03-06-2025
Cairo, undelivered: A conversation with Mai Serhan
I read CAIRO: the undelivered letters the morning after Mai Serhan's book launch. I came home carrying the book with a quiet urgency to meet it on my own terms. Not through someone else's framing, not through a room's impression. Just me and the work.
CAIRO: the undelivered letters is a book of epistolary poems: each one a fictional letter written to the city, tracing what remains unsaid, unread or unheard.
So is its author, both letter and city, both voice and witness. Mai is someone I've come to know recently, as a writer and a confidante. Her voice carries a steadiness that feels earned. She doesn't seek approval. She moves through the page with clarity, each line a product of something lived, not just observed. That kind of authorship demands a space that listens. So I gave her that. I woke up the next morning and read the book straight through. Not out of duty, but because something in me needed to.
The book had already drawn me in with its physical form. The airmail aesthetic, the modest production, the sense that you weren't holding a product but something closer to a secret. Reading it felt like unlocking a drawer: hers, or at times, mine.
Mai's writing doesn't seek to provoke. It seeks to reveal. She carries resonance that cuts through time and place. As a Palestinian-Egyptian woman, a mother, a witness, she writes Cairo from within: without apology, without compromise. It isn't aggression that defines her voice, but the refusal to make what's true more bearable.
This isn't a book that asks to be liked. It doesn't ask to be read, even. It asks you to look inward. To notice what stirs, and why. In that way, it reminds you of what art is for. Not to decorate, but to disrupt. Not to charm, but to charge. Cairo doesn't always listen. But Serhan writes anyway, each letter a quiet defiance, meant for anyone still willing to feel. Beneath that defiance is a deeper question: What do we do with the things we never get to say?
That's the question that stayed with me. I wanted to understand how someone keeps writing into silence. How do you sustain a voice when the city around you is unwilling to respond? It's that courage to speak without knowing who might be listening. That's what made me want to ask her more.
***
Adam Makary: Why letters? Why 'undelivered'? What drew you to this form — a dispatch that knows it may never arrive?
Mai Serhan: A letter as a literary device holds enormous dramatic potential. It bridges and emphasizes distance, which leads to conflict. It's private and intimate, often risking exposure. It seldom brings closure and can only provide fragments. A letter-writer may speak with conviction, but because they can only offer their own version of truth, that very limitation became an invitation for me to explore multiple perspectives.
The inspiration came from Bareed el-Gomaa, a popular advice column that ran in Al-Ahram for over 30 years. People wrote in with their problems, and the editor responded. When I finally read the compiled letters, I had an immediate aversion to his advice. It felt paternal, moralizing, rooted in state-approved ideas of what a 'good' person should be. It didn't speak to me.
So I thought, why not dispense with the advice altogether? That shift gave me creative license to invent the letters. Ones that hadn't been published, and others that were too raw, too uncomfortable, too much.
AM: Who, or what, is the Editor in your mind? Is he a real figure, an imagined authority, or something more metaphorical?
MS: The editor stands for the system at large. He's a kind of Zeus figure on the mountain. A removed and impotent god-like voice. He's supposed to stand for truth, hope and justice, but he doesn't deliver.
AM: The book moves between the hyperlocal and the mythic. How do you hold Cairo as both city and symbol?
MS: My interest in Cairo was two-fold: Cairo as material reality and Cairo as literary imaginary. I wanted to map the city's underbelly and position it alongside its grand history and authoritarian present. You can do that with Cairo. Its timelessness allows you to collapse time altogether.
I saw Cairo as Al-Qahira, the vanquisher. Pride and pressure. Mother and monster. Capital of the motherland. A city of mythical dimension. How can it possibly mother more than a hundred million people without depleting, without aborting the task?
That paradox charged the language forward. I wanted to match that emotional intensity with an equally heightened imaginary. What happens when you're contained too long and suddenly released? You explode. That was the space I wrote from. Awe and terror.
AM: These poems feel channeled, almost trance-like. What was your process like? Were they written quickly, compulsively, or built slowly?
MS: I do believe creative thinking is a kind of channeling. It's a generative state that demands your full attention. You enter it with guideposts, and you yield to what the space offers in return. You summon the paradox and start connecting disparate ideas. You listen for that other voice — the voice of your character.
I write compulsively, but not always quickly. Some poems arrive like a baby ready to pop, whether you're ready or not. ' Red Dress ' was one of those. I was emotionally charged and wrote it in 20 minutes. When that happens, the poem finds me, I don't find it.
AM: There's an ache in the voice, exhaustion, but not silence. What kind of response were you hoping for? Did you expect the letters to be read, or was the act of writing itself a form of survival?
MS: Writing is survival. A personal urge to find meaning in chaos, reconcile and connect. Being read is a blessing, of course. It means others connect to you through the writing. But it's also surreal. You work alone for years, then suddenly you're in conversation with a stranger about your inner workings. It's jarring and beautiful at once.
AM: The book doesn't flinch. It names violence without spectacle. How did you avoid turning trauma into performance?
MS: George Saunders gave some of the best advice. He said to move as quietly as possible toward what you feel is heat. The quieter the approach, the more space the reader has to feel.
I try to name things without describing them in detail. That invites the reader's imagination to do the work. You suggest, tease, woo, and leave the door ajar. Whoever's meant to enter will.
AM: One letter ends with 'the petals torn for a false spring.' Can you speak about revolution as a metaphor in your work?
MS: Yes, metaphorically the undelivered letters are, in some ways, an act of protest. They rebel against their original inspiration, Bareed al-Gomaa. These are the letters that don't get selected for publication, that don't make it to print, which, I suppose, ultimately raises questions of censorship.
The way I see it, there is the official narrative, embodied in the person of the editor in a state-run newspaper. He gets to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't. What content is permissible, and what isn't. What kind of advice ensures law and order.
Then there's the alternative narrative of the letters, which speak up, or scream, despite being coerced into silence. I wouldn't go so far as to call it revolutionary, but there is defiance there, and a refusal to disappear.
AM: When does a poem fail? And what does a failed poem still leave behind?
MS: A poem fails when it doesn't startle me with recognition. We need to find each other. That moment needs to feel like discovery. Even if a poem fails, it leaves behind the attempt — the possibility of connection, the attempt at resolution.
AM: There's a tenderness in how the characters appear: maids, scribes, ghosts. Who are y ou responsible for as a writer? Who are you carrying?
MS: I'm responsible for every character in this collection. I carried them all and delivered them to you. I wouldn't have bothered if I didn't care about each of them. AM: Do you consider yourself a poet?
MS: I love poetry. I love writing it. I use its techniques across all kinds of writing. But no, I don't call myself a poet. I get awkward when others do. Maybe it's because the perfect poem still feels out of reach.
There's one by Dorothea Grossman I come back to:
I have to tell you,
there are times when
the sun strikes me
like a gong,
even your ears.
