189. Enayat al-Zayyat — Love and Silence with Iman Mersal

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron” to find out more. 

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to unearthing forgotten classics by women writers. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes. 

AMY: Hi, everyone! Today we’re going to be discussing an Egyptian writer who wrote a single novel before, tragically, dying by suicide soon after it was rejected for publication. 

KIM: Enayat al-Zayyat’s novel, Love and Silence, was eventually published in 1967, four years after her death, but then her name seemed to virtually disappear from literary history. 

AMY: Fast forward 30 years to 1993 when poet and author Iman Mersal stumbled across the book in Cairo’s oldest book market and purchased it for one Egyptian pound.  

KIM: The novel haunted Mersal so much that in 2019 she wrote a biography on al-Zayyat in which she shares her decades-long journey to unravel the mystery of the novelist’s writing, her life and death. The English translation was published by Transit Books this April. 

AMY: It’s a fascinating story, and we’re fortunate to have Mersal on the show today to tell us all about it. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today, Iman Mersal, is a poet, writer, academic, and translator. Born in the northern Egyptian Delta, she emigrated to Canada in 1999. Her book, Traces of Enayat, which was first published in Arabic in 2019, won the prestigious 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, making her the first woman to win its Literature category. The author of five books of Arabic poetry, her most recent poetry collection, The Threshold, won the 2023 National Translation Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Award. 

AMY: Iman, whom the New York Times recently called “one of the most consequential Egyptian authors of her generation,” is also the author of 2018’s How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts, and her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books and The Nation, among other publications. She is an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. Welcome to the show, Iman! We’re so glad to have you here.

IMAN MERSAL: I'm so happy to be here as well.

KIM: Okay, Iman, can you take us back to the fall of 1993, that's 30 years after al-Zayyat’s death, and tell us more about how you came upon Love and Silence? Because you initially thought it was written by someone else, right?

IMAN: Yeah. I found a novel with a plain gray cover by a woman named Enayat al-Zayyat, and I never heard this name despite the fact that I studied Arabic literature. So the first thing that came to my mind was, “She must be a younger sister or a cousin of a famous Egyptian novelist named Latifa al-Zayyat.” She published her first novel in 1960, Open Door, and the novel became a film three years later. She was a very famous, iconic writer. So I actually started to read a novel thinking she is just a relative who tried her hand in writing. I was, of course, mistaken. 

AMY: Okay, so you start reading the novel, Love and Silence. What's your response?

IMAN: At the very beginning, I was taken by the whisper voice in the novel and the language. Because Latifa al-Zayyat set the formula of a good novel written by an Arab female writer in the 20th century by writing Open Door in 1960. So the formula was basically to have the "woman question" and the "nation question," and they have to be mingling together. There is no separation between “women” and “nation.” With the Enayat al-Zayyat novel, it started with the death of a brother of the narrator, so I thought, “Oh, she will take some time, you know, a meditation with grief, and then she will go on to find this formula.” But it wasn't actually. The novel was more complicated, with so many layers. The language was very strange, as if she is translating it from another language. This is what fascinated me the most. She was not trained in Arabic literature to begin with. She studied in a German school, and her father used to sit with her daily to improve her Arabic language in terms of writing. So you can see the struggle in her writing. And what I want readers to know about the novel when it's translated into English (now there is a project that it will be translated) is really the language of the novel. In this particular moment, a female writer is trying to put this internal journey in Arabic language. I don't really treat this novel as a memoir at all, but you can see that it was typical of her journey actually; anxiety, depression, feeling alienated inside her own class, inside her own body. The novel is not the best novel you would read, of course, and it's a debut novel, so it has all of the problems of a debut novel, when the young writer wants to capture and to say everything, you know. However, there is this kind of genuine voice that for me was a great gift. I really did not read in Arabic a female voice like this until I read Love and Silence in 1993. 

KIM: And I just want to go back to that moment. You're in the bookshop, you find this book, you pick it up. It's totally unknown, and yet it's this voice when you read it that is completely unlike anything you've read. It's amazing.

