Traces of Enayat by the Egyptian writer Iman Mersal was published in 2019 and tells a story of another Egyptian female writer, Enayat Al-Zayyat who committed suicide at the age of 26 in 1963. She only wrote one book called Love and Silence which initially rejected for publication but later was published posthumously. Love and Silence explores one’s woman quest for a sense of belonging in the pre-1952 revolution Egyptian society inspired a film and other cultural endeavours and then Enayat and her book was completely forgotten. Iman Mersal stumbles upon Love and Silence in one of the Cairo second-hand bookstores in 1993 which inspired her to find out more about Enayat. Over the next decades Iman tries to learn more about Enayat, and why she was erased from the pages of the Egyptian literary history. She interviews Enayat’s friends, family members, tracks down schools Enayat attended, neighbourhoods she lived in, the sanatoriums she went to, the Cairo German Institute where Enayat worked. Traces of Enayat also touches on domestic abuse and mental health and their perception by the Egyptian society. The book also gives a rich layered depiction of Cairo’s society of the 1950s and 1960s and includes interesting references to the golden age Egyptian cinema. I found the story of Enayat profoundly moving and compelling. Traces of Enayat is an engaging read, rich in the cultural and historical commentary. It constitutes an exploration of the erasure of one’s life from the public memory and of the reasons why Enayat’s work was omitted from all the literary journal and never included in the anthologies dedicated to the women writing in Arabic. Traces of Enayat also highlights the importance of the personal archive including personal journals, letters, notes, annotations, pictures, as a way to show the appreciation of one’s humanity.
To an extent Traces of Enayat is also the portrayal of the 1990s Egypt; this was the era when Iman found Love and Silence in one of the old bookstores, when the writers experienced many obstacles and when Iman herself decided to leave her home country. Traces of Enayat is not a typical biography, with the linear sequence of dates but rather a book highlighting one life at one point in the history, multilayered, conditioned by the historic events. For Enayat in the 1950s and 1960s as well as for Iman in the 1990s and during the later decades, books, cinema and music all serve as vehicles to escape the present-day realities and allow them to feel less trapped by the social norms surrounding them. I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.