Tracing a Line, from Arwa to Enayat

From Arwa Saleh to Enayat al-Zayat:

A Society that Reproduces its Women’s Disappointments

By Moaaz Muhammad

Translated by Osama Hammad

Browsing the histories of those who died by suicide is one of my favorite hobbies. It’s like visiting dark places linked to death and crises. I don’t read about them to find an answer to the complicated question of suicide. I do it to look at those who committed it, attempting to get closer to their worlds, and, in so doing, I have seen vastly different identities. They aren’t one undistinguished mass, and I felt their uniqueness in the ways they directed the final scenes in their lives.

The way some people take their own lives provides us with a glimpse of their journeys and their lives in the societies within whose walls they attempted to find their place. Their deaths are the last messages of their will to the outside world. In Cairo, where they lived and engaged with its public sphere, those who have died by suicide gain an added allure. There is a line connecting us: They spoke colloquial Arabic, strolled along the Nile, lived on streets I’m familiar with, and maybe we even set foot on the same points. The most significant thing is that I had my experiences in the same public spheres, under the same rules that directed their experiences. We all belong to a society that perpetually reproduces its crises.

Arwa Saleh and Enayat al-Zayat lived in transitional periods of Egypt’s history. Enayat was born in 1936 and committed suicide in 1963, while Arwa was born in 1951 and committed suicide in 1997. Enayat’s youth coincided with the fall of the monarchy and the early years of the new republic, while Arwa’s political awareness bloomed with Egypt’s 1967 defeat by Israel, the wars of the 1970s, and the aggressive social changes that followed, with a generation of leftist students “once enchanted by a dream” before facing tragic fates.

Both led different lives and were dissimilar in class traditions. Enayat hid from society, deciding only to engage with it from behind the curtains of literature. Arwa was bolder and engaged life with assertive passion. Arwa was a communist involved in political organizing. She wrote, translated, and protested. When Arwa’s world turned upside down and her comrades let her down, she cursed them with fierce criticism, which later became a historical reference for understanding the students’ generation. There can be no mention of the 1970s without reference to Arwa and her famous book, The Stillborn (al-Mubtasarun). The two young women walked different paths to self-actualization and left different traces: ideology vs. literature; a loud voice vs. whispers; theoretical dissection vs. literary symbolism; sleeping pills vs. falling off the 10th floor… Yet, their paths led to the same shore, the short of voluntary death, in the same city, Cairo.

Finding Enayat

In her book Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal searches for a literary writer who committed suicide at the age of twenty-five after writing one novel, Love and Silence, which was published after her departure. Iman doesn’t trace footprints in the sand but rather the ontological traces of a reclusive writer who doesn’t exist in the Egyptian cultural archive nor in her generation’s memory. This absence provoked Iman to embark on a journey that ended with this book.

Enayat belonged to a generation that Nadia Lotfy, the actress and her close friend, described as “the generation of transition” from monarchy to the republic. In this generation, women were able to work in cinema, writing, and theater inside cultural projects supported by the state. In the world of the young July 1952 Republic, which promised to fulfill dreams and wishes, Enayat sought to achieve her literary realization. However, she embarked on this journey alone during an era of blocs, parties, and communities, and she didn’t conform to the “code” the July State prescribed for its writers. Lacking any affiliation to either the state or its opposition’s projects, when Dar al-Qaumia rejected her sole novel, she found herself on the margins of the public sphere with no voice of her own.

Mersal challenges the laconic narrative that rejection is what led to Enayat’s suicide. She disambiguates the other tragic events in Enayat’s life—her failed marriage, her depression, and her long journey of trying to treat it. Mersal points out that Enayat’s literary project could have been a way to escape that closed circle or at least a form of help. The publisher promised Enayat a response to the draft she submitted within two weeks. But those two weeks turned into two years, and when the publisher finally responded, it was to reject her novel. Two days later, they called again to apologize for an administrative mistake, saying that they had not meant to reject the novel. Tragically, it was too late. Enayat had swallowed an entire strip of veronal sleeping pills. She died on January 5, 1963, in her apartment in Dokki.

