Traces of Enayat E-Book

Iman Mersal

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 356

Beschreibung

When Iman Mersal stumbles upon a great – yet forgotten – novel written by Enayat al-Zayyat, a young woman who killed herself in 1963, four years before her book was published, Mersal begins to research the writer. She tracks down Enayat's best friend, who had been Egypt's biggest movie star at the time; she is given access to Enayat's diaries. Mersal can't accept, as has been widely speculated since Enayat's death, that a publisher's rejection was the main reason for Enayat's suicide. From archives, Enayat's writing, and Mersal's own interviews and observations, a remarkable portrait emerges of a woman striving to live on her own terms, as well as of the artistic and literary scene in post-revolution Cairo. Blending research with imagination, and adding a great deal of empathy, the award-winning Egyptian poet Iman Mersal has created an unclassifiable masterpiece.

Leseprobe

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First published in English translation in 2023 by And Other StoriesGreat Britain – United States of Americawww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Iman Mersal 2023

First published as في أثر عنايات الزيات in 2019 by Kotob Khan Publishing

English language translation copyright © Robin Moger 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. The right of Iman Mersal to be identified as author of this work and of Robin Moger to be identified as translator of this work have been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Excerpt from Isolde Lehnert’s Giants of Egyptology: Ludwig Keimer (1892–1957) used with permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-913505-72-1eBook: 978-1-913505-73-8

Editor: Tara Tobler; Copy-editor: Bella Bosworth; Proofreader: Robert Sharman; Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Sarah Schulte.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledges that our work is supported using public funding from Arts Council England.

The publication of this translation has been made possible through the financial support of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award at the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, part of the Department of Culture and Tourism - Abu Dhabi.

Contents

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Endnotes

‌1

But Paula hadn’t gone to the funeral. She didn’t know where the grave was.

She repeated the story I’d heard from her before, the same details in the same order:

That after receiving the phone call she had gone to Astra Square in Dokki, to the apartment there, bounding up the stairs to the second floor.

That it had been true what she’d been told: they had broken down the bedroom door searching for her.

That she had seen her stretched out on the bed, beautiful, as though peacefully asleep, the blanket laid over her smooth and neat.

‘She’d made up her mind and there was no going back, you see. Such determination! She wasn’t playing around.’

Then Paula had lost her mind, swearing at the sleeping woman and beating her hands against the walls. She had left the apartment. And hadn’t gone to the funeral.

At eight in the morning, 19 February 2015, I commended myself to God and caught a taxi to Basateen. All I had to go on was an address that had run in al-Ahram back in January 1967: In memory of the late Enayat al-Zayyat, with hearts full of patience and faith, the family is holding a service in her memory which shall not be forgotten, at the tomb of the late Rashid Pasha in al-Afifi.

Notice in the deaths column of al-Ahram, January 1967

Something about these lines itched at me. Demanded I edit them. Say,

… the family will hold a memorial service today for she who shall not be forgotten, at the tomb of the late Rashid Pasha, al-Afifi.

Finding this little paragraph among the death notices, I had been sure that there must be more stories. Among the memories of those still living, say, or in books, or on the shelves of public archives. That all I needed to do was be patient. But now, years after I’d first chanced across this clipping, reverently preserving it as though it were Enayat’s identity card, and following the series of telephone conversations with Paula the previous autumn, I still had no idea who Rashid Pasha was, nor anything about his relationship to Enayat. I didn’t even know his first name.

Was he from an Egyptian family, or Turkish? Was he Circassian? Nothing.

One of those nineteenth-century pashas, was my guess: men who strutted about with their entourages, sauntering through the palaces and vast estates granted them during the reign of Mohammed Ali, and whose legacies were the mausoleums which bear their names.

I found four men from the period that might fit the bill:

The first was a Turkish diplomat by the name of Mustafa Rashid Pasha, born in Istanbul and buried there in 1858. Jurji Zaidan dedicates a chapter to him in Lives of the Great Men of the Orient in the Nineteenth Century.

