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A poet searches for answers about the short life of a writer in 'Traces of Enayat'
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, Mersal was establishing herself as a reader and writer, and felt the need to “personally celebrate the books which ‘touched’ her, as though she needed to define herself by appending her discoveries to the canon.”
Decades later, she remains engaged in that project, at least where Enayat is concerned. Now an established poet living in Canada, Mersal set out to learn as much as she could about Enayat’s life and death — enough, ideally, to write the other woman’s life story. Although she did not uncover nearly enough to achieve that goal, she still presents the resulting book, Traces of Enayat, as a biography of sorts. It isn’t. Traces of Enayat is a memoir of Mersal’s search, a slow, idiosyncratic journey through a layered, changing Cairo and through Mersal’s mind.
Mersal is a cool, restrained writer. Her prose, in Robin Moger’s translation, slips by easily, so that her moments of flaring emotion stand out. In contrast, the excerpts of Love and Silence she includes are hot with description and feeling. In one, Enayat describes feeling “at once imprisoned by this life and pulled toward new horizons. I wanted to pull this self clear, gummy with the sap of its surroundings; to tear free into a wider world.” It seems evident that Mersal chose this passage for its echo of Enayat’s story. Certainly it evokes one of Traces of Enayat‘s central questions: “Was it [Enayat’s] decision to end her life that drew me to her,” Mersal writes, “or the thought of her unrealized potential” — the wider literary world Enayat never reached? More vexing still is the question not of what draws Mersal to Enayat, but why Enayat’s hold over her is so powerful. At the end of the memoir, it’s still not clear.
Of course, Traces of Enayat is not designed to satisfy. It’s there in the title: we’re only going to get glimpses and fragments of its subject — or, really, its subjects. Mersal hides herself behind her search for Enayat; Enayat herself hides in the past. Her best friend, the actress Nadia Lutfi, remembers her vividly, but was too busy working to be fully present for some of Enayat’s bitterest disappointments; Enayat’s surviving relatives, meanwhile, recall her painful divorce and the rejection of her book by the publisher she’d hoped would release it, but they never had the emotional access to her that Nadia did.
Even Enayat’s tomb is hidden. She turns out to be buried in a side wing of a family member’s mausoleum and, after much investigating, Mersal manages to visit. This is the book’s emotional high point. Mersal weeps, not out of grief but because “standing there in front of her headstone was the high point of our relationship… the tomb was the only place where she actually was. For her life, I had to return to the archive, to the memories of the living, and my own imagination, but I felt now that at last she trusted me, that she had allowed me to reach her.” For the first time here, Mersal allows her interest in Enayat to transform on the page into a nearly mystical connection before moving swiftly away from the tomb and the scene. For the reader, this is an answer of sorts: Mersal’s link to Enayat goes in some way beyond the explicable. We can’t experience it for ourselves.
What we can experience is Mersal’s investigation of Egypt after the Nasserist revolution of 1952, the context for Enayat’s book and its disappearance. Enayat’s work and life do not fit neatly into the prevailing narrative that “Arab women writers [of the period] were primarily concerned with nationalism, that there could be no liberation for women without the liberation of the nation.” Love and Silence is about grief and romance; its author, meanwhile, had to battle sexist Nasserist divorce laws to free herself from her husband and couldn’t get the court to give her full custody of her son.
Mersal pieces this story together slowly, speculating about the role of Enayat’s divorce and one subsequent romantic relationship in the end of her life. She does archival work and visits the places still left from Enayat’s Cairo, superimposing the post-revolutionary city Enayat lived in — full of new hopes and colonial legacies — on the contemporary one she describes. These moments are, like the book’s other strands, fragments and flickers. Mersal passes over geography the way her prose tends to pass over emotion, never lingering in one place long enough to describe it in depth.
Mersal is a poet and this is, fundamentally, a poet’s strategy. A poem is, more often than not, a peek through a cracked window, a fleeting experience rather than a drawn-out one. But Traces of Enayat is a full book, and the degree to which it feels swift and partial is at once a literary achievement and a frustration. In its last passage, Mersal writes that Enayat “wants to remain free and weightless.” Maybe so. But by letting Enayat have what she wants, Mersal denies the reader a deeper experience of her own obsession.
Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her first novel, Short War, was published in April 2024.
Delroy Lindo is nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role in Sinners.
Rebecca Cabage/Invision/AP
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Rebecca Cabage/Invision/AP
Over the course of his decades-long career on stage and in Hollywood, Sinners actor Delroy Lindo has experienced firsthand what he calls the “disappointments, the vicissitudes of the industry.”
