Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal
In Iman Mersal's Traces of Enayat, the poet and scholar blends biography, memoir, and literary criticism to recover the story of forgotten Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat
Enayat al-Zayyat was an Egyptian writer who, in 1963, killed herself four years before her only novel would be published – briefly celebrated and then for decades, forgotten. In the 1990s, poet and scholar Iman Mersal finds Enayat’s book and is captivated, journeying to find Enayat, wresting her from the cultural, patriarchal and bourgeois logics that have written and rewritten the meaning of her life and death. Traces of Enayat is the culmination of this search, originally published in Arabic in 2019.
The journey to Enayat is not linear. While existing in official archives and newspapers, Mersal finds her personal archive destroyed, and conflicting narratives held by her closest friends and family. Mersal navigates this loss through deft understanding of archival and biographical theory, and rich empathy for Enayat’s struggle through depression, and for her independence as a woman, mother and writer. What originally is conceived of as an impossible search becomes the premise of the book: a search for traces of someone lost to history.
Mersal’s writing is as organic as her journey through these traces; accordingly, the book does not follow a simple chronology of Enayat’s life. Biography and memoir are blended, with some chapters sitting as stand-alone essays on the literary scene in post-revolution Cairo, and reflections on motherhood. Enayat emerges and breathes, independent, in the expansiveness and freedom of this structure and Mersal’s compelling, tender writing.