Second was Rashid Pasha al-Kouzlaki, originally from Kyrgyzstan, who was appointed wali of Baghdad by the Ottoman Sultan in 1853 after leading a military campaign to crush a Kurdish rebellion in northern Mesopotamia, only to be buried in Baghdad just four years later, in the al-Khayzuran cemetery behind the dome of Abu Hanifa al-Numan’s mausoleum. It was just possible that one of his sons was buried in al-Afifi.

The third Rashid Pasha had an interesting story. A Circassian who spoke Arabic with an accent, he is mentioned in Ilyas al-Ayoubi’s history of Khedive Ismail’s military expedition against the Ethiopian Empire. Rashid Pasha went south on the steamship Dakahlia with the other commanders, reaching Massawa on 14 December 1875. Al-Ayoubi gives a description of an on-board Babel‌: the commander-in-chief of the campaign, Ratib Pasha, was Turkish; Maj. Gen. William Wing Loring, his chief of staff, was American; the rest of the officers were a mix of Turks, Circassians, Americans, Austrians and Germans, along with one Italian convert to Islam and a Sudanese.

Al-Ayoubi claims that although they had little combat experience themselves, the Turks and Circassians, Ratib Pasha and Rashid Pasha among them, conspired to withhold their cooperation from Loring and frustrate his plans. The resulting confusion led to the overwhelming victory of Ethiopian forces at the Egyptian-held fort at Gura on 7 March 1876. Some 3,273 Egyptians were killed and 1,416 were wounded, with just 530 escaping the battle unscathed.

Rashid Pasha was killed in the fighting. According to al-Ayoubi, as he lay in his own blood, Ethiopian soldiers stripped his body of its finery, dividing the haul among themselves and castrating him, before moving off to pursue the rout‌ – meaning that this Rashid was buried, if he was buried at all, in Ethiopia.

The dead were buried in the wadi‌ and the stream beds,writes al-Ayoubi. There were almost two thousand of them, and they were not interred properly, for the rains soon washed the topsoil from their corpses and the wild beasts fed on their flesh.

Reading this, I was secretly hoping that this improbable Rashid would not turn out to be Enayat’s.

The final Rashid Pasha came from a family with close ties to Mohammed Ali. His name first enters the record in the 1850s, on a list of officials responsible for digging canals, draining marshland, and reclaiming desert land for agriculture. By 1868 he was governor of Cairo.‌ He was among the founders of the Egyptian Geographic Society in 1875, and a year later he joined what was then called the Privy Council, where he headed the precursor of the Ministry of Finance‌. From January 1878 to April 1879, he was Speaker of the final parliamentary sessions‌ to be held in the reign of Khedive Ismail.

There is almost no information about his origins or life outside of these facts, though in 1868 we find him registered as a member of the Society of Knowledge, which places him, in the historian al-Rafai’s words, among the best classes in society.‌

To take the tone of a policier: it looked like this was the Rashid Pasha I wanted. If he turned out to be the owner of the tomb where Enayat lay, I would have to return to his story, but first I needed to see the tomb for myself.

The driver took Salah Salem Street as far as Sayyida Aisha Square, where he turned right, dropping me off a few minutes later at a narrow opening in a wall that ran parallel to the road.

‘Ask here,’ he said. ‘There’s a thousand can show you the way.’

I stepped through the opening onto a ruler-straight street. To my right there was a high wall broken by sections of black corrugated iron, and to my left the entrances to the tombs, each dressed in a fresh coat of yellow. I saw a little girl trotting towards me. She wore a violet robe flounced in tiers, loaves slumped across the lattice of palm fronds that she balanced on her head. The sight was so compelling that I longed to take a picture and wished I had a tourist’s audacity.

The girl passed me, then the scrape of her sandals stopped abruptly and I looked round to find her standing and staring. Our eyes met. Did she know where al-Afifi was? ‘Man or street?’ She was older than I’d thought. I took a couple of steps towards her and asked the way to the nearest bakery. She described it precisely.

It wasn’t as crowded there as I had anticipated and I sensed people watching me. A woman asked what I was after, and as we were trying to figure out whether al-Afifi was a street or an alley, a gentleman seated on the ground, sunning himself and smoking, remarked: ‘She’ll be one of those newspaper people, come to take her photos and fuck off.’

Politely, as though I hadn’t heard, I asked him if he knew where I might find the tomb of Rashid Pasha in al-Afifi. ‘There are no Afifis here, but there’s Abou Aouf’s court. I’ll take you if you want.’

