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.
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 to English who lives in Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The White Review, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Washington Square Review, Michigan Review, and elsewhere.
Moderator Elizabeth Brogden is a Boston-based writer and editor whose essays, reviews, prose poems, and stories have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Bellevue Literary Review, Full-Stop, and The Common, among others. She holds a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University, with a specialization in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature.