A poet searches for answers about the short life of a writer in 'Traces of Enayat'
Poet Iman Mersal's book is a memoir of her search for knowledge about the writer Enayat al-Zayyat; it's a slow, idiosyncratic journey through a layered, changing Cairo — and through her own mind.
As a young literature student in the 1990s, the Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbled across a copy of Love and Silence, a forgotten 1967 novel by a writer named Enayat al-Zayyat who died by suicide in her 20s — a few years before her book was released.
Mersal was taken with the book's "fresh and refreshing" language and emotional intensity; it exerted such power over her that the moment she finished reading it, she "turned back and began again... [copying] out passages, small stand-alone texts like lights to illuminate my emotional state." At the time,