Better I find my own way, I thought, but I made a mental note to refer to a court not a tomb the next time I asked for directions. If I didn’t find Enayat today, she would send me a sign when she was ready.

I wandered aimlessly, peering through the entrances to the courts and up at the family names over their lintels. I didn’t mean to spy, but every step I took delivered me countless scenes from their interiors. I was in a strange mood. Not frustrated exactly, because Enayat had taught me over the years that nothing about her would ever come easily. Nor did the traduced beauty of these tombs inspire any sense of sorrow in me or moral judgement on the living occupants who disturbed the rest of the dead. I couldn’t remember which of my friends had once described his mood as ‘pins and needles’, but it fitted perfectly.

Around me, the living were sleeping and waking, eating and bickering and breeding. It was somehow ugly to witness, painful even, a scene better not seen at all, yet at the same time, it offered powerful evidence of a will to live, of their resolve. Passing by the incised names – bedrooms, kitchens and washing tubs all open and spilling onto the street, the electric cables strung tight across Kufic calligraphy (And every soul shall taste death) – my initial shock shaded into familiarity. Cactuses next to dried flowers next to mounds of rubbish, the smell of piss and fried garlic. Barefoot children scampering, one in an Adidas T-shirt. A gas range set on a grave. A washing line slung from tree trunk to marble headstone. Mayada al-Hennawy singing ‘I adore you’… and, despite the chill, beneath a tree that fronted the green of a finely worked iron gate, a knot of men all smoking in their underwear, white shorts and vests and nothing else besides, as though lounging by an invisible seashore.

As I went, my mind began to wander with me. A memory of the last time I’d been to the cemetery in Basateen. It was back in 1995, not a funeral but a wedding, whose I don’t know, but the Sufi praise-singer Sheikh Yassin al-Tohamy had performed. That night it had seemed the most beautiful place in the world. A summer breeze, the distant lights from the top of Mokattam’s cliff-face, strangers holding out hands that held fat joints, and the rasp of al-Tohamy’s voice: ‘What good be there in love if it should spare the heart?’ I had floated motionless for hours, that extraordinary sensation of being cut off from past and present. Not of going away, exactly, not of travelling, but rather that you’re flying: a flight which ends with the end of the night.

The day after my walkabout, I had a taxi drop me off on Sixteen Street. I passed the shoppers and the sellers, the pavements and the walls of the courts covered with goods and every conceivable kind of scrap and appliance: VCRs and washing machines and gas bottles, window frames and bedsteads in wood and iron, aluminium cabinets and broken chairs and car tyres, empty bottles that once held quality whiskey and vodka. A market for the waste disgorged from the city’s guts.

I turned off one side street into another, then another, and I began to hear my own footsteps. There was no one around me, like I’d wandered into the outskirts of the City of the Dead.

I came to a great tomb towering like a castle, barred against invaders by the huge locks hanging from its gate. Through the railings I could make out cactuses and well-tended flowers and I imagined the lucky residents stepping out from their burial chamber bedrooms at dawn to gather in the courtyard and talk.

Squabbling children brought me out of my reverie. An Adidas T-shirt again. Surely not the same child I’d seen the day before. ‘Adidas among the tombs…’ came the thought, and all of a sudden I was remembering a relative of mine, a classmate back in primary school who’d become a construction worker in Cairo. One of the most intensely pious people I’ve ever known: gentle with his family, prays the five prayers daily, and goes into seclusion for the last ten days of Ramadan. He has never harmed a soul and to me is the model of what a true Muslim should be. I once saw him, dapper and handsome, wearing a T-shirt which bore, in English, the slogan of an abortion rights campaign from overseas: The right to choose – It’s my body! God knows where he’d found it. I’d been unsure. Should I tell him? Did he have the right to know? A moral quandary which I settled inside a minute: I didn’t say a word. And now I felt guilty.

My journey ended at a makeshift cafeteria outside the entrance to a tomb, seated on one of the red plastic chairs that were clustered beneath an ancient tree. I felt at peace, as though this little stand of chairs had always been my destination, and ordered a tea, then changed my mind, and asked for a bottle of water.

