Alex Tan speaks with Egyptian author Iman Mersal about her new book “Motherhood and Its Ghosts.”:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2FMotherhood%20Mersal.jpg)
Motherhood and Its Ghosts by Iman Mersal. Transit Books, 2025. 142 pages.
MOTHERHOOD, IN ANY LANGUAGE, is overdetermined with archetypal symbolism, burdened with the labor of signifying—in our idealized imaginaries—a desire for our origins and the deepest of all intimacies. Think of the Arabic trilateral root for “mother,” which extends to such words as “umma” with their transregional and sacred resonances; or the English “motherland,” which consolidates a primordial connection between the maternal body and the nation. How easy, beneath the suffocating weight of figuration and mythology, to forget the real mothers who breathe and labor with bodies of their own.
Writing into that lacuna is the task that Egyptian poet and essayist Iman Mersal takes up in her new book Motherhood and Its Ghosts. Using as a point of departure the sole photograph of her mother, who died when she was seven, Mersal asks what it means to truly see her mother—and, by extension, motherhood in the culture writ large—when the singularity of her presence has been effaced by everything she is made to represent.
Compact but thickly allusive in Robin Moger’s dexterous translation, Motherhood and Its Ghosts juxtaposes speculative chapters on Victorian photographic conventions and modern Syrian poetry with entries from Mersal’s own journals. Together, they narrate a wayward journey towards the density of everything that lies outside the frame—that which the image has “failed to hold.” Here we glimpse the ghostly contours of disavowed antipathies and affects—not only the dimensions of identity that precede and transcend maternity but also the rage, ambivalence, selfishness, and guilt that a mother must not admit she sometimes feels toward her child. “With and for and against”—this variety of prepositions, from an Adrienne Rich passage Mersal cites, points to the unceasing relational interplay of fission and fusion that she compels us to reckon with anew.
As in much of her other nonfiction, such as Traces of Enayat (2019) and Archives & Crimes (2022), Mersal continues an enduring preoccupation with the anxieties, regrets, and forms of violence that underlie acts of archival occlusion. Beginning as a discrete essay in the magazine Makhzin and subsequently issued under the Kayfa ta imprint in Berlin, Motherhood and Its Ghosts has traveled a long way before its current republication in the United States, in Transit Books’ Undelivered Lectures series.
Across my multiple encounters with Mersal, I’ve come to expect uncanny convergences and serendipities. The first time I received an email from her, I happened to be in McNally Jackson buying a copy of her poetry collection for a dear friend. For this conversation, we met in a New York café called Maman, and only after the fact did I realize that we had spoken to each other on the eve of Mother’s Day. We discussed dreams, questions of form and framing, the limits of metaphor, and the fissure within the self that motherhood can be.
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ALEX TAN: We’re meeting in a café called Maman, so I feel I have to comment on that. What did you call your mother when you were growing up, and what word do your own children use when addressing or referring to you?
IMAN MERSAL: I called my mother Mama, but I realize that my kids use the word Mum more. My younger son Youssef usually calls me Imu, which is my nickname. He’s loved it since he was a child. I don’t think this is common in Egypt, but my kids aren’t typical Egyptians or Canadians. And as a child, whenever Youssef wanted something badly from me, he would try to speak in Arabic. I think of it as him wanting to widen the relation a little, making it more like a friendship.
Motherhood and Its Ghosts was originally published under the Kayfa ta imprint in Berlin, an innovative series that invites different artists and writers to reconceptualize and subvert the form of the self-help manual. How did you first respond to the prompt of writing within the constraints of a “how-to” guide? Is there something about motherhood and its cultural narratives that lend themselves to the genre of instruction and advice?
I believe that whatever you’re writing is usually based on an older question, one that strives to be rearticulated—whether urgently or not. I had been occupied with the question of motherhood—as the daughter of a mother who died when I was seven and as the mother of two boys living in a foreign land, speaking to them mostly in English.
I was first invited by the co-editors of Makhzin magazine to contribute to their special issue on “feminisms.” I felt ready to explore motherhood; I thought it would just be an isolated piece on motherhood and violence. But the process of writing can open doors, can make you see what’s behind this question with greater clarity.
Afterwards, Kayfa ta invited me to write a book as part of their how-to series. I really love that series, and the idea of being out of established publishing houses, creating books as beautiful objects, distributing them in mysterious ways—via word of mouth sometimes, or in art galleries. Also, I had the pleasure of discussing my ideas with Maha [Maamoun] and Ala [Younis], the founders of Kayfa ta. This was very new to me since poetry is more of a solitary practice!