AMY: And unfortunately for all of us English speakers, we have to wait a little while to get a copy of this. It's good to hear that this is going to be translated at some point. But I'll go ahead and read an excerpt from Love and Silence:

Out of the still calm of sleep I pulled myself into motion, wandered across the room and, standing by the window, brushed my discontent into the street. I sat down—looked out—paged through the book of life. My heart was heavy and to my eyes everything seemed old. People were damp yellow leaves and I was unmoved by them, by their faces, by the soft covers of their clothes. I felt at once imprisoned by this life and pulled towards new horizons. I wanted to pull this self clear, gummy with the sap of its surroundings; to tear free into a wider world. The clear skies of my country bored me. I wanted others, dark and muddied and threatening, capable of stirring fear and astonishment. I wanted my feet to know a different land.

KIM: I mean, gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. 

IMAN: I really want to just comment here. So see this last sentence, to find “a land,” you know, not her homeland. This was in the time when the dominant discourse in culture was talking about the homeland, the nation, the “best land ever,” the “most brilliant nation ever,” and so on and so forth. I just want to say, when you read something like this in this age and this environment, you feel as if it's really speaking to you directly.

KIM: Yeah, I mean, it's how I felt, I still do feel sometimes, but definitely felt really strongly in my 20s and, you know, my late teens. It's a beautiful way of putting it that I never could have, but that feeling of just wanting another experience so deeply and also that ambivalent feeling of discontent, but also excited about the potential future at the same time. I thought that was lovely. And your translations throughout the book, because that's our opportunity to get to hear her voice, are just wonderful. So I'm so glad that you wove them throughout your book.

AMY: Okay, so you're realizing right away, “Wait a second, this is a whole different ball game here and probably, possibly, not what I thought, not a relative of this other very iconic writer.” What information, then, were you able to uncover on al-Zayyat in your first attempts at research? 

IMAN: Right away, actually, I started to ask old writers whom I know from the Sixties generation, and I was very close to. I started to ask them about a woman named Enayat al-Zayyat or about the novel. And I was so taken aback that people did not know her. And when someone knows her, they would tell me very interesting things, like “her mother is German” or “she had to learn the Arabic language in order to write in Arabic.” One time someone told me, “Oh, she is absolutely the younger sister of Latifa al-Zayyat,” going back to my assumption. And this actually made me ask my first question, and it wasn't “Who is Enayat al-Zayyat?” It was why this novel has been excluded from the canon of Arabic literature, from lists about Arab female writers, Sixties writing, whatever. So this was the first question actually. What makes the canon celebrate or exclude or forget something?

KIM: Right, right. So this all sparked what eventually turned out to be this decades-long quest to learn more about al-Zayyat. And I want to read from your book, Traces of Enayat. You write, “There’s a kind of intense curiosity which possesses us when we encounter an author who is truly unknown—a branch cut from the tree with no date of birth or death in evidence—or when their writing offers no clues to the wider life of their generation, to their close friends or literary influences.”  I really love the use of the word “clues” here. Because I felt like your book is just this beautifully written real life mystery. Like a detective, you're sifting through all this evidence. It's often contradictory, as you said earlier. It's incomplete. And there's also this physicality to the search. You're digging through archival material, you're reaching out to al-Zayyat's friends and family. You're meeting some of them in person multiple times throughout this search, and you're even traversing the streets of Cairo, particularly its cemeteries. And I found that part especially interesting. I was Googling to see pictures of the cemeteries and learning more about how they're part of life there. I wanted to know if you could share something about that with our listeners so they can get a feel for that as well.