‘We don’t have bottled water, miss. Will you take a Pepsi?’

‘Please.’

A man seated beside me smiled my way, and once we had exchanged greetings, I asked him if he knew the area.

‘Well I’ve lived here for forty years.’

We chatted for a while and, emboldened, I lit myself a cigarette and another for him.

He wanted to know why I’d come and I told him that I was looking for a street called al-Afifi. An alley, perhaps.

‘There’s no al-Afifi here,’ he said. ‘It must be in Basateen or the Mamluk cemetery.’

‘This isn’t Basateen?’

I must have come further than I’d thought.

I once read that this stretch of desert was where the Mamluks held their military parades, their rites and races, feats of arms and religious feasts. They chose to be buried here because it is so dry. Amid its miles of walls and doors, the ramrod avenues and evergreen trees, outsiders quickly lose their way. Historical periods tangle, interleaving their walis and pashas, mosques and palaces, the shrines of their saints. There are no signs to mark boundaries in the City of the Dead.

I intended to resume my search the next day, convinced I must be very close to finding Enayat’s grave. But this was naïve. I would finally locate Rashid Pasha’s tomb in the summer of 2018, only to learn that this tomb was not the end of the trail. Enayat’s resolve, it seemed, was as strong as Paula had claimed, as though she were watching over every moment of my journey and wanted me to reach her by some other road.

‌2

I was woken by my phone ringing beside the bed. Half awake, with the sense of dread that presages any morning call, I reached out my hand and answered.

It was Paula, her voice unmistakable: ‘I know I’ve already put you through enough trouble, but how much longer are you going to be in Egypt? I was going to ask you to come by tomorrow evening around nine, but it won’t work now. Could we meet up when you’re back in the summer? The bronchitis laid me out and I’m still recovering. Faten’s death affected me very badly, you see…’

I was fully awake.

‘No, no, you must get better, ustaza…’

On the verge of asking her, ‘Who’s Faten?’ I realised she must be talking about the actress Faten Hamama, whose death had been widely reported the month before. And I don’t know what I said for the remainder of our conversation, only that no sooner was it over than I flung open the door to the balcony, stared out at Cairo, and cried, ‘Finally!’

The aunts, back at my grandfather’s house for their summer break: urbanised students in short nightgowns, watching the late-night film on the black-and-white set in the television room, hair curlers doubling the size of their heads.

The television is showing Sleepless. My aunts sip lemon juice from tall, ribbed glasses; on-screen, Faten Hamama and Emad Hamdy play Nadia and Mustafa. They are speaking on the phone:

‘Well, my name is Nadia Lutfi, and my father is Ahmed Lutfi. I live in Dokki. You know who I am and I know you fancy me. Oh, and you kicked a football at me this morning. That enough for you?’

Nadia arranges to meet Mustafa outside the Equestrian Club at four thirty the following afternoon.

Then an exterior scene: Nadia Lutfi, walking along the outer wall of the club. She wears white gloves and a sleeveless dress that might be pink, or maybe rose, and is covered in little white circles.

‘Such a pretty dress,’ says the youngest aunt.

‘We’ve got eyes too, you know,’ the eldest replies.

As they bicker, Nadia’s lines, delivered in formal Arabic, are moving me to tears:

‘I am bewildered. Lost. I feel a mysterious hand propelling me towards a fate that is no more certain. And I feel that I need somebody by my side, a person to direct me and guide me down the path of safety. But there is no one.

‘I cannot ask my father or his wife for advice.

‘I feel the same loneliness as before, and I am afraid of Mustafa. He is stronger than I am, and older. More experienced. Should I go home? I should go home!’

But before she can make her mind up, Mustafa’s convertible pulls up beside her, and the relationship begins.

Standing there on the balcony, looking out at the city, I thought of that world: the dome of Cairo University, the private clubs and peaceful neighbourhood parks, open-topped cars and black-and-white TVs, short skirts and cocktail parties. I thought of how my aunts, too, must have longed to be stars of the screen. For sure that desire was there, at least before kids and work and the hijab put paid to it.

