WRITTEN BY: Sally Gimson.
EMAN ABDELRAHIM belongs to a new generation of Egyptian short-story writers shaped by the country’s uprising and the internet.
Although she declines to call herself either a feminist or a political activist, her stories tell of the struggles of Arab women to find their place in a world where they are torn between the conservative society they were brought up in and the liberation which events such as the Arab Spring promised. Her tales also touch on taboo subjects like mental illness.
Many of Abdelrahim’s stories present women’s dilemmas in surreal ways. She tells tales of brides in black, secret staircases and threatening male strangers in wolf masks. Her first short-story collection, Rooms and Other Stories, won her accolades including a Sawaris Cultural Award for emerging writers in 2015. The literary website Lithub identified her as one of the top 10 female Arab writers who should be translated into English.
Her main influences are the Russian greats Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and she sees parallels between Egyptian society today and 19th century Tsarist Russia.
Now 37, Abdelrahim started writing anonymous blogs in her early 20s. The daughter of a teacher and a nurse, she lived with her parents and five younger siblings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, until she was 15.
The family was plunged into crisis when her father was killed in a car accident shortly after they all returned to Cairo. Her mother had no way of supporting them and remarried quickly. She divorced after setting up her own property business.
Abdelrahim completed university, where she studied business, and worked for an import-export company. She wrote in her spare time, moving from writing blogs to finding her voice composing fictional stories on Facebook. Encouraged by her friends, she used her dreams as inspiration. She was rebelling, too. She took off her hijab, curled her hair – and then cut it all off.
She also became mentally ill and her psychiatrist encouraged her to write as a way of healing.
Now married to a German anthropologist, she lives in Chemnitz and is writing stories inspired by her mother, who died last year.
But Abdelrahim is still surprised that she’s a writer. “I loved writing. Nothing else,” she said. “I never considered anyone would read it. I am writing for me as a reader.”