One of the weird things about modern motherhood is the amount of how-tos there already are from medical institutions, and books telling mothers what to do and not to do. But I’ve never had a manual on how to navigate motherhood with your own individual experience—with your own pain.
What was the origin point conceptually for the project?
It started from my obsession with this singular picture I had of my mother. It’s always been present in my poetry, but I was thinking about it again in light of the metaphor of the hidden mother in 19th-century photography. Different questions about motherhood and photography emerged. For example, what is selected, documented, and displayed when motherhood becomes the subject of photography? Is there a preconceived idea of what needs to be captured in order to create a mother? And this was a way to return to my mother’s only picture and ask if we can find our mothers in their photos at all.
What significance did quoting your own diaries hold for you? How did you decide which sections to excerpt?
There was selectivity involved, but it was an inspiring practice of taking diary excerpts and editing them. I was loyal to the idea of the diary, of these events being what really happened on these dates. This helped me make sense of the struggle—the role of institutions when it comes to motherhood and mental illness, the whole fact of being foreign and not understanding the system, and the need to seek validation from institutions (such as schools, social workers, and doctors) affirming that my son wasn’t struggling because I was a bad mother. And trying to get help, from both cultures: in the diary, you can see that I reach out to traditional modes of healing in Egypt too, like Qur’anic cures.
And these were your grandmother’s rituals …
Yes, because my grandmother was my maternal figure. The songs, the exorcisms, the elegies—these are motherhood for me, the rituals I’m carrying. As a mother, you try to widen yourself, to live in the moment, and to learn new things about motherhood. It’s the 2000s, not the 1970s; it’s not a village in Egypt but a city in Canada. The definition of motherhood, however, is rooted inside you from your own childhood. You have to shake it sometimes to modify or modernize it.
Your book is divided into several sections, the first two being much more discursive, ranging over poetry and photography, and adopting what feels like a self-consciously detached voice. The movement of the book then takes a turn inward. Even before that trajectory, there are interruptive gestures toward the intimate and personal, breaking the surface of the text, like the italicized fragments of conversation between you and Mourad at the end of the first chapter: “I don’t want to die, Mama.” How did you conceptualize the text’s form as a whole?
It takes time for our personal wounds to emerge in writing. Exploring motherhood in feminist discourses across literature and photography helped me to find my voice, to articulate these wounds in writing. I can’t imagine it otherwise. The tone of voice is what saves writing from being merely confessional or a bare expression of need. It allows others to relate to it and think about their own wounds.
For me, I didn’t have a structure for the book to begin with. I wrote a short piece, as I said earlier. Little did I know that this was my way of arriving at my own wound. Inserting my diary was my choice, not to put my son on the spot, because the diary is about me. The diary is its writer’s feelings, experiences, and even illusions.
When I look at this diary, I see how much it’s connected to the first two chapters. But I’m not the kind of writer who thinks their readers need help—you have to think they’re even more intelligent than you, because they can relate things in their own way, which can take so many shapes, not just the way you see it. This is why I wasn’t interested in going back and connecting things together at all.
You end with dreams of your mother visiting you. What do dreams mean to you?
In writing, I think a dream is a great source of trying to see something you can’t see otherwise. The dream is telling you something, but trying to write it gives it validation, as if it’s part of your journey, as if it’s an enlightened message.
Dreams fascinate me because of the time of dreams. The dream usually happens in the past so we can tell it. But the time inside the dream is so interesting: what do you see, what comes before, and how do you use language to describe it? In English, you would use the continuous past, but it has moments of presence and a future, the future where you are telling the dream to someone—here, to readers.
There are two dreams in the book: [first,] the dream of making a surgical incision into my son’s brain and searching for the source of mental health, of darkness, mood swings, depression. The other dream happened on the night I gave birth to my first child: I was in the hospital in Canada, but I dreamt that I was visiting my mother in her house in Egypt. Both dreams are real and took place in my life, but the way I wrote them is what matters. You’re taking them from a personal moment of enlightenment to share them with others, through language.
In the last dream, in particular, I didn’t understand it when I had it 25 years ago, when my son was born. The process of writing the book was really a reconciliation with my mother’s death, feeling comfortable realizing, after waking up from a dream, that she is dead. You will not go through this grave again; it happened in the past, in reality.
