Motherhood and Its Ghosts - (Undelivered Lectures) by Iman Mersal (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Continuing her investigation into the archive, Iman Mersal sifts through representations of one of history's most elusive figures--the hidden mother.

No one excluded my mother from our joint portrait. It is before me now and I can see for myself that I was with her, but she is a ghost. The picture is a burden: an assault on, and fabrication of, what I remember. It doesn't make my mother present; it sharpens my desire to resist, to transcend her ghostliness, to rescue what the picture hides.

Iman Mersal has only one photograph of her mother, who died giving birth at age twenty-seven. But the woman portrayed in it strikes her as very unlike the one in her fleeting childhood memories, in mood, expression, dress. When Mersal has a child of her own decades later, she begins to wonder whether it's possible to depict a mother with any degree of fidelity. How to represent--in photography, dream, memory, or writing--an individual whose complex inner landscape has suddenly come under threat of looming archetypes? What is hidden in traditional representations of motherhood? What lies outside the narrative in which motherhood "means giving, the melding of two distinct selves, a love unlimited and unconditional"?

Sifting through the archives of motherhood, including journal entries, photographs, and the writings that have informed her own poetic practice, Mersal privileges questions over answers, drifting over arriving, allowing a form of motherhood to exist in these pages unbounded.

Review Quotes

Praise for Motherhood and Its Ghosts:

"Gracefully written...[Mersal] creates unexpected meaning from interwoven timelines."--Kirkus Reviews

"A searching, intimate, and captivating volume that deserves a place among the best writing and thinking about motherhood."--Book Riot

Praise for Traces of Enayat:

"A subtle and universal exploration of identity."--Aida Alami, The New York Times

"Literary obsession and detective work merge in this biography of Enayat al-Zayyat...whose remnants [Mersal] embroiders with photographs, speculation, and personal reflections, leaving behind a seductive mystery."--The New Yorker

"This is what Mersal does: she exposes herself in a way that leads you to bare something of yourself in turn; you look up from the page and lock eyes with your life."--Ursula Lindsey, The Point

"The prose shines and the central literary mystery will keep readers turning pages. This beguiling volume captivates." --Publishers Weekly

"A resonant literary biography by way of fractured, obsessive sleuthing." --Kirkus Reviews

"Thorough and empathetic . . .Traces of Enayat frees its subject from the rote interpretation of her life through the lens of her suicide, placing her in conversation with other women who felt similarly trapped and dreamed of new horizons."--Edmée Lepercq, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A haunting biography that rescues a compelling legacy from a fragmented story of loss."--Foreword Reviews

"A slow, idiosyncratic journey through a layered, changing Cairo and through Mersal's mind."--Lily Meyer, NPR

"A consuming read, layered and complex as the best hybrid memoirs are, with a sadness at its heart I wasn't prepared for...Like with any life that ends much too soon, Mersal lets us look back on Enayat with a mix of hope and loss: understanding that this was perhaps what her life was meant to be, yet still imagining how much different it could have been."--Kevin Dean, The Common

"Traces of Enayat [is] a creative nonfiction text that defies categorization, in which [Mersal] continues her investigation of the untold histories of women's mental health at the intersection of middle-class morality and cultural canon-making. The archive, its gendered composition, and its silences, are for Mersal a constant point of departure and return." --Vina A. Ramadan, BOMB

Praise for Iman Mersal:

"The first new poems I've liked for years . . .Unpredictable, savage, chaotic. There is something of Zbigniew Herbert in them, clever, abstract, musing stuff, but they are this year's model, an 'upgrade, ' as we would say, with terrifying bleakness in place of his periodic geniality." --Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement

"Mersal doesn't offer herself as a representative of her country, culture, or religion, and her feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love. Her voice is so inviting, so familiar, so confiding that it's even easy to forget that these are translations: Creswell renders her as a perfect contemporary . . . To read The Threshold is to be heartened by poem after poem that exhibits the whole woman--heart and mind, candor and cunning." --Ange Mlinko, The New York Review of Books

"[Mersal's poetry] is bracing, clever, and terse, but slippery too. The self is not her subject so much as an impediment that she writes around; there's deceit, disloyalty, duplicity, misdirection . . . There is an almost joyful sense of privacy in Mersal's poems: She obscures as much as she discloses." --Amir-Hussein Radjy, The Nation

"This selection, drawn from [Mersal's] first four books and nimbly translated from the Arabic, showcases the sweet, tough verve of her voice." --The New York Times Book Review

"Mersal's poems are many things--sensuous, cerebral, intimate, angry and disorientating. They provide food for thought and elicit laughter in the dark . . . [The Threshold is] a perfect entry point for readers new to her work." --Malcolm Forbes, The National

"Ravishing . . . Mersal's poems read like short stories; they are spare but resonant, full of charming misfits, and governed by chance." --Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, 4Columns

"Traces of Enayat asks what it means to write a biography as opposed to following the traces of a person's existence."--Rebecca Hussey, Full Stop

About the Author

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian writer, translator, and literary scholar. A professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta, she is the author of five books of Arabic poetry. In English translation, her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, The Paris Review, and The Nation, among others. The Threshold, translated by Robyn Creswell and published in 2022, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the 2023 National Translation Award. Mersal received the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature for her creative nonfiction book Traces of Enayat, published by Transit Books in 2024.

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic living in Barcelona. He has translated poetry and prose, including Haytham El Wardany's The Book of Sleep (Seagull) and Slipping by Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press).