IMAN: Sure. Let me tell you first about geography in the book, because I really felt when you search for someone, and this person is absent in the official public archive, and her family got rid of so many things, including the draft of her second novel, as we can talk about later… when you are searching for almost a ghost, it was, for me, geography that I can rely on. I wanted to know where did she live, die, work, and where is her cemetery? And here, a new relation emerged with Cairo, because I left Cairo in 1998. Of course, I go every year, but every year you go, places are disappearing, changing, and so on. But through the search for Enayat, I started to see the map of Cairo differently. So, for example, to find her old house in Cairo. I found out that I was living just two streets down from there, in the Dokki neighborhood. But the neighborhood was a bourgeoisie neighborhood, full of villas, trees, and very fancy during Enayat's life. But during my life, it became a middle class area, crowded, full of open markets in the streets and so on. The cemetery was very important for so many reasons.( I mean, I love what Saidiya Hartman said about visiting archives. She said to visit an archive is to go into a morgue. What do we see in the morgue? You see corpses. You see corpses that can't speak for themselves.) She was buried in what is known as the City of the Dead, right? It's more than four miles of different cemeteries and mausoleums, beautiful ones. However, with urbanization, poverty, migration from villages to big Cairo, people started to live there. So when you walk there, you are seeing people living there, children playing, you hear music, you smell food. So you can't see life and death coming that close to each other anywhere, I think, than like at this cemetery. However, I ended the book promising Enayat that I will visit her again and again. This is her place, the only place I am sure she is in. But guess what? In 2020 our government had a plan to build so many bridges and highways, and part of doing this was to demolish some of these beautiful cemeteries, which means even cemeteries are threatened to disappear.

KIM: There's just so much symbolism there. 

AMY: I was just going to say, it's so in keeping with Enayat's story. It just keeps happening time and again. And also these coincidences between her life and yours; you mentioned living in close proximity, but there's so many [coincidences] throughout the course of your book that kind of give you chills. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

AMY: It took you so long to work this all out that it was almost like time was giving you little morsels here and there, or Enayat was slowly dispensing the information to you. It's very interesting.

KIM: Yeah. I agree. So let's go back to Enayat’s life. What can you tell us about her early life, her childhood, her family?

IMAN: Her childhood can be seen through images, right? So, from her sister, Azim al-Zayyat, who died actually last year, it was a happy childhood. A devoted father, intellectual father, bourgeoisie family, the mother is a little bit tough, and, uh, controlling. From Nadia Lutfi, the iconic Egyptian actress who was a close friend to Enayat al-Zayyat, it wasn't that happy. Yes, the father was devoted, and Enayat was very close to her father, but she actually did not get along with her mother, because her mother was applying the bourgeoisie rules, and Enayat was struggling with depression, interested in writing and painting, not in salons and showing off. So whatever happiness and functionality of the family were there, she was struggling as a child, for sure.

KIM: So you mentioned Nadia Lutfi. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got in touch with Nadia and what she told you about their friendship? 

IMAN: So Nadia Lutfi is this kind of actress, she's an icon. I mean, think about Audrey Hepburn or something. We used to watch her movies on TV and in the cinema since I was a child. So the idea of reaching out to her was just terrifying. So I actually called the number I got from a friend who is a journalist, and I did not expect her to answer. But she answered. She has this hoarse voice because she was a heavy smoker, so I knew she was Nadia Lutfi right away. And we talked for one hour on this first phone call. And later on, I went to Egypt and I kept meeting her at least twice a year or so. And we continued talking and we would drink lots of whiskey, smoke lots of cigars together, stay up until almost the morning and she was sending me home with her driver, you know. So every time I was with her I just would feel, "I can't believe it. This is Nadia Lutfi!" 

AMY: Listeners, it's like Angelina Jolie or somebody like that and finding out that she has this childhood friend who was a lost lady of literature and she’s going to tell me all about it, and how intimidated you would be, but also how wild and crazy this must have been for you.

KIM: I mean, it's like Enayat led you to her.

AMY: Didn't Nadia say the same thing? 

IMAN: Yes, she said "She sent you to me."

AMY: Amazing. Okay, so let's move on in Enayat's story a little bit. She married an air force pilot at a very young age. She wanted to sort of get away from her childhood, and so she thought marriage was the answer. It was not, to say the least. What do you know, Iman, from your research about this marriage?

