‘Yours, Anonymous’: Letters from Cairo

Yours, Anonymous

In Conversation with Mai Serhan

By Fatima El-Kalay

There is nothing like a coffee date with a poet friend­­­­ — especially when the drink is steeped in verse and the conversation textures both the beautiful and grotesque.

I met with the wonderful Mai Serhan to talk about her new collection, CAIRO: the undelivered letters. I’d read the original chapbook when it first came out, and it left me reeling, trying to hold the squirming delight and horror of a city that is, for better or worse, our beloved monstrosity. But now the beast has grown into a full-length collection, which is due for release by Diwan Publishing this May. I had just finished devouring it, and there was a lot to unpack.

Fatima ElKalay: Mai, this is such an incredible collection. It both honors and rebels against its inspiration—Bareed el Gom‘a (the Friday Mail), an advice column that ran for thirty years in Al-Ahram newspaper. You’ve taken that source and flipped it into something entirely your own: a city that devours its people, leaving them hungry and pleading to an absent Editor-in-Chief. Can you tell me more about how that transformation happened?

Mai Serhan: The idea for CAIRO: the undelivered letters came to me in increments, over several years. I first heard of Bareed el Gom‘a or the Friday Mail through our mutual friend, Rania El Badry, during a creative writing residency we both attended in 2018. She told me at the time that the Friday Mail was a treasure trove of Cairene stories, should I ever go looking for one. I clocked in the information, but didn’t do anything with it for a couple of years.

Then I read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong—a letter addressed to an illiterate mother who will never read it. The idea of writing to someone whom you know will never receive your words intrigued me, and got me thinking of authorial intention. Who was Vuong actually addressing when he framed his novel as a letter which will never be read? Who is his intended audience? Could it be someone outside the text—the meta-reader?

I started digging into the epistolary form to find out more about it. Letters tend to speak of unsurvivable conditions yet travel far. They’re often secrets, told in confidence, carried in stealth, but are also discoverable in trunks, published in newspapers, and run the risk of falling in the wrong hands. Letter-writers will speak with conviction about truth and yet present one version of it: their own. All this was terribly exciting to me, and I quickly began to see potential in a poetry collection about Cairo, where I would experiment with danger, divulgences, and different perspectives.

I found out that the Friday Mail had been compiled in a series books. I went to a second-hand bookstore and found volumes upon volumes. I read through a few. The letters were OK— there was material to work with there, but what I instantly developed a dislike for was the Editor-in-Chief’s advice. I found it moralizing: how to be a good wife, a good Muslim, etc. So, I thought, why not turn the Editor-in-Chief into an absent figure, dispose of his clichéd advice altogether? And why not invent new letters, ones about the people I see around Cairo, whom no one talks about? And what if those new letters don’t make the cut, don’t get selected for publication, because they’re off-limits, too dark, deprived, too underground?

FK: And that’s where it all began—the stories no one wants to hear, that never made it to print.

MS: Yes, once I gave myself license to go beyond the published letters, a new space opened up; one that I could not only see, but invent. I wanted it to be surreal, grimy, magical, and spectacular all at once. A grotesqueness that makes you look, but then look away.

FK: Speaking of looking away, it’s fascinating how you employ mirrors in the collection. There’s that stunning line: “Language is a dirty mirror that reflects the city back at you.” You can’t escape how murky and distorted this image is. Then you flip that line: “You, at the back. Your dirty language reflects in a city mirror.” It’s like a false reality. In your work, how do you feel language operates — what does it reveal and what does it obscure?

MS: What language is capable of is endlessly fascinating to me. It can turn what’s ugly into an aesthetic, shimmer on a dusty surface., or dive inward while standing in the material world. It can exist in that liminal space between what’s said and what’s held back. It can suggest — and resonate with other meanings.

I saw this resonance as a chorus, many pleas trapped in envelopes. And there’s power in numbers. Together, those voices become something grand, something hard to ignore. Together, they can be released — or delivered, so to speak.

FK: There’s also that moment in the collection when someone says, “The cracked mirror has failed to re-create me.” It’s not just distortion — it’s malfunction. It’s a failure to reconstruct the self out of broken pieces. Then there’s the nod to the black mirror…

MS: The mirror is an object to be seen in, but none of these characters are truly seen, so there’s always tension. Some hang their hopes on the mirror, and some have already reached desperation, a breaking point. They beg it to yield, to lie even, and reflect what they want to see — better versions of themselves; but the mirror is truth. And the truth is, the city has damaged everyone. Whether the mirror itself is broken or the people looking into it are, is a subjective matter — it depends on perception

FK: So when Grisly smashes a mirror in a poem—is that an act of defiance, or is it despair?

