One land, one author: in Egypt with Iman Mersal and a forgotten writer
Audio 29:00
Writer Iman Mersal in studio at RFI (June 2021).
© Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint / RFI
By: Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint
32 mins
Iman Mersal, born in 1966, defended a doctoral thesis in Arabic Literature at the University of Cairo.
She teaches at the University of Alberta in Canada.
She is the author of a collection of poetry “Two things escaped me” in 2018, and of the story “In the footsteps of Enayat El-Zayyat” on the suicide of a young Egyptian writer (Actes Sud, collection Sindbad led by Farouk Mardam Bey).
The book received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2021 considered the Nobel of the Arab world.
(Replay)
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In the footsteps of Enayat Zayyat, Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2021 © Actes Sud
"At the beginning of the 1990s, Iman Mersal discovers in a bookseller
" Love and Silence "
, the only novel by Enayat Zayyat, published in 1967 and fallen into oblivion. She does not know anything about its author, if this only that she died before she could publish it.
Twenty years later, she embarked on an investigation that will spread over several years to try to find out who Enayat Zayyat was and to understand what led this young woman of good family to kill herself at the age of twenty-seven. . She gleans snatches of information from the press archives, meets actress Nadia Lutfi, Enayat's closest friend, then relatives and acquaintances. Little by little, she accesses layers of truths that are always fragmented, sometimes contradictory, which make up a puzzle which she knows right away that will remain incomplete. Is the publisher's refusal really the cause of his suicide? When was his depressive disorder? What role played in this depression his divorce, the loss of his son whose father had obtained custody,or the remoteness of Nadia Lutfi? Why this suicide when she had just been hired at the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo for a job that fulfilled her?
All these questions and many others take Iman Mersal on a quest that is both historical and intellectual, poetic and intimate, which is also an invitation addressed to today's Egypt to look at itself in the mirror of its recent past, that of those 1950s and 1960s which are the object of a nostalgic cult that this book, far from nourishing it, peels like an onion and peels leaf after leaf, until nothing remains. "
(Presentation of
the Actes Sud editions
) (Story translated from Arabic by Richard Jacquemond)
Editor Farouk Mardam Bey and writer Iman Mersal in studio at RFI (June 2021) © Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint \ RFI
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