The ministry-led imprint, unable to tolerate a dénouement of death, slapped on the July Revolution as a happy ending for the female protagonist. Having no say from beyond the grave, Enayat’s authorial signature is quite starkly overshadowed by the peremptory state imperatives that burdened Egyptian culture: either voice the nascent revolutionary collective or cease to exist.
Though Mersal does not allude again to her initial judgments of the novel’s hackneyed ending, the reader might feel compelled by the shock of this revelation to retread previous pages. Suddenly, Iman’s erstwhile intuitions make total sense: The anodyne positivity of the novel’s culmination is “indistinguishable from the clichéd conclusions of many novels written in the aftermath of 1952”; the extreme interiority of the voice is superseded by “something sonorous and depersonalized.” And there, early on in Chapter 3, is already encoded the structure of Enayat’s foregone defeat. “The United Arab Republic – Ministry of Culture” is the first line on the work’s title page; the subtitle “An Egyptian Novel” hammers another nail in the coffin. Against these grandiose institutions, Enayat’s name appears diminished, frozen.
The magic of Mersal’s literary patterning works like this throughout Traces, each chapter rising out as if incongruously from the previous, only for chance realizations to shroud earlier occurrences in a penumbra of fateful significance. Our first passage by and through these architectures entails a necessary failure, alongside Iman herself, to perceive the network in which they are enchained, and in which they accrue the gravity of sense. This might be a truism of all literature, but it is accentuated in the tightness of Mersal’s writing, even and especially when it takes on the air of being accidental, like steering into a dead end.
There we might situate the quality that renders Traces so peculiarly urban in the circularity of its time and space; we must traverse its streets again, retrace our footsteps, knock on the same doors, for fixity to fall away. Perhaps another implication of understanding the journey as the protagonist is, then, to not accept any individual moment or evaluation outside of the continuum that coils back upon itself. Every scene, provisional, opens to overwriting and reconstruction. We might think of the titular traces, along these lines, as akin to Jacques Derrida’s notion of the “trace,” succinctly glossed by Mersal herself in her lesser-known Archives and Crimes: “not an origin or fact, but a configuration or reiteration that preserves meaning,” a specter continually referring to something else.
At the end of that Astra Dairy chapter, Mersal does something extraordinary with time: She spatializes it in language, within the proximate bounds of the same textual section. “Later, I will enter one of these villas,” she writes, anticipating important meetings with other guardians of Enayat’s memory that will nonetheless refer back to, or at least recall, the random peregrinations here and now. Place, crisscrossed by the wanderer, furnishes a nexus for the convergence of the past and the future. It is an exceptional instant in all of Traces, where overlapping temporalities radiate out from the ground of the present. It consolidates the phenomenology of the reader as walker, enunciating a speech act in their trajectories and detours. This reader—simultaneously Iman herself and an imagined other trailing after her—is interpellated in Mersal’s directions: “If you walk down al-Tahrir Street into Dokki Square . . .”
Thus does Mersal reconstitute an invisible corpus of paths through Cairo. Edifices and roads, in their physicality, still yield no easy referential answers. “What do you want addresses for?” Enayat’s sister, Azima, defensively asks, as if to shield the family’s pain from the prying gaze of a stranger. Yet, like weather, rooms and walls can thrum out the tenor of an existence. Enayat knew as much; her plans for an uncompleted second novel spun out from her obsession with Ludwig Keimer, a German Egyptologist. Like Iman, Enayat sketched out a map of Keimer’s haunts in 1930s Cairo, where he lived and worked and communed with friends, and where his very ability to exist in Egypt depended on the vagaries of world war and international diplomacy. Like Iman, Enayat learned about her own life through the prism of another. What Iman gleans from shadowing Enayat’s routes, far beyond the individual circumstances of her biography, is a method—a mode of relation, and an orientation towards history: A method where identities like reader, walker, archivist no longer stand compartmentalized, but bleed porously into one another.
In rescuing something of Enayat’s presence from the dis(-)appearance to which the state and her family have subjected it, Iman returns to her own archives, tucked away for years in the attic of her father’s house. A cartography of her elusive, errant self is reassembled, as I wrote in my previous review; in writing this essay, I find my metaphor literalized. Iman notices, anew, spots that once meant something, like the photography studio where her wedding pictures were taken, just in the vicinity where Enayat’s father resided. She mourns—with a variety of leftist melancholy perhaps peculiar to a post-revolutionary generation—the quashing of radical political possibility, when the name of Enayat’s relative nudges Iman into remembering a book gifted to her by Egypt’s “last communist.”
These circuits, eventually, lead Iman to Enayat’s grave. She does so with the help of serendipitous companions, some of whom have made it their life’s work to relentlessly chart Cairo’s sprawling Fatimid and Mamluk burial grounds. It is a fitting climax and “high point” for the “relationship” between Iman and Enayat, if we recall that Traces opens with a seemingly futile quest for Enayat’s tomb, an impasse heightened by the unrecognizability of the ancestral name attached to it.
Ahmed Pasha Rashid: it resounds like a cipher that Iman might not have decoded. It might be vague, even generic, but it is irrevocably inflected with historicity and social class. Even on an initial investigation, Iman senses that the right Rashid, out of a list of multiple potential candidates, is the one that served as a minister under Khedive Ismail in the 1860s. Not only did he found the Egyptian Geographic Society, he had also been involved in “digging canals, draining marshland, and reclaiming desert land for agriculture.” In other words, he was essential to the construction of Cairo as we, and Iman, know it today.