MS: I’d say it’s an act of rupture, of protest. It’s a cut your nose to spite your face kind of moment. I can’t make you see me, so I might as well make a bloody spectacle out of it. There, do I get your attention now? That kind of thing.

FK: But one character does try to clean the mirror: the maid. She’s the only one who dusts it, tries to “reorder her reflection.” She reinvents herself.

MS: Yeah, the maid wants to transform into her Madame, right? Again here, it’s all bound to belief. To the maid, the mirror is a vanity object. She stands in front of it, by her Madame’s dresser, surrounded by fancy furnishings, clothes and perfumes. The mirror places her amongst these fantasy articles where she is able to put on another role and dream her way up in life.

FK: My Madame was quite a light and cheeky poem, and that’s the thing ­— despite all the suffering and hardship, there’s a sense of humor that comes through so clearly in the poems — this dark, biting humor.

MS: The most fun part about writing the letters was that I got to impersonate all these Cairene characters and inhabit their experiences. Having lived in Cairo as long as I have, so much of what I observe, its sights and sounds, have become ingrained in me. Egyptians have a great sense of humor, they’re hilarious. It’s what makes the pill easier to swallow, what keeps them afloat.

But also, I suppose on a certain level, I was aware that I can’t trap the reader in a dark and oppressive atmosphere for too long. I had to catch and release it. You want them to laugh and cry, trigger both awe and terror, go through all the range of emotions.

FK: The weight of all those emotions must certainly register in the body, and sure enough the body is everywhere in the collection, taking all the weight. Hunger. Pregnancy. Amputation. The body itself feels like a burden, constantly under strain. Take the mother with too many children — her identity reduced to function. Were these conscious choices?

MS: It’s never really 100% a conscious choice — you enter a world and eventually find your footing in it. I know I had guideposts: the motherland as body, as an eternally pregnant woman — outstretched, malnourished, exploited. She abandons out of necessity; she has too many hungry children and not enough to go around. The body is the site on which the city’s troubles play out.

FK: And yet, despite their abandonment and namelessness, the characters — the children of this city — are never erased. They’re all visible; Grisly, the girl in the tight red dress, the beggar, “all eyes and no face,” the man who says, “and in this dust on my mirror/I wipe my index finger and all/ I see is a silver of me, clearly.”

MS: Well, that man—he’s only visible in part, right? He’s a sliver of a person. The rest of him is dust. That’s what I mean when I say language can turn the ugly into an aesthetic, shimmer on a dusty surface, be one thing and its opposite. When language does this, it makes the invisible, visible.

The way I see it, the woman in the red dress — she’s wearing her flesh like a slutty number. She’s been stripped naked, has surrendered to full exposure, because she has no choice.

FK: Another thing I noticed is that there are recurring doves and birds circling above Cairo throughout the collection. Some collide with the city and meet their deaths, while some continue to circle around the minarets, especially at sunrise and sunset. So, is that what keeps them going — hope? Faith, perhaps?

MS: Doves have been messengers for centuries. I found framed maps of their centuries-old flight paths in The Postal Museum of Egypt in al-Ataba Square. They flew as far as Palestine in the old days, carrying letters on their wings, so breeding them is one of the oldest recreations in the Middle East.

Nowadays, under repressive living conditions, doves are flown as a way to escape daily burdens. People here take pride in the sport; to breed doves has become a kind of alternative system of capital, power and freedom. For those whom the city has abandoned, doves are a good return on investment; you fly them out and they come back. So, I suppose it’s also about loyalty. They only die when they collide against the megalith, a man-made thing. In the case of Mina, the garbage collector from Manshiyyet Nasser, he’s a dove fancier whose bird crashes “against a god of bricks;” that’s why his letter never gets delivered.

But, as you said, there are other birds that fly over minarets, and yes, I suppose those yearn for something higher: hope, faith. And sunsets and sunrises mark endings and beginnings, nature’s delicacy and constancy against the harshness and uncertainty of the city.

FK: That’s beautiful. There’s something deeply tender in that.

On another note, I’ve been thinking about how garments function as identity markers in the collection.  We’ve already touched on the woman in the red dress, and the maid who tries to uncrack her heels by wearing her Madame’s slippers. There are also the boys from Torah or Helwan in counterfeit Ray-Bans and skinny jeans; but nowhere is this tension more palpable than in “Mosski Bride.”

MS: Indeed! What I found quite bizarre about Mosski is that the sellers are all men and the buyers are women. Kinky lingerie is everywhere, alongside beauty products, sewing kits, cutlery, and other domestic odds and ends. It’s like a male fantasy space, pre-packaged as wedded bliss, and women just flock. The funny thing is, the salesmen had long beards and the Quran was blasting all around, even though their shops were stacked floor to ceiling with kink. I remember getting a pounding headache within the hour and making a quick exit.

