To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death so much as feeling impelled, somehow, to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. Whether or not you are hoping to tell the story and share it with others, you might be able to give this corpse a name and lend a meaning to its life. The corpse is the researcher’s question. Urgent, mysterious, distorted or even inconsistent, it is a question that issues from the present—the here and now—but which lacks the language required to speak it.

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator and literary scholar, and Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, selections from which have been translated into numerous languages. In English translation, her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, Paris Review, The Nation, American Poetry Review, among others. Mersal was awarded the prestigious Shaykh Zayed award for literature in 2021.

Translated by Robin Moger.

About Howdunnit:

With one foot in archival research and the other in crime literature, this series explores how these different modes of investigation converge and diverge. One can start with a body riddled with holes, the body may be an archive or the corpse of a neighbor. Forensic investigation is underway, but some crimes can only be unlocked through language. Sometimes language is the site of the crime, its perpetrator, victim or chief investigator. Howdunnit summons literary and archival research to the investigation of crime and how its narratives are constructed, obfuscated or dismantled, its gaps filled or purposefully left open, its evidence gathered, its cases closed or left to stare back at us across time.

The first two book in the Howdunnit series, Archives & Crimes by Iman Mersal and Panorama by Merle Kröger, came out upon an invitation to Kayfa ta (Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis) extended by the editors of The Nomadic Curriculum — A Manual Series are publications by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Stefan Aue, Lama El Khatib. To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death so much as feeling impelled, somehow, to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. Whether or not you are hoping to tell the story and share it with others, you might be able to give this corpse a name and lend a meaning to its life. The corpse is the researcher’s question. Urgent, mysterious, distorted or even inconsistent, it is a question that issues from the present—the here and now—but which lacks the language required to speak it.