Aida… Safa Ismail… Arwa Saleh

My political awareness was being developed with the January 2011 uprising despite the fact that I was living eighty-five kilometers away from Cairo. Yet the lava that erupted from the volcanic square reached my house, dragging me like an enchanted person to the capital to explore that strange world. That enchantment led to the next natural step: ideology. My ideologization process led me to join a small leftist group that embodied my convictions during that period. We didn’t see our small number as a disadvantage. On the contrary, we believed ourselves to be the chosen coterie. I first heard about Arwa Saleh during this period. I knew her by three names: Aida, her codename; Safa Ismail, the name with which she signed her political writings; and Arwa Saleh, the name she carried from her birth and the one to which she returned. At the time, I didn’t care much about her—who cares about the prophets of defeated religions in the stupor of their victory?

I read her book, The Stillborn, without preconceptions after my embers had cooled, and I learned why she was ostracized from the organizational leftist imagination. According to the court of ideology, the same court that prosecuted Milan Kundera for his novel The Joke, Arwa was an apostate. Arwa was active in the 1970s as a part of the generation that emerged after the 1967 defeat. She was nineteen when she became politically active and a member of the central committee of the Communist Workers Party. According to her friends, she was exceptional and possessed a remarkable critical and theorizing sense.

The consciousness of her generation unfolded within a public sphere that was forcefully opened by the weight of reality, following the collapse of the regime’s ability to use repression after the defeat. In her book, Arwa presents a narrative that is different from the nationalist one. Rather than cursing the period following the defeat, she viewed it as more energetic and vibrant than the period following victory. It was a time when people engaged in public affairs, and numerous issues were discussed without censorship. This margin would collapse after the October 1973 “victory,” when the regime regained its vigor.

The student movement was born within these margins. The movement inherited the remnant leftists of the 1960s and the crises of their endeavors. Arwa strips away the sanctity of the freedom fighters of the past, describing them as “unemployed” and possessing only mediocre talents. She examines her generation’s experience by linking it to the society in which it matured, concluding that her generation emerged as a result of the void between the worlds of Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar al-Sadat, between socialism and capitalism. In a significant moment between a world that was ending and one that was beginning, the 1970s generation was at the beginning of their twenties. Arwa writes, “[They] who had memorized a few Marxist phrases and whose self-appointed mission filled them with a naive arrogance for which they would soon pay a steep price” (The Stillborn, translation by Samah Selim).

Chillness of New Rooms

So, what do Enayat and Arwa have in common?

I do not aim to find a definite reason to pin their suicide on, as Joumana Haddad says in “Death Will Come and It Will Have Your Eyes”: “Whenever a human being commits suicide, a secret is born—an impenetrable secret no one could unravel.” However, I’m trying to pinpoint where their personal lives came into contact with the public sphere and how shuttering the public sphere could lead to repeating tragedies across generations.

Arwa and Enayat engaged with the public sphere in two different ways in two consecutive eras. Yet, we can see the bitterness of disappointment in their journeys. While waiting for the court to grant her divorce, Enayat wrote her only novel, Love and Silence. The protagonist is an eighteen-year-old girl named Naglaa, whose story begins during the years Enayat lost to her failed marriage that produced a child. Enayat turned to literature to write an imagined history of herself. The commonality between what remained of her journals, which were published in Iman’s book, and Naglaa in the novel is that she wanted to break the familiar pattern of her lifestyle and set out into the vast unknown world. “I want to pull out my soul that is glued to its surroundings and set out in search of a bigger and wider world. I am bored of the clear skies of my country. I want other skies, bleak and mysterious. I want terrifying and astonishing promises” (Love and Silence).

Literature was the vehicle Enayat chose to leave her trace in life, but that life expected a different model of youth than the political authorities demanded. The mood during Enayat’s era was set to cultural propaganda and charging the people to line up behind Nasser’s newborn republic. Any writer seeking cultural recognition had to walk that path. At some point, one asks oneself, “Who am I?” From this question, a sense of belonging to a collective or singular project begins.

Unlike Enayat, Arwa was affiliated with a collective project: The Communist Workers Party. In The Stillborn, she tells us about “The Kitsch,” the desire for collective salvation. According to this theory, collective salvation is what leads to individual salvation, and Marxism promises that each society is led by a chosen few to its historic destiny. The student movement saw itself in that prophecy. Its downfall was as big as the dreams had been.

