The New York Times ran a full-page profile of Iman Mersal and her “subtle and universal exploration of identity,” Traces of Enayat (tr. Robin Moger), which was published by Transit Books on April 2.
The article outlines Mersal's exploration of the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature's tragic heroine, Enayat al-Zayyat, which led her to write Traces of Enayat. After discovering al-Zayyat’s lone novel in a Cairo book stall, Mersal embarked on an obsessive journey of reclamation and reckoning, delving deep into the world that shaped Enayat’s life and afterlife. Mapping two simultaneous psychogeographies through Cairo—from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal’s own past—Traces of Enayat embraces the reciprocal relationship between text and reader, past and present, ultimately revealing a portrait of two women striving to live on their own terms:
“Telling the story of searching for Enayat was my way of reading her life and not displaying her life,” [Mersal] said. “My dream was to tell our story, my story, her story, this interaction between us. The past is not that glorious. It’s the collective and individual wounds of this past.”
The piece is available in it's entirety at The New York Times