On Feb. 22, at the BAFTA awards in London, Lindo and Sinners co-star Michael B. Jordan were the first presenters of the evening when a man with Tourette syndrome shouted a racial slur.
Initially, Lindo says, he questioned if he had heard correctly. Then, he says, he adjusted his glasses and read the teleprompter: “I processed in the way that I process, in a nanosecond. Mike did similarly, and we went on and did our jobs.”
Lindo describes the BAFTA incident as “something that started out negatively becoming a positive.” A week after the BAFTAs, he appeared with Sinners director Ryan Coogler at the NAACP awards.
“The fact that I could stand there in a room predominantly of our people … and feel safe, feel loved, feel supported,” he says. “I just wanted to officially, formally say thank you to our people and to all of the people who have supported us as a result of that event, that incident.”
Sinners is a haunting vampire thriller about twins (both played by Jordan) who open a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. The film has been nominated for a record 16 Academy Awards, including best actor for Jordan and best supporting actor for Lindo, who plays a blues musician named Delta Slim.
This is Lindo’s first Oscar nomination; five years ago, many felt his performance in the Spike Lee film Da 5 Bloods deserved recognition from the Academy. When that didn’t happen, Lindo admits he was disappointed, but he had no choice but to move on.
“I have never taken my marbles and gone home,” he says. “And I want to claim that I will not do that now. I will continue working.”
Interview highlights
On his preparation to play Delta Slim
Various people have mentioned … [that] my presence reminds them of an uncle or their grandfather, somebody that they knew from their families, and that is a huge compliment, but more importantly than being a compliment, it’s an affirmation for the work. My preparation for this started with Ryan sending me two books, Blues People, by Amiri Baraka — who was [known as] LeRoi Jones when he wrote the book — and Deep Blues, by Robert Palmer.
Lindo, shown above in his role as Delta Slim, says director Ryan Coogler “created a sacred space for all of us” on the Sinners set.
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In reading those books and then referencing those books, continuing to reference those throughout production, I was given an entrée into the worlds, the lifestyles of these musicians. There’s a certain kind of itinerant quality that they moved around a lot. The constant for them is their music, so that there is this deep-seated connection to the music.
On being Oscar-nominated for the first time — and thinking about other Black actors, including Halle Berry and Lou Gossett Jr., who had trouble getting work after their wins
I will not view it as a curse, because I am claiming the victory in this process, no matter what happens. … In terms of this moment, I absolutely am claiming, as much as I can, the joy of this moment. I’m not saying I don’t have trepidation, I do. It’s the reason I was not listening to the broadcast this year when the nominations were announced. I did not want to set myself up. But I’m … attempting as much as I can to fortify myself and know in my heart that I will continue working as an actor. I absolutely will.
On being “othered” as a child because of his race
Because my mom was studying to be a nurse they would not allow her to have an infant child with her on campus, so as a result of that, I was sent to live with a white family in a white working class area of London. … I was loved, I was cared for, but as a result of living with this family in this all-white neighborhood, I went to an all-white elementary or primary school. And I was literally the only Black child in an all-white school.
So one afternoon, after school had ended, I was playing with one of my playmates … And at a certain point in our game, a car pulls up, and this kid that I was playing with goes over to the car and has a very short conversation with whomever was in the car, which I now know was his parent, his father. He comes back and he … says, “I can’t play with you.” And that was the end of the game.
On the experience of writing his forthcoming memoir
It’s been healing, actually. I’m not denying that it has opened me up. I’ve been compelled to scrutinize myself. I’m using that word very advisedly, “scrutinized.” It’s a scrutiny, it’s an examination of oneself. But in my case, because a very, very, very significant part of what I’m writing has to do with re-examining my relationship with my mom. And so my mom is a protagonist in my memoir. I’m told by my editor and by my publisher that one of the attractions to what I’m writing is that it is not a classic “celebrity memoir.” I am examining history. I’m examining culture. I’m looking at certain passages of history through the lens of the “Windrush” experience [of Caribbean immigrants who came to the UK after World War II].
On getting a masters degree to help him write his mother’s story
My mom deserved it. My mom is deserving. And not only is my mom deserving, by extension, all the people of the Windrush generation are deserving. Stories about Windrush are not part of the global cultural lexicon commensurate with its impact. The people of Windrush changed the definition of what it means to be British. There are all these Black and brown people, theretofore members of what used to be called the British Commonwealth. And they were invited by the British government to come to England, the United Kingdom, to help rebuild the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the destruction of World War II. My mom was part of that movement. They helped rebuild construction, construction industry, transportation industry, critically, the health industry, the NHS, the National Health Service. My mom is a nurse.