Enayat, a daughter of the bourgeoisie, used different individualistic routes to self-realization, which Arwa had rejected. Namely, marriage and a child. After her marriage collapsed, she circled back to that same point that had led her to marriage and to the questions: “Who am I, and what trace do I want to leave behind?” Here, literature began to play a significant role in her life.

We can spot the contradictions between Enayat’s antisocial behavior and her unrestrained writing. She was isolated and did not like social interaction, yet in her novel, she wants to travel, break into the unknown, and disrupt her still world. Enayat remained confused all her life, searching for the reason behind the detachment of what was inside her from what was outside. She described this void in her novel through Naglaa, writing, “her growing individualism isolated her inside herself.”

Enayat had known the cold rooms of mental hospitals since her teenage years. She suffered the same coldness when she presented her novel to the great intellectuals of her generation and failed to attract their attention. After she died, they all claimed that they had encouraged her, although they had not praised her writing until she left. So, Dar al-Qaumia does not bear the responsibility for ignoring Enayat alone. The great intellectuals of her generation did, too. In our dear society, one must die to grab attention: “I had no shelter but myself, everyone was a stranger, I’m vainly trying to be at one with this wild soul inside me.”

In her book, Arwa Saleh writes (in Samah Selim’s translation), “I never for a moment regretted taking the only possible path to rediscovering the world. But the things that happened to me during the trip were beyond my endurance because I had to bear them alone, above all. All the world’s sweetest dreams combined can’t compensate for a single moment of warmth expressed in a human face.”

When we compare the two biographies, we find many points of entanglement between the two women’s worlds. For example, when Arwa described Enayat’s world in the beginning of the second chapter of The Stillborn, she talked about the talented leftists of Nasser’s era in the 1960s who were involved in a fenced-in literary movement, in which the system defined its framework. Enayat’s language didn’t fit the terms of that movement. Dar al-Qaumia was executing Nasser’s plan to create cultural propaganda. There was no demand for her gloomy language and existential philosophical metaphors at a time of great collective dreams. Even an exceptional writer such as Naguib Mahfouz resorted to symbolism to escape authority’s sword.

Love and Silence, which was published after al-Zayat’s suicide, ends with the July tanks rolling, marking the beginning of a new era that “champions life.” In this era, the protagonist feels her individualism fading for the benefit of the collective dream of salvation. It was the same dream Arwa wrote about in her analysis of her own experience: The desire for a collective salvation as a tool to fix one’s personal wreck. However, Iman published a testimony from journalist Neam El-Baz in her book, which said that the ending of Enayat’s published novel had been doctored. The publisher was not convinced by the sad ending, in which the protagonist’s lover died, as they wanted a “positive” ending.

With the sense of a poet, Iman Mersal imagines different scenarios for Enayat’s involvement in others’ lives or in her generation’s cultural and political projects. Enayat could have gotten involved in the world of the 1960s and become a freedom fighter like Arwa, but Iman doubts there was anything that could have protected a woman of Enayat’s temperament from suicide.

Women, Before Anything Else

After Husni Mubarak stepped down in 2011, uproar filled the streets. Everyone was submitting their demands, and a significant issue emerged: What are the priorities on the long list of demands? I remember that feminists raised this point, and we, the radical leftists, assumed the position that women’s issues were part of their class position and not separate. Society didn’t see any value in women’s issues in the first place.

I tried to compare what Arwa, Enayat, and the women in my generation experienced in the fight over priorities, not only on the political level but also on the social level. The three characters represent different models of individuals who lived through periods of significant change in Egyptian society. Even when the masses break free from political authority in fleeting moments, it cannot be considered a victory for women. There are still gender-based struggles they must wage against the men in opposition and against society and its laws to place themselves on the list of priorities. Arwa and Enayat’s ordeal was not only confined to the exceptional moments in which they lived; it was also because they were women who lived in these defining moments.

Iman obtained a copy of the lawsuit Enayat filed for divorce at the Court of Personal Status in Giza. Enayat describes her marriage as a chain of tragedies and humiliating assaults on her as a human being, a wife, and a mother. In her journals, she describes her marriage as lacking love, understanding, and harmony. It had no goal beyond leaving her uptight, limited school.