IMAN: It was a wrong decision. She was not happy. They were completely different. She felt suffocated, she wrote in her diary more than once. She asked for a divorce. And actually the whole thing was resolved after a few years, not by the court, but by her father speaking directly to the husband and convincing him to divorce her.

KIM: Okay, so she is separated from her husband, as you said. She's living in her father's house. There's an apartment on the floor above his. I believe it's an apartment. She's sharing custody of her young son with her husband. So this hasn't been resolved. What's going on there?

IMAN: In terms of custody, the father had the right to have full custody of the son when he reached the age of six. This was the law then, and the son was coming closer to this age, of course. So, Abassi al-Zayyat, al-Zayyat's father, built this beautiful villa in Dokki. And when she wanted to leave her husband and ask for a divorce, he built another apartment above the villa so she could have her independent life. And this is the space where she wrote Love and Silence. This is the space where she dreamed of obtaining an Optima [typewriter] machine so she can type. It was a very new trend, so she got one to type her novel. So what I'm trying to say is there are so many gaps to describe the three and a half years before her suicide. But we can fill these gaps by imagining her geography without really speaking for her. In the end, you are imagining. I don't want the question of why did Enayat commit suicide to be in the center of my book. Really, it wasn't. Maybe at the beginning I wanted to know, and I was fascinated with the idea that a young woman with a son, a beloved father, a friend like Nadia Lutfi, would commit suicide because her novel is rejected. I felt it's a tragedy, but it's a very interesting tragedy. It deserves to be known and researched. So I think really the rejection of the novel was the last straw. Her identity was as a writer and a mother, and both were going to be taken from her. She did not live, really, to her potential. 

AMY: The lack of archival information that was available on her did seem to impact how you thought about your own legacy as a writer and what you leave behind. You talked about that a little bit in your book.

IMAN: Yeah, I mean, you go through stages. In this case, one of them is “Oh, I want to keep my archives, my old papers and the diaries and you know drafts of books and blah blah blah.” And you go to your father's house, collect it and so on and so forth. But seriously, through my experience with Enayat, I feel now at least that the best way to protect our archive is to read other people's archives. It's to read the past. We read the past not to display it, not to talk about, for example, Enayat as a victim. No, she is not a victim. I was celebrating, all the time, the potential of Enayat as well. But it's actually to find this intersection and the connection between you and others. It could be a historical event. It could be a person. It could be a place, I don't know. But reading the past is our great way of actually reading the archive. Because if you go to the archive without a question, without a burning question, you will display it. You will talk about interesting things about Enayat, for example. It's not that way. I was actually reading my own archive while writing about Enayat. This is how I think about it.

KIM: I love the way you put that.

AMY: You also have a really interesting section towards the end of your book. It's almost an aside, where you address all these other women writers from the past. And you talk to them individually, and then you say “I want to tell a story right now. I want to light a candle for Enayat, and I want to talk about the day she decided that life was unbearable.” That was such a beautiful and poignant section of your book, and I think it kind of ties into what you just said about reading the past.

IMAN: Yeah, it's usually really the question of how to tell a story, either our story or someone else's. So, talking about this chapter, I was almost visualizing every day the last few days of Enayat's life. But how to write it is just so difficult. Am I going to write it as a prophet who saw what happened or someone who is imagining? I felt there was a heavy weight of reaching this moment of a young woman standing in front of the mirror, desperate, feeling “I don't want to be here anymore.” And then a moment happened that it's January 3rd. I'm in bed already. And then I realized it's Enayat's birthday. I went to my studio behind the house, and then something opened up. I saw all of these books, because I was searching them as well, of female writers older than Enayat, next to hers on my big desk. And this is the moment when you feel so connected to the past. It's not just Enayat. It's not just me. It's all of these women here. They existed. Lots of them are forgotten. And it's a moment to celebrate one of them, their life. So it's really finding the way to tell a story that is always the most fascinating thing in writing. 