The reason that I went into NYU was because my original intention was to write a screenplay about my mom. I wanted to write a screenplay about my mom because I looked around and I thought: Where are the feature films that have as protagonist a Caribbean female, a Black female, where are they? … I wanted to address that, I wanted to correct that, what I see as being an imbalance.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Britney Spears
Open to Treatment Plan After DUI Arrest, Source Says
Published
Britney Spears‘ team is hoping the judge mandates treatment for the pop star over jail time following her Wednesday DUI arrest … and Britney isn’t fighting them on that, TMZ has learned.
Sources familiar with the situation tell TMZ … Britney is willing to comply with a treatment and support plan.
We’re told her team is in the early stages of developing a plan and they’re exploring multiple options, including mental health services, detox, and dual-diagnosis programs.
It’s unclear whether she would do inpatient or outpatient treatment, and it’s also unclear whether she would enter treatment before her May 4 court date.
Broadcastify.com
We broke the story … Britney was pulled over by California Highway Patrol officers around 9:30 PM Wednesday in Westlake Village, CA, not far from her home. She was later taken to a hospital — not for any injuries, because we’re told she didn’t sustain any — but to draw her blood to determine her blood alcohol content.
According to CHP, she was arrested for “driving under the influence of a combination of drugs and alcohol.”
Sources familiar with the investigation told us an unknown substance was found in Britney’s car, which was sent to be tested.
Britney’s manager, Cade Hudson, previously told TMZ … “This was an unfortunate and inexcusable incident. Britney will take the right steps, comply with the law, and we hope this marks the start of long-overdue change in her life. She needs help and support during this difficult time. Her boys will be spending time with her, and her loved ones are putting a plan in place to set her up for success and well-being.”
Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack in Sinners.
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Ryan Coogler’s supernatural horror stars Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers who open a 1930s juke joint in Mississippi. Opening night does not go as planned when vampires appear outside. “In a straightforward metaphor for all the ways Black culture has been co-opted by whiteness, the raucous pleasures and sonic beauty of the juke joint attract the interest of a trio of demons … they wish to literally leech off of the talents and energy of Black folks,” writes critic Aisha Harris. The film made history with a record 16 Academy Award nominations.
We asked our NPR audience: What movie would you recommend to someone who loved Sinners? Here’s what you told us:
Near Dark (1987)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow; starring Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen
If you want another cool vampire movie with Western kind of vibes, check out Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark — super underseen and kind of hard to find, but really gritty and sexy and another very different take on what you might think is a genre that had been wrung dry. – Maggie Grossman, Chicago, Ill.
30 Days of Night (2007)
Directed by David Slade; starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston
It follows a group of people in a small Alaskan town as they struggle to survive an invasion of vampires who have taken advantage of the month-long absence of the sun. Both this and Sinners revolve around a vampire takeover and the people’s fight to outlast the “night.” – Nathan Strzelewicz, DeWitt, Mich.
The Wailing (2016)
Directed by Na Hong-jin; starring Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee, Jun Kunimura
In this South Korean supernatural horror film, a mysterious illness causes people in a quiet rural village to become violent and murderous. A local police officer investigates while trying to save his daughter, who begins showing the same disturbing symptoms. The film blends folk horror, religion, and psychological dread, exploring themes of faith, evil, and moral weakness. Like Sinners, it centers on a supernatural force corrupting a close-knit community, builds slow-burning tension, and examines spiritual conflict and human frailty. – Amy Merke, Bronx, N.Y.
Fréwaka (2024)
Directed by Aislinn Clarke; starring Bríd Ní Neachtain, Clare Monnelly, Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya
In this Irish folk horror film, a home care worker, Shoo, is assigned to stay with an elderly woman who’s convinced she’s under siege by malevolent fairies. Like Sinners, Fréwaka blends folk traditions and social commentary with horror. The social failures Shoo copes with (untreated mental health issues, religious abuse) are just as frightening as the supernatural forces. – Kerrin Smith, Baltimore, Md.
And a bonus pick from our critic:
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
Directed by George C. Wolfe; starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glynn Turman
This is an adaptation of August Wilson’s play about a legendary blues singer (Viola Davis) muscling through a recording session with white producers who want to control her music. Chadwick Boseman’s blistering in his final role. – Bob Mondello, NPR movie critic
Carly Rubin and Ivy Buck contributed to this project. It was edited by Clare Lombardo.
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