Cinema held out the promise of an alternative geography. Its dramatic denouements offered hope for a different life. Cairo of the fifties and sixties. Rebellious girls filling journals with roses printed on their covers and falling for the wrong men – for older men, for men who are poorer than them, or richer. Girls harbouring secrets which others expose as the crisis draws near. And then the men, wedded to distance, who are posted to Egypt’s deep south or sent to study in Europe, whose credulity when faced with slander is the torment of their lovers, who are sometimes killed in battle.

These films were a window on love, misfortune, and retribution. There was always retribution, if not from society, then from the skies.

The night before Paula’s morning call, I did as I’d done every day since my arrival in Cairo, and tried to call her. And, as usual, she hadn’t answered. The frustrations I had managed to hold at bay over the last few days then swept over me:

I had foregone a planned visit to Egypt a year and half before, then taken up the opportunities afforded by a semester-long sabbatical and an invitation to Italy, just so I could meet Paula now. Here I was, hostage to fortune, my evenings left open on the off-chance she might call, only going out when all hope was lost. This whole trip had been a waste of time, I told myself. Nothing had come of it. I needed connections to get into the state archives and track down Rashid Pasha. No one in the City of the Dead knew where the al-Afifi cemetery was. In Dokki, it transpired, there was no such place as Astra Square!

And Paula wasn’t answering.

More burdensome than the frustration was having to confront the questions I’d been putting off: what was it I was looking for, exactly? I mean, I had no idea what I was going to do with the photographs and papers that Paula had promised me – supposing I ever got them. Was I running away, escaping my own life by chasing clues into the life of a woman who wrote a single novel and died before she could see it published? Hadn’t I read her novel several times already? How significant a novel was it, anyway? Enough for me to go searching for its author? Was it her decision to end her life that drew me to her, or the thought of her unrealised potential?

Hadn’t Paula already told me enough over the course of our phone calls for me to picture her life?

The night before, as I’d first kindled then luxuriated in my anger, it had never occurred to me that Faten Hamama’s death might have something to do with Paula’s inexplicable disappearance. But this morning, the connection seemed to offer access to the very world I longed for like a child. After all, who didn’t know that Paula had taken her screen name Nadia Lutfi from the role Faten played in Sleepless? Hadn’t Paula told me that she and Enayat had hopeless crushes on Faten, and that Paula and her husband had watched the film with Enayat at Cinema Miami in December 1957?

Back in from the balcony, I made coffee, then opened my file on Paula to transcribe what I could remember of our conversation before it slipped away. She had told me a tale. A tale she’d told many times before in interviews, with slight variations every time.

Her decision to work in cinema, she said, caused strain at home, and her parents made her promise that if she was going to be an actress, she wouldn’t use the family name. There were other considerations, too: Paula might sound strange to ears attuned to more common Egyptian names. The producer Ramses Naguib had suggested Samiha Hussein as a screen name, but she didn’t like it. After one particularly difficult night it struck her that the confusion she felt was much like that of Nadia, the heroine in Sleepless, when she says: ‘I’ve been through hard times, and my hope’s begun to drift and fade, till all I can see of it is a mirage, a distant shadow.’

Paula made up her mind that the crisis facing the character Nadia Lutfi suited her perfectly.

And she called Enayat:

‘Hello? How are you, Ninou? Do you have Sleepless by Ihsan Abdel Quddous?’

‘Does it have to be Ihsan? I’ve got other books. Good ones.’

‘No, it has to be that one.’

‘I don’t have it.’

‘Fine, but if you happen to come across it, buy it and bring it round.’

‘Paula, what’s going on?’

‘Nothing, the same old trouble at home.’

‘The family still not supporting our young starlet’s dreams?’

‘Very funny. We’ll talk when you come round.’

‘Don’t worry, Paula.’

‘I’ll wait for you. Don’t be late.’

Paula had the most extraordinary ability to summon Enayat al-Zayyat’s voice out of decades of silence.

When I returned that summer, I told myself, I would visit Paula’s apartment for the first time. Enayat’s friend! It wouldn’t be just Paula I would meet there, in other words, but also the actress Nadia Lutfi and her creations: Ahlam from The Seven Daughters, Mady from Sunglasses, Soheir from The Sins, the Ilham and Mustafa double act from For Men Only, Riri in Autumn Quail, Louisa in Saladin, Zouba the dancer in Palace of Desire, Zaina the matriarch in The Mummy, Ferdous in My Father Up the Tree, as well as all the womenwhose lives she’d worn in her middle age, characters whose names and films had slipped my mind, but who all wore wigs and plucked their eyebrows into oblivion. I would meet them all.