AMY: Yeah. I love that moment of, like, it just all came together for you when you saw the books. I feel like we haven't done her writing enough justice yet on this episode. And so I want to read another passage from her journal. So there wasn't much available from her journals, right? But this passage that you included in your book just stopped me in my tracks. I'll preface it by  saying that Enayat, she would often refer to herself in the third person in her diaries. So this is her talking about her decision to get married when she was young:

She entered a marriage without love, without mutual under-

standing, without compatibility. The possibility of such things had

never occurred to her. Her only thought was to escape the discipline

and constraints of school.

So the paradise of infancy closed its gates and the doors of a

premature young adulthood swung open. Young adulthood? Just

adulthood. And she chose wrong. She went through the wrong door,

the one that opened onto a desert, onto wastelands devoid even of

mirages, and she looked back to find that the door had vanished, and

now there was no way home that she could see. Bewildered, she wept.

Wretched and lost, she wept. And then she took heart and resigned

herself. Resigned herself, and in doing so discovered an extraordinary

capacity to endure. She saw herself as a camel, ruminating on all

the happy moments of the past, chewing them over slowly, slowly in

the midst of that brutal desert. And then? Then the provisions ran

out, the past was finished, and the camel needed something new to

chew on. But there was nothing to be had except despair, yellow as

the sands, and her body wasted away and her soul thinned and she

began to call for deliverance, began to scream for help. Suddenly she

saw that her home was built on shifting sands and the harder she

worked to save it the deeper and deeper it sank, and she pleaded for

salvation, for help from God, from Fate, from everything. Caught

up in her wild inquiry, she had forgotten that no one was coming

to save her because she was the only one who could do it. The first

impulse must be hers. Then she saw the key, the key of deliverance

that hung at her neck and in her soul, in the spirit within her, and so

she rose to her feet and, opening the door, she stood on the threshold

and filled her lungs with life, with the rich fragrance of youth, the

scent of spring and freedom. There on the threshold she cast off her

old, cracked hide, gashed and knotted, saturated with fear, and took

her first steps in new skin, free and uninhibited. She was brave, she

was steadfast, she relied on herself.

I mean, I cannot wait to read this novel, Love and Silence, based on that passage alone from her diary! If this is how she was writing…I know you're saying it's not “the greatest novel ever,” but this writing right here is pretty damn good. 

IMAN: And this is really what makes literature great. I mean, you don't have to write the best novel on earth, but you can talk about it as a work that has real impact on you, that can speak to you. And this is what we should appreciate about literature, actually, more than anything else.

AMY: Absolutely. al-Zayyat died on January 3rd, 1963. And you imagine her final day in Traces of Enayat, but we'll never truly know exactly what happened. We do know that she left a note to her son and took an overdose of pills. It was four years after her death that Love and Silence was finally published. How did that happen and what was the response to the book?

IMAN: Enayat's father and Nadia tried to publish the novel more than once, and they kept waiting for this publishing house to bring his book out. When the book came out, it was March, 1967. Some of our best critics at the time wrote about the novel and how beautiful it is and how sad that the novelist is dead. And I got to know this later when I started the archival search. However, the 1967 war took place in June, like three months after the novel was published. And if you go through not just the Egyptian, but Arab newspapers, from the war and for at least a year, everything was about the defeat, was about the war, was about what's next. It was rare to even see book reviews in these newspapers and magazines. So I think there was kind of bad luck, but also the question for me was really why this novel did not impact other Arab female writers of the time? They kept using the formula of women/nation. Big issues and so on. I think it wasn't included in the literary scene. It wasn't talked about enough. It wasn't taught in schools like other novels and so on.

KIM: You discovered, as you briefly mentioned earlier, that there was a second novel in the works, and that adds really to the sense of loss there. What do you know about that novel?

