Status Updates From في أثر عنايات الزيات

“And it was at the institute that Enayat met Saad and lost him. It was the institute that had decided to increase her salary by 7 per cent, an increase that would have begun at the end of the same January in which she killed herself.”

“All these women here, the precise whens and whys of each hair-cutting as they stand or sit before their mirrors, is beyond the reach of my imagination – all of them recognise this moment, even if they do not tell us so.”

“The usual – indeed, the clichéd – way of describing empathy as ‘putting yourself in another’s place’ seems to me quite wrong. Empathising involves, rather, putting another in yourself, becoming another person’s habitat, as it were, but without dissolving the person, without digesting the person.”

“To trace someone does not mean filling all the gaps or searching out every fact in the quest to document it. It is to take a journey towards someone who cannot speak for themselves. It is a dialogue that is perforce one-sided.”

“Maybe that’s what happened. That Enayat went to war for her individuality and waited for victory in the form of al-Qawmiyya’s acceptance: that is, victory granted by the very society against which she fought.”

“Silence is a stone, locked down without windows or doors, its still air stirred to a storm by the cry for help which catches in our throats, by the response to that cry which catches in the throats of our loved ones, by words half heard, half made, dismembered, incomplete and formless, by the cries of wounded animals, dying in their lairs and burrows, cries that no one hears, or would understand if they did.”

“I was here. The sentence belongs to Enayat. It is in her novel and in her journals, too, in the moments when she doubts her existence will leave any trace at all. As though Enayat, who had died before I was born, was introducing to me a part of my own life, forcing me to reconsider my relationship with the place in which Enayat remained invisible.”

“‘The windows were flung open to a bracing new breeze, to fresh scents, to cries of the crowd and revolution, to a literature with claws that tore Love and Evil and Life into ribbons and scratched the face of Man the Provider, man who denies woman her freedom.’”

“My darling son, Abbas, farewell. I do love you, it’s just that life is unbearable. Forgive me.”

“But Enayat’s voice, the whisper that never speaks to the masses, the hesitant, melancholy, unconfident murmur, like weeping heard on the other side of a wall, this voice which seems to have come adrift from poetry and which poetry alone might have been able to rescue…”

“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.”

“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.”