It was my last day in Cairo. I decided that I wouldn’t be going to the tombs.

‌3

Love and Silence…

I came across Love and Silence in 1993, during a hunt for a cheap copy of Collected Miracles, al-Nabhani’s dictionary of holy men. ‘One pound,’ said the bookseller by the Ezbekiya wall, and though I’d never heard of it before, I bought it on the spot.

From her name I instantly assumed that the author must be the younger sister of the activist and writer Latifa al-Zayyat.

The United Arab Republic – Ministry of CultureLove and Silence – An Egyptian NovelEnayat al-ZayyatDar al-Katib al-Arabi (ah 1386 / ad 1967)Introduction by Mustafa Mahmoud

The novel opens in Cairo, as the narrator describes her state of mind following her brother’s death in November 1950:

And again I was overcome by the piercing realisation that, with his death and departure, this incredibly precious thing had vanished from my life: that I had lost my brother.

Hisham has died in an accident on the parallel bars, a discipline of which he says, It gives me control over my body. Hisham’s absence is a fount, the spring from which the narrative flows, branching into a tangle of internal reflections, among them the narrator’s account of her depression and her meditations on the meaning of a life lived in the presence of death:

And I looked into his face, unable to believe that Hisham could be dead, that this face would forever be a sleeper’s. A sleeper without breath in his chest. Yet at the same time, the lack of breath seemed meaningless, like he could get to his feet, and run about, and laugh; that he was stronger than anyone, than everyone, and didn’t need something as insubstantial as breath to live. And I reached out my hands and ran them over his face, maybe so he might feel them and open his eyes to me – me, his sister, Najla. But the face stayed still and frozen. I thought I saw a blue steal into his lips, then seep slowly outwards across his features, and for the first time I found myself afraid of him, and ashamed of myself for my fear; for fearing my brother now that his soul was gone. I felt as though I was spying on someone I didn’t know. Then I saw him, or imagined I saw him, turn his face from me, and the sight was insupportable, because for the first time I had accepted his death.

The reader learns of the narrator’s grief and her brother’s death before they know what to call her. During the course of an earlier scene in which her perspective is intercut with those of the other characters around her, and up until this unbroken train of thought as she stands over her brother’s corpse, she never tells us her name. Hisham’s death is presented as a first step to understanding:

In my mind, brooding on death and dwelling on my brother’s name grew interchangeable. I thought of him as a territory, its shores uncharted, ringed by mystery. Whoever discovers these shores never returns.

I expected the book to develop into an elegy for the dead brother, or to take us through the narrator’s gradual emergence from grief. And so it did, briefly, but at the same time, and imperceptibly, it was generating layers, complex and overlapping: every bid to escape her state of mourning becomes entangled with a fresh challenge and prompts a return to the cocoon of that inner voice.

For instance, against the wishes of her family, Najla takes a job, but quickly finds herself unhappy and questioning the worth of what she does. She wonders about her family and her place amid its cold bourgeois detachment when she realises that her bedroom contains more tokens of love affairs and friendships than anything which links her to her parents.

Then there is the evolution of her political awareness, a process which begins when she meets a writer and revolutionary called Ahmed. She starts to adopt his views on colonialism, poverty, and the corruption of the royal family, and then looks deeper, into the selfishness of her own social class and the responsibility it bears for the ills of the status quo. Here, Najla makes her most forceful break with the gravities of Hisham’s death, when she realises that her brother – a pampered, bourgeois university student – had been deeply self-centred and trivial:

Had I really loved him, or was I merely expected to, like everyone else in the family? How did such a simple, obvious truth pass me by? Only now do I see that I had never been more than Hisham’s lackey; what happiness I knew was only spillover from his greater store, and all the joys of home life were because of him and for his sake.

We are repeatedly taken beyond the tragedy of Hisham’s death, beyond remembrance and wrestling with loss, into a taxonomy of the different routes to freedom – employment, love, political consciousness – but each attempt carries within it the inevitability of her return to a cycle of depression and isolation. It is as though there is something wrong with Najla, a flaw she carries with her as she shuttles back and forth, in and out of life, and which poisons everything she tries.