Birth is about giving material form not just to another but also to yourself—I feel like this is where we might locate the intersection between motherhood and writing. The book contains flashes of your past work: you quote a poem you wrote years ago that itself is ekphrastic, describing a photograph of “a woman and a girl.” You rigorously cross-examine your own writing, asking questions about its neutral tone, speculating about where the specter of your mother lies. When you reencounter versions of your past writerly selves on the page, does the writing carry a maternal undertone?
I think we should take the image of giving birth to yourself with some caution. In writing, you’re not aware of giving birth to yourself until it happens. Writing is process and result, always also the beginning of something else in life. The image of giving birth to yourself feels like a metaphor for life itself; it’s not just writing. For someone else, it might be migration, motherhood or fatherhood, love, freedom. Giving birth to yourself is the process of life itself until we die—the moment when this process is completed, by death.
I’m curious about the image of the crack. When you describe the fissures within the self that childbirth and motherhood might create, you ask, “Isn’t this crack itself the identity by which we move through the world?” I thought of Haytham El Wardany, who poeticizes the etymology of the Arabic word “laysa.” A composite of two different words that point to being and its negation, laysa sutures over—but retains—its own internal contradiction, a kind of fissure that “wells up from within.” One of your poems, too, “The Idea of Home,” concludes with the wish that home “be a wall whose cracks keep growing until one day you take them for doors.” How has your thinking been shaped by the image of the crack and the fissure?
I’d never made this connection before, but it makes lots of sense: giving birth as a crack from within and its impact on identity. Being a mother is not just an identity that swallows everything else; it also creates a crack and rearranges all other fragments of identity, and you have to live with it.
There’s another poem in my 2006 collection Alternative Geography about the demolishing of my father’s house when I was 17 or 18, and it had an image of strands of my mother’s still-wet hair flying up from the cracks of a wall. Women were scared to throw away their tangled hair from combs into the garbage; they feared that, with their hair, someone else might wish ill upon them, so they would keep their hair in a crack in the mud walls. This image might be something very deep from my childhood, growing up in a village, seeing these cracks. It’s almost a holy place for secrets. We never know how an image is created or founded; it comes but it changes with life.
Motherhood is also often conceived of through the overwrought metaphor of the creative act. Sometimes the labor of writing itself is compared to pregnancy. You quote Adrienne Rich, whose description subverts this association: she compares poetry to a space where she could live as “no-one’s mother.” Where do you position yourself when you reflect on yourself as a writer and as a mother? Do poetry and literature open up a parallel realm where motherhood temporarily vanishes?
To be a writer and a mother is not inherently contradictory, but Rich confronted the expectations imposed on female poets of her generation: “Once in a while someone used to ask me, ‘Don’t you ever write poems about your children?’ The male poets of my generation did write poems about their children—especially their daughters. For me, poetry was where I lived as no-one’s mother, where I existed as myself.” Thinking about Rich’s argument, I would ask what that “myself” is. There is no one solid identity I can call “myself.” But if such an identity exists, I imagine that motherhood can crack it and rearrange its fragments. It’s more complicated than being no one’s mother; it is part of one’s sense of the world.
In the moment of writing, you are—at one and the same time—all of the fragments of your identity and nothing; something comes to the fore, something is more urgent than other things, depending on your state of mind.
The autobiographical elements of the book also deal with your own mother and the aftermath of her death. In the journal section, there is a line that haunted me: “The monster that is my life. My childhood and his childhood both.” Across the text, there are these doublings between generations. I thought of the 2021 film Petite Maman by Céline Sciamma. Do you think you could be friends with your own mother? I’m also reminded of Traces of Enayat and that moment of separation between you and Enayat, when you imagine yourself and her living in the same generation, and the impossibility of friendship between you.
Maybe we wouldn’t be friends. Maybe, if my mother had been alive, she would have shielded me from the grief over her death, or from the many experiences I had as a child without a mother. There are so many possibilities for me to have become someone else if she had been there—and maybe I would not have become a writer, and this question wouldn’t even be asked.
In the harrowing dream of the court scene, you wonder what it would be like to say, in your own defense, that your son is your “double,” that you are “twins.” To what extent do you think we repeat our relationships with our mothers, unconsciously or not, with our own children? How far can we move away from or unlearn everything we’ve experienced, and forge something different?
