Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with writer Iman Mersal, celebrating her latest works translated into English, Motherhood and Its Ghosts and Traces of Enayat. Mersal will be in conversation with writer and editor Elizabeth Brogden.
From one of the preeminent poets of the Arabic-speaking world come two brilliant works of creative nonfiction that consider the lives of women as remembered—or overlooked—by the archive.
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.