The novel ends in a great confusion. In fact, it’s as though there are four distinct endings set alongside one another in the space of a few pages:

One: Ahmed, the revolutionary lover who encouraged her fledgling political consciousness, falls ill and goes abroad to begin treatment. Najla learns to make peace with the world and to live with herself, and, through the support she gives to Ahmed in his illness, she learns to give.

Two: Ahmed returns from his treatment abroad and their relationship peters out. Najla starts to enjoy her own company. She takes walks through the places where they used to meet and realises that a man should be a part of a woman’s life, not life itself. She applies to the College of Fine Arts – and buys a set of new curtains.

Three: Ahmed travels abroad for a second round of treatment, and dies. We are now faced with the possibility of a second wave of mourning, but Najla goes to university all the same: she wants to paint, for her life to have meaning.

Four: The final ending takes up less than a single page: a brief description of the 1952 revolution, presented as the happy ending our narrator deserves after her long and painful journey.

All these endings work as conclusions to Najla’s journey, but the first three are plausible extensions of her quest for identity, and for all that they involve Ahmed’s illness (and the end of her relationship with him and his death), they also offer closure, because Najla is permitted to create new possibilities for her future. The fourth is genuinely problematic, not just because the solution it provides comes from outside the narrative, and not because it is indistinguishable from the clichéd conclusions of many novels written in the aftermath of 1952, but because of its language. The language is a puzzle. It feels as though the author has begun her journey with the whisper of an inner voice, like someone peering through the window of her bedroom at the bleak emptiness of the streets outside, and that she has retained this voice throughout, for all that it is shaped and changed by experience and engagement with other people, only for it to suddenly vanish, its place taken by something sonorous and depersonalised.

For the last ten lines it is the masses that speak, and the book’s very last sentence is its worst:

The clank of the tank tracks shook the ground, and as I stood there, smiling, the new day began to dawn.

The lack of clarity is a curiosity too. Are these multiple endings intended as a satirical comment on the very idea of a conclusion, or had their young and inexperienced author, caught between these options, decided that she would leave it to her readers to resolve an ending for her?

It wasn’t what happened in the novel that made me fall in love with it. Even in 1993, callow as I was, I knew that a good novel is more than the sum of its incidents. Nor was I drawn to it because of its social or feminist ‘consciousness’, or the simple historical fact that it had been written by a young woman in the 1960s. As a matter of fact, at that time in my life, in conversation with friends and fellow writers I would frequently mock the idea of describing a novel as ‘conscious’ or praising a work of literature simply because it ‘reflected reality’ or championed a particular social class, or issue, or nation. And we reserved our profoundest mockery for any defence of ‘higher values’ in incompetent literature.

Back then, I was the same as all my friends. We read ‘high literature’ (defined by consensus), but we also read randomly, hunting out whatever appealed to us around the margins of this definition. My passions included CP Cavafy, Wadie Saadeh, Yehia Haqqi, Régis Debray, Samir Amin, Tzvetan Todorov, Eduardo Galeano, Milan Kundera, Louis Awad and more, and I would argue for my choices with a partisan’s fervour:

‘How can you even mention al-Aqqad alongside Taha Hussein?’

‘Critics need to read Abdelfattah Kilito.’

‘Sepúlveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories is better than One Hundred Years of Solitude.’

‘So the Ministry of Culture can invite Darwish and Adonis, but not Sargon Boulus?’

A young woman writer had to personally celebrate the books which ‘touched’ her, as though she needed to define herself by appending her discoveries to the canon.

I added Love and Silence to the great chain.

The language in Love and Silence is both fresh and refreshing. Sometimes cold, sometimes sentimental, it can feel uncanny, too, as though translated. Occasionally you sense the ponderous influence of contemporary romance novels, but elsewhere it is modern, strange, limpid and beyond categorisation. It is clearly a first work, but its tonal inconsistencies are held together by virtue of the author’s talent. In a single paragraph, the reader might encounter a wide sample of registers, the spectrum of the author’s language choices:

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.