The court rejected her claim because Enayat’s witnesses to prove the violence and humiliation were her friend and her maid. The court decided that both witnesses testified that the incident happened without the other being present, so their testimonies were invalid. The court also doubted the testimony of Enayat’s father, Abbas al-Zayat, because he didn’t witness the insult that made her cry. In the court of appeals, the family’s lawyer, Nagi Khalil, criticized Egypt’s Personal Status Law for not considering a woman an independent person but rather as a possession of her husband. Enayat’s appeal was rejected, and only one last fight remained: to appeal the appeal.

Enayat lost her appeal in mid-November 1960, almost two and a half months before she committed suicide. More than a legal judgment, the grounds for the court’s decision were a lesson in patriarchy and casting women in certain roles. I will summarize it into the brief points I want to focus on: “She is antisocial and does not join her husband and his friends when they come to visit with their eminently respectable families, to share food and drink together. She withholds her company from the marital bed, locking the door of her private chamber (…) it is clear to the court that the appellant’s desire for employment went against her husband’s wishes and was obtained without his consent, which he withheld on the grounds that his salary was sufficient to provide her with a comfortable existence (…) that her employment was out of keeping with the customs and traditions of the elevated society from which he comes and in which he was raised.” (From the court’s judgment as written in Traces of Enayat.)

It seems that the generation of social transition Enayat and her peers believed in was a trick. In it, women’s role in the public sphere was confined to the spaces the authorities allowed and did not extend to other aspects. The law was yet another guardian among those who directed the trajectory of Enayat’s life.

For Arwa, her dilemma as a woman in a male-dominated organization was to earn them as her custodians. In a chapter titled “The Intellectual in Love,” Arwa analyzes the relationship between men and women in society as an entry point to parse the relationship of Egyptian intellectual men with women. For her, understanding the intellectual’s perception of women required understanding the “origin” that controls the intellectual’s behavior.

According to the bourgeoisie laws, women in men’s lives fall into two categories: wife or whore. In both cases, the categories are governed by the laws of property. Here, a man spends money, and, in return, a woman gives him pleasure and dispels his boredom. The woman understands her relationship with the man in terms of exchange—her femininity for his spending—the amount of which is set according to social class. The Egyptian intellectual understood these laws, then demeaned the concept of “free love” and defined it as sex without responsibility.

In return, the intellectual puts women in the same dominant social molds. When the intellectual speaks about the fiction of societal values that regulate relationships, his criticism does not extend to demanding a radical change in traditional social roles in bourgeois relationships. The woman is still required to tend to wounds, compensate for defeats and failures, embrace and contain men’s emotions, and she must be beautiful and have round, firm breasts.

These were the demands with which the one-sided liberal intellectuals besieged Arwa’s generation of women. As for the general perception of women, the intellectual’s perception isn’t different from dominant social standards. It remains synonymous with a woman’s sexual behavior. Arwa writes, “When it comes to women, the intellectual takes his cue from the bourgeoisie. In other words, he plays the pimp. In thought and feeling, though, he remains a petty bourgeois and, hence, deeply conservative.”

This perfect description applies not only to the Left of the 1960s and ’70s; it traverses generations, up to my own. I did not notice any radical change in the conservative perception about women in society. Chanting with progressive ideas was confined to seminars and public speeches. Deep inside their chests, on a practical level, and regarding prioritizing women’s issues on the Left’s agenda, things had not changed from what Arwa described. A male colleague once told me, when describing a female colleague, that the true impact she had in the movement was her big breasts. As in Arwa’s description, the passing of the poisoned milk continued from one generation to the next until the January Revolution, as if all those years in between had not passed.

A Straight Line

Can we draw a line that starts with Enayat and ends at Arwa?

If, for the sake of argument, we assume that Enayat set out into the world she feared in the same way that Arwa had, and took part in the student movement that ended in tragedy, would she have exposed that world and liberated herself from it to the void the same way Arwa had? In Egypt, all roads lead to inevitable nihilistic ends, and all choices at some point become a zero-sum equation.

