Arwa Saleh

Arwa Saleh (1951–1997) was an Egyptian communist and feminist, who was a veteran student leader in the 1970s radical student movement. She was also a member of the central committee of the Marxist-Leninist Egyptian Communist Workers Party (ECWP). Much of her writing appeared in the ECWP paper, circulated underground due to state repression of communists. She also published several translations of Marxist literature in Arabic, including Tony Cliff's Class Struggle and Women's Liberation. She has two published essay collections—al-Mubtasarun (or The Premature Ones/The Stillborn) and another, posthumously published, titled Saratan al-Rawh (Cancer of the Soul). She committed suicide in 1997.

Early life and education Arwa Saleh was born in 1951 in Cairo, and studied English literature at Cairo University. Upon graduating, she worked as a school teacher for a short time, and then as a translator for the state-owned Middle East News Agency and the Saudi-funded economic newspaper al-'Alam al-Yawm (The World Today). She wrote socio-political essays under pseudonyms, and her translations of Marxist literature appeared in internal and secret pamphlets and newsletters of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party (Hizb al-'Ummal al-Shuyu'i al-Misri), which functioned as an underground organization. An earlier wave of radical student politics in Egypt broke out in 1968, demanding harsher punishment for those responsible for the defeat in the Arab-Israeli war. Many leaders of this wave were co-opted by the regime or successfully intimidated and arrested. In work later published posthumously, she wrote that she had received psychiatric treatment while she was away. Her first manuscript (which was lost and never published) and a posthumously published autobiographical text 'Strolling: Daydream of a Lonely Rover' was dedicated to patients in psychiatric clinics. The event is referred to in Ahdaf Soueif's 1999 novel The Map of Love, and Soueif and Salih had studied together in the English Department at Cairo University in the early 1970s. Her death has also been given fictional treatment in Radwa Ashour's 2008 novel Release as well as Youssef Rakha's 2014 novel The Crocodiles. In Fathi Imbabi's al-Sab'iyyun (The 1970s Generation), Imbabi published a long eulogy for Salih without mentioning her name apart from in the dedication, holding her comrades (including himself) as responsible for her depression and suicide.

A short and hastily edited selection of her papers was published in 1998—these included an excerpt from her memoirs, a long poem and an essay on the novelist Son'allah Ibrahim's fiction al-Mubtasarun was later reissued in 2016, by the Egyptian General Book Organization, a Ministry of Culture organ, as part of its 'family library' series.

Works al-Mubtasarun [The Premature Ones], 1996. Translated into English by Samah Selim, 2016. Saratan al-Rawh [Cancer of the Soul], 1998. Cairo: Dar al-Nahr.