As soon as I finished a first reading of Love and Silence, I turned back and began again. In my notebook, I copied out passages, small stand-alone texts like lights to illuminate my emotional state:

I am in exile from myself. Who can issue a pardon for my soul, so that it might return, might know the body as its own small true homeland? [… ] If I were able, I would erase myself and be reborn, somewhere else, some other time. Another time. Another time… Was I born at the wrong time, maybe?

Sometimes a piece of writing can shake your very being. This doesn’t mean it has to be unprecedented in the history of literature or the best thing you’ve ever read. It is fate, delivering a message to help you make sense of whatever you’re going through – and at the exact moment you most need it, whether you realise it or not. We are grateful, not only to ‘great’ literature, but to all writing which plays a significant role in how we understand ourselves in a particular moment. When we turn to contemplate our lives, it is these works that let us see.

Love and Silence is a novel about death. Not Hisham’s death, nor the death of her lover, Ahmed, but the quotidian death against which Najla goes to war within herself. Her life becomes unbearable, her every escape attempt falling back into routine and ennui, from taking the job she had hoped would be her gateway to the world, to the love and freedom that leaves her unmoored and at a loss. Najla is depressed, insomniac, alienated. She feels not only born out of time, but that she isn’t functioning as she should. There is a bedspread missing a final stitch, a canvas unfinished on the easel: she never finishes what she’s started. Ahmed helps Najla confront her paralysis. With teasing affection he dedicates his book to:

The reader who doesn’t read, the painter who doesn’t paint.

Najla has no idea how to live without keeping herself under observation. What is captivating about the novel is the author’s desire to document this internal journey and the language in which she does it. It is a personal journey, a quest for meaning, and the novel’s themes – employment, love, the politics of class and country and colonialism, and her naïve rejoicing over the 1952 revolution that we encounter in its final paragraph – are all thresholds which lie outside herself and which she must cross. The voice shows us more when it speaks out of the interior darkness.

My conviction that Enayat was Latifa al-Zayyat’s younger sister remained unchallenged. It even grew stronger: I began to imagine that I could see the influence of the elder sister on her sibling.

Latifa was born in 1923 and Enayat, though I didn’t know her date of birth, must have been around ten years younger. While Latifa was making her name as a leader of the Higher Committee of Students and Workers in 1946 – the senior members of her family fretting over her behaviour and her future – the teenage Enayat was torn between her love of Cairo’s members’ clubs, its singers and cinema, and her desire to become a daring political leader like her sister.

In 1952, Latifa married the playwright Rashad Rushdi. For more than a decade thereafter she stepped away from the struggle. But Enayat grew bolder and declared that she was a poet. Her poems weren’t much, just thoughts jotted down without any attention paid to technique and craft, but though Latifa wasn’t keen on them, Rushdi supported her. He even made the girl a present of his copy of Nizar Qabbani’s collection, You Are Mine. When Latifa’s The Open Door was published in 1960, followed three years later by the film, Enayat decided that she had something new to say about discontent and depression and death, and the only way she could ever say these things in a debut novel would be by doing what was expected of any self-respecting author: she must link her personal story to public concerns. It would be decades before any talented woman author in Egypt was able tell her story without reflexively asserting an equivalence with wider societal issues, because The Open Door was so dominant a model.

A convincing story. But in her memoirs, The Search: Personal Papers (1992), though Latifa talks a lot about her two brothers and the men in her life, she only mentions, very fleetingly, a single sister called Safiya. So Enayat had to be reassigned: a younger cousin.

In December 1997, I submitted my MA thesis on Adonis, and the novelist Radwa Ashour asked me to provide her with the Sufi sources I’d used in my research. I brought a box of books over to Radwa’s house and drank tea with her and her husband, the poet Mourid al-Barghouti, and as we sat, I unpacked the books. Nearly all were old and yellowed, with the green cover of al-Nabhani’s Collected Miracles shining brightly among them. I asked her if she’d heard of a novelist by the name of Enayat al-Zayyat, and was she a relative of Latifa’s? And Radwa said that, unless I knew better, she didn’t believe they were related at all. She added that she had heard Enayat’s father was from the al-Zayyat family in Mansoura and that her mother had possibly been German.

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The introduction to Love and Silence