The issue is not the method of engagement, whether individualistic or collective. The issue is the track on which Enayat and Arwa’s vehicles move. Both of them had depression, but depression isn’t a monolith. It led them down two different paths: isolation and engagement. Arwa’s life was the opposite of Enayat’s, but they both sailed from the same harbor and landed on the same shore. Literature and ideology are two hammers with which to strike the same wall—the wall of society—in pursuit of the echo of one’s own voice coming from the strike, to leave a tangible, material trace. Enayat writes, “Maybe I was born in the wrong time, everything seems inharmonious.”

Arwa writes, “Did I manage, after this long and difficult journey, to become someone capable of dealing with the real world without losing either her balance or her dreams?”

The public sphere played a hidden role in their lives. That poisoned public sphere defined and directed their courses. Every time Arwa and Enayat stepped from the private to the public, they returned disappointed. I should clarify that I am not offering an idealistic theory that assumes the world should reward people for their intentions and desires. However, I imagine that their experiences could have been less cruel in other societies that don’t seal the public sphere up so tightly. This closure fuels all of society’s vices and impedes its healthy development and ability to learn from its mistakes. It is not limited to the authorities but extends to the opposition as well, as in Arwa’s case and as with the great intellectuals who ignored Enayat.

The function of the public sphere is to accommodate the human desire to express themselves, engage in discussions, debate, and leave their isolation and present themselves to the world outside. When this role ceases to exist, the human being becomes lost and lonely and is forced to enter an acute personal crisis. At the beginning of the 1960s, Enayat isolated herself in Dokki, and, after her divorce, her life was limited to writing her novel, caring for her son, and working at the library of the German Center. Each period began with warmth, promising to fulfill her dreams before it ended in tragedy.

Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk says that literature is the space where the private becomes public. Enayat tried to move the cold of her room outside—this is how literature engages life—but she didn’t get the chance. Nasser’s state didn’t care for creative literature as much as it wanted positivity and motivation. In response to closing that door in her face and her ruined personal life, Enayat could not find another shelter. Literature could have been her lifeboat.

Arwa felt lost after the collapse of her generation’s endeavor. She tried to analyze her experience through criticism, contemplation, theorizing, and getting to know herself and the world without masks. She published her book The Stillborn while she was alive. Another book, Cancer in the Soul (Saratan al-Rawh), a collection of notes and journals, was published after she committed suicide.

I looked fervently for the book, but I could find neither it nor its publisher, as if the publisher had vanished along with the text. However, I managed to find some of the pages that told the story of a previous failed suicide attempt in the Nile River, which ended with Arwa being saved by a police officer.

Wikipedia mentions falling as a reason for her death. The reality is that her life felt like free falling from one point to another. This fall was not synonymous with collapse. It represented a desire to genuinely savor experiences to the last drop and to spit them out at the same moment she discovered they were an illusion.

Unlike Enayat, who feared jumping, Arwa fell from the top of the building of human experience and tasted ideological belief and the relief of certainty. Arwa then moved to the trickery room—self-reflection—and looked at life from the perspective of cold facts. Although she reached her hands toward life, the rooms of society were suffocating.

Arwa could have become a notable political writer or even a lecturer at a university’s political science department. However, these gains had a tax. Arwa would have had to turn herself into the version of herself the public sphere demanded if it were to open its door to her. Without doing so, she was rejected. That came with a tax, too—isolation and hollowness.

Generations of Stillborns

In the introduction to her ontology, Joumana Haddad writes: “Whoever examines the lives of those who committed suicide would find a thin but strong thread that connects them to each other. As if they all belonged to the same planet.” She goes on to mention examples of their intertwined lives. One translated another’s work. This person was born on the same day as the other. She ends the paragraph with, “Perhaps if we draw a line connecting each of them to the other, we would discover that the line is nothing but a circle.”

I saw recurring fragments of Arwa and Enayat’s lives in my observations of the post-January 2011 world. Aside from participating in the nationalization of the public sphere, I feel that we are in a wretched cycle of eternal societal recurrence. For example, in her reflections, Arwa offers observations on leftist movements’ detachment from reality and the conservative perception of women within “progressive” organizations. Her explanation is that a corrupt society supplies the war front with soldiers: “Just as it’s impossible to create a utopia out of beauty and human intimacy in societies that are inhuman.”