IMAN: So in Enayat's diary, or to be specific, in the independent separate papers that survived from her diary, there were actually two or three pages that I didn't understand at the beginning at all. She wrote the name of “Ludwig Keimer” with another two German names. When I searched them, Ludwig Keimer was a very famous Egyptologist who was born in 1892 in Germany, and he escaped in 1928 to come and live in Egypt. And he lived in Egypt until he died in 1957. And just a year after he came to Egypt, he became involved in the culture and the Egyptology scene in Egypt with other scholars. So he was involved in cataloging the National Egyptian Museum. He got Egyptian national citizenship, and so on and so forth. So, the name was just a mystery for me, but there was also more than one address in her diaries that didn't make any sense. And in my search, I was successfully connecting the address to Keimer and to his other German friends. So when it came to my attention that she was writing a novel about Keimer, I became absolutely all over the place searching for any draft. I found, actually, some pieces of the draft of the novel. And I kept imagining that Enayat was trying to do with Ludwig Keimer exactly what I am doing with her now. So when she worked in the German Institute of Antiquities, she was bored, actually. She felt it's a useless job, but I have to take it. She used to make fun of herself as a woman who is working in bookshelves, but actually she became so fascinated with his life. Because this guy had a great collection of books, manuscripts, paintings, maps, and the Institute bought all of his materials, and his collection was just amazing. And she was working on classifying this material, since she knew German. So she became fascinated with his life. So I think this was a potential way to go out of your crisis, right? And through Keimer's life, I imagine that she was trying to reposition herself in her own life. She didn't finish the novel, of course.

AMY: Right. His story was an escape for her. Yeah. 

IMAN: Yes. The story of lonely Jewish intellectuals and scholars in Egypt is just fascinating. All of those who escaped the Nazis to come, and they became really a part of the society, an important part of the society. Every one of them needs a book. But I wish someone will write…

AMY: [interrupts] How much time do you have, Iman? How much time do you have? 

IMAN: I don't! It's not my project. But I feel like sometimes I have this feeling, especially in Cairo, because it's my city. I feel if I move a stone in the street, I will find a story. So it's not about the interesting stories, it's about which story is really part of you. Because it takes years, you are right, to tell one story. Every time you start the project, you are 60 pages into a draft and then you feel, “No, this is not what I want to do.” Like walking in a street and finding a wall in front of you and you have to reboot. And I'm actually engaged with Enayat because of poetry, because this is what touched me. In her whispering voice is this kind of poetic power. And I'm asking my questions about her, but I don't want to speak for her. So it's not a biography. It's not an academic work. It's not a history book, right? It's everything together. I wasn't able to write the book until it came to me in an enlightening second, that the story of my search for Enayat al-Zayyat is a book, not a particular genre. And I will have freedom to go with whatever genre that can express what I want to say. And this was a moment that the book really opened itself.

AMY: I think you chose perfectly in that. It's so much more interesting than just reading a cut-and-dry biography of what you could find about her life. And the missing pieces almost spurned you on to have to get creative in that way. And when you're talking about writing and hitting a wall, hitting a dead end, that literally was happening to you in Cairo! You were trying to look for her childhood home and being like, “Wait, the street's not here!” And having to talk to doormen and figure out where the street is now because it moved. So it's very fascinating to read your book. I absolutely loved it. 

KIM: Same. Definitely. It's a wonderful book. 

AMY: So we hope that there's a renewed interest in Enayat al-Zayyat, thanks to your book, Iman, and Kim and I are both so glad that through her, we've been introduced to your work. Listeners, there are so many intriguing twists and turns to Iman's journey in telling Enayat's story. It's quite a ride and well worth reading. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today. We truly appreciate your time. 

IMAN: Thank you for having me. This was fun.

KIM: Yeah, it was a real pleasure to get to talk to you and talk about this wonderful book. So that's all for today's show. Thanks for joining us and we invite you next week to listen to our Patreon episode on Ina Eloise Young. She was one of America's first female sports reporters and likely the first sports editor of a daily American newspaper.

AMY: I will also be fangirling a little over Caitlin Clark in that episode and recounting my own brief history as a sports reporter. If you want to get in on that and all of our twice-monthly bonus episodes, go to lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron.” And shout out to our newest Patreon members, Simon Sleighton and Julia Valentine. Thank you for your support. 

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes and made possible by listeners like you.