It was under Khedive Ismail’s rule, from 1863 to 1879, that a swath of Cairo was built in the image of Haussmanized Paris. As Mara Naaman tells us, however, Ismail ignored Haussmann’s “fundamentals,” like sewage and transportation systems, for “more aesthetic goals.” The Khedive’s superficial imitation and idealization of Europe lent credence to Timothy Mitchell’s groundbreaking theorization in Colonizing Egypt. He suggests that crucial to the advent of Egypt’s capitalist modernity is the understanding of reality as an exhibit, a copy aping the real—a Derridean trace, as it were, whose meaning is continually deflected. Though Mersal never milks Rashid’s (and Ismail’s) administrative legacies for symbolism, we might nonetheless detect something uncanny in Enayat’s genealogy, her very bloodline entangled in the urbanity and dissimulations of the postcolonial place.
The echoes don’t subside there. Iman learns, later in the book, that Ahmed Pasha Rashid’s life began in enslavement; he was a Greek boy named Dimitri, abducted by the Turks in the 1820s. He renamed himself Rashid, likely after his captor. Yet another Name Change, naturalized into Arabic. Just like Astra Dairy, and Enayat herself; now we can see that her origins narrate, aslant, not only a timeline of Cairo’s emergence into modernity, but are themselves based on a disavowed name—a violence and abjection dis(-)appeared from view. Here is “dis(-)appear” as a transitive verb, an action inflicted by an agent and translated into a dismembered archive. Saidiya Hartman, in her oft-cited “Venus in Two Acts” (an explicit inspiration, too, for Mersal in Archives and Crimes), reflects on a similar conundrum in researching the archival documents of transatlantic slavery, many of which participated in the dehumanization of enslaved bodies. These bodies, given names that “deface and disfigure,” cannot simply have their anonymity corrected.
Through the locus of the vanished name, Traces reveals a constellation of aliases and assumed identities whose artifice is now obscured, inseparable from the body and the referent that it fragilely apprehends. To enumerate a few: Enayat’s best friend was originally named Paula, but called herself Nadia Lutfi after a fictional character to pursue her dreams of becoming a movie star; Madame al-Nahhas, yet another intimate of Enayat’s, is known by that title because her father was a close friend of the former prime minister, al-Nahhas; Avis, Enayat’s childhood companion, renamed Emilia while she was a Jewish refugee in Egypt. Whether personal, political, racialized, or diasporic, every name—like every space—hides an encrypted secret.
To engage in twinned fashion with the givenness of a name, alongside the concreteness of a city, might bring us back to Enayat’s tomb. Greeting us at Iman’s arrival is a full-page photograph of the crypt’s exterior, its gate framed by trees and dappled with light. There are many black-and-white images scattered throughout Mersal’s text, mostly of Enayat. Sometimes she is solitary, sometimes bunched together with a larger group; often she is poised, on a staircase or beach, emanating an easeful glamor. Only two photographs, however, are denuded of human forms: one is this tomb, and the other comes right at the end, when Enayat’s headstone is revealed to have been unceremoniously broken loose. For now, the image of the gate, which we imagine as a metallic green from reading Mersal’s accompanying description, must invite and inhibit us at once. However we might be transported and allowed to accompany her, we wait on the threshold. Yet another picture, several pages later, shows Iman through a window frame, her back turned towards the camera, standing at Enayat’s grave.
Looking back at the picture of the sun-spotted, walled mausoleum compound, I find something inhuman, even ghostly, about its peace. Is this a momentary stilling of the journey, the search as protagonist, the gaze one of pure movement in space? At the same time, it seems to throw into relief the irreducible embodiment of Iman’s presence, in “the only place where [Enayat] actually was,” which the image captures only at a distance. Iman’s emphasis on being there, on physically alighting upon the scene, carries strong connotations of an Islamic ontology. In the tradition of grave visitation, after all, pilgrims would undertake extended rihla and fulfill acts of worship precisely through the embodied gesture of traversing the architecture of a saint’s shrine. These sensory forms of contact are exemplified in Iman’s instinct to wipe a corner of Enayat’s headstone with a tear-stained tissue, “a little patch to make the marble shine.” In yet another recursive loop, the beginning and end of Iman’s rihla resembles an enactment of a line that she finds in Enayat’s archives: The journey must begin from the tombs.
Underlying the rihla as protagonist, then, is the tracery of a sacred geography, re-signified by Mersal as a speculative, feminist, literary lineage. No wonder that, when Iman lines up the volumes of her writerly foremothers in order of their dates of death, she thinks of herself as a “gravedigger,” giving their souls a final dwelling. And indeed, the Arabic word ‘athar in the book’s title, translated as “Traces” in the English, also refers to the relics interred in these spiritual sites. They work as “sensuous media,” in Engseng Ho’s words, establishing direct connections to one’s “pious ancestors.” Before the readerly journey began, Mersal’s communion with the funerary and ancestral realm had already been forecast. ‘Athar, as Mersal understands it, condenses these contradictions between the transitory and the permanent, between the city and the phantoms that pass through it, between the name and its vanishing referent.
They come to rest, for the time being, in the tomb of the literary.
Alex Tan has been an editor at Asymptote Journal for the past three years. They are passionate about literatures of the global South, in particular Arabic literature, and frequently review works in translation. Some of their critical writing can be found here.
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