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.

Read the full article: Tracing a Line, from Arwa to Enayat