That hasn’t changed. We looked at reality with an eye of “inevitable” historical laws that resemble a Procrustean bed. We attack it, stretch it, or cut its feet to fit the bed size. Arwa’s generation defended the Soviet Union’s mistakes to protect its theoretical ideas, and we were embroiled in supporting regimes like Bashar’s, Iran, and others because they represent “the Axis of Resistance” against imperialism. We approach our conventions through books and what could be the potential interpretation of the text, while completely disregarding the reality.

The Stillborn presents all the leftist’s ailments that I experienced nearly forty years after Arwa’s. It was odd to look at my experience through the book’s eye and see the confusing continuation of Arwa’s observations, as if what happened is a simulation that could have been overridden but instead is being repeated in a Sisyphean manner.

I share Enayat’s attraction to literature and writing. After the sword of ideology has fallen with its sharp edge, a less sharp sword, like literature, could replace it. I felt a strong geographical connection with Enayat. I lived for a year in the al-Munira neighborhood of Cairo next to Saad Zaghloul’s mausoleum, where she was born and raised. Enayat worked at the German Center in Zamalek and used to walk along the Nile to Gezira Club after work.

Along that exact route lies the boat dock where I, with some of my friends, rent a felucca every few weeks to dance, brushing off the daily struggles of a toxic, complex city like Cairo. I imagine Enayat passing alone after a day of work at the library’s archive. I invite her to join us, and she accepts in a simple, unexpected way.

Enayat refused to self-publish her novel because she was seeking external recognition. Inner confidence in one’s talent is not enough on its own. In the society we live in, creativity is an inner energy directed toward the outside world. When this world is governed by restrictive rules serving ideological and authoritarian goals, a creative person finds themselves facing two choices: To change and adapt to these rules, or to isolate themselves and drown in their own inner world. When we have a healthy public sphere, a person would feel that their traces are visibly marked in the ground. In its absence, they will drown in the void. “When I walk, I leave no tracks, like I walk on water, and I am unseen, invisible. ”

In July 1985, Arwa sent a letter to a friend in Seville, telling them that the bitter experiences that killed her in Egypt were the fruits of a harsh life in a dead society. The public sphere in Egypt has been poisoned since the sixties, and no one moves through it unscathed. A freedom fighter becomes part of the regime, and whoever refuses to do so, like Arwa, will end up with feelings of nihilism and loneliness.

Authorities were not Arwa’s only problem. The opposition she joined was, too. At a decisive moment, she held onto her belief in her general convictions, but she reexamined the mentality of the opposition, its individuals, and the psychological framework that shaped their choices. With the dismantling of all the projects that a person could be involved in, all the public courses became poisoned, and holding its keys were gatekeepers who opened the doors only to those who were shaped according to their vision.

Amid these self-reproducing conditions, being involved in the public sphere is like falling into a swamp. That swamp is the Lote Tree of the utmost boundary to all endeavors, the individualistic and collective, the old and the new. The tools of resistance differ as well as the individuals, their psychology, and their class, but the destination remains the same. In a personal letter, Arwa writes, “It seems to me that the nature of someone’s death is determined by the nature of their life.”

With that perfect note, we can link the ways Enayat and Arwa executed their suicides to the way they lived their lives. It makes sense that sleeping pills suited Enayat’s isolation and her seemingly calm life. Jumping from the tenth floor seems fitting to Arwa’s engagement in political life and the noise of her experiences as she was “living astray in life, lacking social status of any kind.” Those who live astray die in the street, their bodies proof that the society that cast them out and turned its back has failed.

Moaaz Muhammad is an Egyptian writer and researcher born in Yemen. He wrote for several websites including Mada Masr and Megazen. Moazz contributed to several studies and reports issued by civil society organizations.

Osama Hammad is literary translator based in Egypt. Holding a Professional Diploma in Media and Audiovisual Translation from the School of Continuing Education at the American University in Cairo.  He published several translated short stories and articles in both Arabic and English, as well as collaborative efforts in translating two Arabic books. Osama is a contributor to Arblit, Boring Books and the Antonym Magazine.

Also read:

From Enayat al-Zayyat’s ‘Love and Silence

Erased, Not Forgotten: Seven Arab Women Writers