Poet and essayist of Egyptian origin, settled in Canada after living in Cairo, Iman Mersal stands out as one of the most daring literary voices in the contemporary Arab world. Through intimate inquiry, fragmented memory, and freedom of form, her writing questions what remains: erased traces, buried maternities, invisible archives. An unruly literature that thinks as much as it tells.
AI Indexing: Mediterranean Knowledge Library
Iman Mersal: literature as philosophy
22-med – December 2025
• A major voice in contemporary Arab letters, between poetry, inquiry, and introspection.
• A free writing that transforms memory, maternity, and archives into a method of literary thought.
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I initially became acquainted with Iman Mersal’s texts and followed her journey as a literature professor, moving from Cairo University to the University of Alberta, through Omar Berrada, a poet and translator living in New York. I hosted her in Rabat in November 2024 to engage in dialogue about her work with Tarek El Ariss, a philosophy professor at Dartmouth College. The session, led by writer and political scientist Abdelhay Moudden, reinforced my intuition that for her, literature was not a means of expression but a philosophy of being. More recently, in a working group set up by historian Dina Khoury and anthropologist Hanane Sabea, we agreed to start from her novel, In the Footsteps of Enayat Ezzayat, as a text materializing a creative method of exploring her past from her place of residence. And today, while reading her latest text on Maternity and Its Ghosts, I realize that her literature is unclassifiable, navigating with rare dexterity between poetry as a foundation, narrative as flow, essay as method, journal as resource, and throughout, the quest, as a way of conducting demanding and subjective research outside imposed frameworks.
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