Thinking about motherhood seems to require looking in two different directions simultaneously: to the past, when we were a child to a mother, and to the future, when we are (or will be) a mother to a child. Whether your mother was serene or tempestuous, warm or cold, rational or crazy, there must be some frame of reference that shapes the motherhood of which you dream. For example, my husband’s grandmother was a piano teacher in New York; she didn’t have a chance to be a pianist because she married early. Her daughter refused completely to learn the piano and did not give her son piano lessons until he was six, even though it was obvious that he was into it. Either we follow in the footsteps of our mothers, select parts of them, or we oppose their path altogether; regardless, we are shaped by it.
The problem is that there is no reference when there is no mother. You rely on other figures—a grandmother, a great-aunt—who help you, in certain moments, to have an image of motherhood.
I don’t believe in doubling but I sometimes see the heredity of mental illness, and I believe we carry the trauma and pass it on to our children. You might see it in some kids who have displaced grandparents, or kids whose parents themselves lost a parent early on. It’s a mystery to me how something like that can travel from generation to generation. I once read a study about the psychological weight carried by the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors even though they didn’t themselves undergo that experience. It’s like a “basma” or fingerprint: traces of this trauma are passed on.
The word “journey” appears multiple times throughout Motherhood and Its Ghosts: birth as a “threshold to a journey” but also a “journey inside” to “save” your own mother from “becoming a ghost or a silhouette.” In your previous work, such as Traces of Enayat, you also use the word “rihla” to frame your trajectory toward Enayat. What resonances does the trope of rihla have for you, both personally and in the context of Arabic literature?
“Journey” really means, to me, to be driven by a question or a contradiction or a big misunderstanding with things, and to be willing—lucky enough to be willing—to give it time and work, and to practice toward understanding. By this reckoning, you can talk about a person’s life as a journey with many thresholds inside it, but writing a book is also a journey.
The word “safr” in Arabic is used more by Sufis to describe their spiritual journey toward knowing God, not through worship but through communion and listening. Modern Arabic would use safr in a very practical way to mean “travel,” so maybe the word rihla is more common in my personal language—I feel it presents what I mean more.
Much of the text revolves around motherhood’s invisibility—how it is both out of sight and constitutes the conditions of possibility for something to happen, or for someone to literally come into being. There’s a passage on the ultrasound image of your son Youssef as a fetus: the mother here is “not a ghost”; she is “outside the picture altogether,” but she also provides the frame for the picture to exist. It is her (your) body. I’m reflecting on this tension between visibility and framing as a question of form. Was this something you consciously tried to enact?
As I say in the book, the meaning and significance of the mother in the imagery of the dominant narrative is direct and directly analogous (the background, the pose and position of the mother, the maternal gaze toward the lens, the relationship between the individuals in the frame). A mother’s image is done and dusted, understood; there is no question about the image of a mother in a picture unless it scratches or contradicts the concept of motherhood we have: a naked mother, a very beautiful mother, a mother associated with a story that contradicts motherhood through violence, sexuality, and so on. These are images of what I call the “instrumental mother.”
In an ultrasound picture, you can see a fetus—a person, a creature in the making, depending on when the image is taken during pregnancy—but the mother is not there, the mother is just a uterus. A child can’t even recognize himself as a baby if he does not see his mother as a frame of the picture. So, we have a hidden mother and a hidden fetus in one image.
And you also sought to grasp the ghostliness of your mother—her hiddenness—in the only picture you have of her …
This metaphor of the hidden mother helped me see the only picture of my mother differently. The picture isn’t abstract; this woman is leaving her house to go to a studio in the city. Her hair, which is braided usually, had to be left loose for the picture. But you can see the braids still. And this was not how I saw her every day. And then there’s the smile that disappeared because of the awkwardness of being in a studio. The artificial backdrop of a colonial house behind us—a house we did not live in. I was just trying to understand why my mother is a ghost in the only picture we have of her, compared to the memory I have. This opened ways for me to play around, to see mothers in archives, instrumental mothers or mothers who become visible because of struggles, like Palestinian mothers. But with repetition, they return to being part of this invisible landscape of everyday motherhood.
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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 other venues. The Threshold, translated by Robyn Creswell and published in 2022, was short-listed 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 in English by Transit Books in 2024.
LARB Contributor
Alex Tan is a writer, editor, and translator of Arabic literature living in New York. They are Editorial Fellow 2025–26 at Words Without Borders.
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