There is an effect of 'In the wake of' (or 'Following') 'Inayat Al-Zayat'

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Product description

Before Anayat transformed from an anonymous writer into a shadow that haunts me, before I saw her picture, heard a fragment of her news, and felt that I was pulled by my nose to know her, I was searching for the treasure, for her personal archive that must be there, scattered between houses and the geography of Cairo and in the memory of those remaining of her life from neighborhoods. Destroying Anayat's personal archive, it seemed to me like a disaster at first, but her absence made me follow the traces of what was erased. It made me think that my ambition is not to display her life in the pages of a book, displaying the life of a dead person is a participation in flattening and the continuous emptying of the past of its meaning. I told myself, I should not speak on her behalf, I should not present a draft of her life, there is a moment of intersection between us, I will make this moment work like a spiritual guide and we will differ greatly in everything else. Perhaps she herself only exists in the margins that escaped the control of institutions, family, and friends; perhaps I should have followed her traces in "Al-Halek," in the geography she lived and died in, the street, the cemetery, the German school, and the German Institute of Archaeology, in the law of personal status and the divorce case, in the context of rejecting the narrative and publishing it, in dreams, friendship, love, depression, and death. It seemed to me that the stories of everyone whose life intersected with hers are like parts of her story. I wanted to know them one by one because they passed through her life. A book on the impact of Anayat Al-Zayat by Iman Marasal