TRACES OF ENAYAT

One woman’s search to uncover the story of Enayat al-Zayyat (1936-1963), a figure in Egyptian literature who nearly disappeared from the canon.

In 1963, al-Zayyat killed herself just days after hearing publishers were not interested in her novel Love and Silence. Mersal describes the novel’s steadfast contemporary relevance, its “feminist ‘consciousness,’” and how “you sense the ponderous influence of contemporary romance novels, but elsewhere it is modern, strange, limpid, and beyond categorization.” Yet the novel is “entirely absent from every history of twentieth century Egyptian and Arabic literature.” In this sharp investigation, Mersal fights against al-Zayyat’s erasure, piecing together the author’s short life and illuminating Egypt’s literary scene and the many societal difficulties faced by a young creative woman in the 1960s. Mersal writes like a detective who lets their case get personal: She calls al-Zayyat’s tragedy “seductive” and recognizes the obsession in her own research. “It had begun to dawn on me that I wasn’t fully in control of myself,” she acknowledges. “I was writing these long emails and sending them out the way some people put a message in a bottle and cast it into the sea: not because they want it to be found, but because they will do anything they can to sleep.” The author traces her leads back as far as she can, and her exhaustive research often sidelines her storytelling. For example, the discovery of a renamed street sparks a sluice of records from the city-planning and surveying offices, and Mersal introduces an investigation of al-Zayyat’s kindergarten with the story of a wartime freighter docking in Alexandria. Excessively thorough, Mersal eventually reveals secrets about her subject’s depression and unhappy marriage, reframing the book into a profound work that is more about al-Zayyat’s mental health than about her being simply a curiosity of world literature.

A resonant literary biography by way of fractured, obsessive sleuthing.