Motherhood and Its Ghosts

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.

Motherhood and Its Ghosts is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator, and literary scholar. She is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, including The Threshold, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and won the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Traces of Enayat.

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 with Borders, Washington Square Review, Michigan Review and elsewhere. He has translated several novels and prose works, most recently Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep (Seagull), Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi with Yasmine Seale (Tenement Press), and Slipping by Mohammed Kheir (Two Lines Press).