Motherhood and Its Ghosts

Continuing her investigation into the archive, Iman Mersal sifts through representations of one of history's most elusive figures--the hidden mother.

No one excluded my mother from our joint portrait. It is before me now and I can see for myself that I was with her, but she is a ghost. The picture is a burden: an assault on, and fabrication of, what I remember. It doesn't make my mother present; it sharpens my desire to resist, to transcend her ghostliness, to rescue what the picture hides.

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 living in Barcelona. He has translated poetry and prose, including Haytham El Wardany's The Book of Sleep (Seagull) and Slipping by Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press).