Traces of Enayat
Traces of Enayat, by Iman Mersal. And Other Stories, publisher, 2023.
In 1993, in a Cairo book market, the poet Iman Mersal came across a novel written in the 1960s by a writer she’d never heard of: Love and Silence by Enayat al-Zayyat. What begins in Love and Silence as an account of the narrator’s grief upon the death of her brother takes an unexpected turn when the narrator realizes she’d been a “lackey” for a self-centered man. This shocking awareness leads her to question her place and purpose in a family with whom she feels no true connection, in a job of questionable value, and in a social class that cares nothing about the ills of the status quo. Enayat al-Zayyat ventures ever deeper into her narrator’s psyche: “I am in exile from myself. Who can issue a pardon for my soul, so that it might return, might know the body as its own small true homeland? . . . If I were able, I would erase myself and be reborn, somewhere else, some other time. Another time. Another time . . . Was I born at the wrong time, maybe?” Enayat al-Zayyat committed suicide in 1963, still in her twenties, believing her novel would never be published. Love and Silence was published four years later and subsequently adapted for film and radio. By the time Mersal has discovered Love and Silence, the novel’s disappeared from the literary canon and public memory.
Part detective story—reminiscent of Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder—and part elegiac meditation, Traces of Enayat documents Iman Mersal’s attempts to understand both the forces that inspired Enayat to write and those that drove her to her early death. Mersal’s wanderings and imaginative forays usher us into the literary and film cultures of Cairo in the 1950s and 60s, into the living rooms of Enayat’s surviving family and friends, to the archives of the German Institute where Enayat once worked and the sanitariums where she was a patient, and to her tomb in Cairo’s City of the Dead. A brooding subtext permeates Mersal’s writing, and though her focus remains on al-Zayyat, she hints at the source of her obsession in resurrecting this forgotten writer: “Sometimes a piece of writing can shake your very being. This doesn’t mean it has to be unprecedented in the history of literature or the best thing you’ve ever read. It is fate, delivering a message to help you make sense of whatever you’re going through . . . ”
Often the information Mersal gleans is more confusing than clarifying, nevertheless she soldiers on, buoyed by a loyalty to a woman whose writings have been almost entirely lost: “I was here. The sentence belongs to Enayat. It is in her novel and in her journals, too, in the moments when she doubts her existence will leave any trace at all.”
Several years after her last investigations in Cairo, Mersal learns in an email from a friend that Enayat’s grave has been vandalized—yet another erasure that makes Mersal’s novel a necessary tribute to al-Zayyat. My hope is to one day find Love and Silence in an English translation.