FK: I remember seeing one dressed in a school uniform, right next to another in provocative underwear. It was like saying: if education doesn’t work out, here’s your other option.

MS:  Funny, sad, true.

FK: It’s the kind of world women are handed, isn’t it? Which brings me to Black Menagerie. She’s no longer a bride — she’s been reduced to a possession. “I did not marry a man, I married his musk in another room.” Her wedding was a Zar — a ritual meant to silence her. And then there’s that line: “I trust me. I trust me not;” like a reversal of “He loves me, he loves me not” — except that it’s directed towards herself. A woman plucking herself apart.

MS: That’s the heartbreak, no? When self-doubt becomes ritual. You kind of fade over time. She’s so unmoored, she no longer knows who she is, or her way back.

FK: I wanted to talk about Dear Cairene. Something shifts here—the voice of the city steps in. But instead of stepping in with help or healing, it points fingers. It lays the blame on Cairenes.

MS: Yeah, the city kind of talks back here. And it doesn’t offer compassion — because does it ever? It says: look what you have done to yourselves, look what you’ve done to me.

That’s something a letter can do—write from its own perspective. It can pretend to be objective when in fact, it’s entirely subjective. That shift in voice fascinated me—how it could turn the letters on their heads, create tension, reversals, drama.

FK: Which brings us to the ending—how you round off the collection. I kept asking myself — does the ending land? It absolutely works, but it also feels more like a collapse. It’s like you set fire to the whole collection with Yours, Anonymous.  

MS: Ah, Yours, Anonymous… is a letter within a letter within a letter. In that sense, it’s the most dangerous—most confidential.  What the son writes is unspeakable.

“Is he thinking what I think he’s thinking? the mother asks. She doesn’t even give it a name. She’d rather believe that her son is feverish, hallucinating, than entertain the contents of his letter. The son on the other hand, addresses no one in his letter, signs off to no one, doesn’t even send the letter. He’s a passive observer, a detached voice — which to me contrasts with another voice, the Editor-in-Chief’s. Both are watching. Neither has control.

I must say, though, I wrote this last one in the shadow of Gaza. I was writing a collection about Cairo when Gaza was happening, and I couldn’t not reference it. Same goes for Beast of Burden — “are we all the same city?” it asks.

The way I see it, the issues that run through CAIRO: the undelivered letters are Cairo-specific, but they’re also tied to larger systems of power and oppression. We’re all sort of left to fall through the cracks.

FK:  So let me ask the question I think every reader is holding onto: Who, in your mind, is the Editor-in-Chief?”

MS: The Editor-in-Chief? He’s an impotent higher power. He’s supposed to represent a higher authority of truth, hope, justice, but by not selecting these letters for publication, he fails at his role. He literally doesn’t deliver.

FK: And do you think you could’ve added more to this collection?

MS: I don’t think I would run out of Cairo letters if I tried. We’re more than a 100 million people, and Masr is Umm el Donya, the original motherland.

FK: That’s just it. More than a 100 million voices, so many remain unheard.  And even with that last apocalyptic poem, you, the author, still find it in you to write letters. Perhaps by releasing CAIRO: the undelivered letters into the world, we can assume the letters have been delivered?

MS: That’s a good way to put it. I’d like to believe that by publishing these poems, the letters have finally been delivered.

CAIRO: the undelivered letters is available from Diwan Publishing, Ingram’s print-on-demand services, and Amazon.

Find your copy now across all Diwan bookstores.

Mai Serhan is a writer, editor and translator.Her poetry collection CAIRO: the undelivered letters was the recipient of the 2022 Center for Book Arts Poetry Award, the FH Pasby Prize from the University of Oxford, and shortlisted for the 2022 Quarterly West Poetry Award. She is the author of I Can Imagine It For Us: a Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir, a finalist for the 2022 Narratively Memoir Prize and forthcoming with AUC Press in October 2025 (pre-order here). Visit www.maiserhan.com for more on her work.

Fatima El-Kalay holds an M.Litt in Creative Writing from Central Queensland University and is a writer, translator, and editor whose fiction has been shortlisted for the London Independent Story Prize and the ArabLit Story Prize. A dedicated translator of Arabic literature, she is currently translating Akhilat al-Dhil (Shadow Spectres) by Mansoura Ez-Eldin, with the opening chapter published in The Markaz Review. Her work spans poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, including Basel’s First Trip (Rowayat Gemeza) and the collaborative short story–memoir hybrid collection Dessert for Three. As managing editor of Rowayat, she champions diverse voices and cross-cultural storytelling.