In her Sawiris award-winning novel, Mariam, It’s Arwa, Areej Gamal explores the interweaving of past and present in the lives of two young Egyptian women.
Mariam and Arwa are each burdened by grief and loneliness, yet a chance encounter at a subway station opens up new possibilities for love and human connection.
“The doors at the metro car opened. I don’t remember the crowd, just you planted inside like a traffic light, standing there with your back to the world, which was me…I was intimidated, as if you’d stepped out of my dreams.” This is Mariam’s first impression of Arwa when she meets her at a subway station near Cairo University during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.
Arwa returns from Germany in the wake of the revolution, searching for her home, her mother’s memories, and a place to live and play music.
Mariam, who lives with her grandmother, longs for comfort and love after losing her parents in a car accident. Together, Mariam and Arwa will have a chance to share their stories, heal from the past, and rediscover love.
Fragments of memory
Mariam and Arwa are shaped and confined by their pasts. Each of them carries emotional wounds that time alone cannot fully heal. However, sitting together, sharing these wounds and speaking about past memories and stories will help them find a fragile way toward acceptance and rebirth.
The novel opens with Mariam recounting her childhood to Arwa. She grew up in Riyadh in a deeply conservative, traditional family.
For her mother, Siddiqa, giving birth to a girl wasn’t welcomed by her grandmother. Mariam even recalls a tape recording from her grandmother, in which she tells her father, Muhammad Ali, that he has the right to “take another wife” so she can bring him a boy: “By law, you get four wives; one of them has to give you an Ali.”
From an early age, Mariam felt unwanted. “I wasn’t Baba’s companion, or his remaining hope.”
After her parents’ tragic death, Mariam returns to Egypt to live with her grandparents. Loss forced her to grow up too soon, shaping a loneliness that follows her into later life. “Because of the word ‘death’, Arwa, the Mariam you love was born.”
By contrast, Arwa’s story is defined by freedom and courage. Her mother, Sara, is an educated and rebellious young woman who falls in love with Michel, an Egyptian carpenter involved in anti-occupation protests.
Sara refuses to obey her father’s order to marry her off to a state security officer. Her love for Michel was real. They meet in an apartment on Champollion Street. This space comes to embody escape and freedom.
Later, Arwa takes it as her home, thereby inheriting her parents’ love story, which becomes intertwined with her own and with Mariam’s.
“Nothing from the past can die. Even people who die will soon come back to life. They’ll rise and talk about what they did and what was done to them.”
Mariam and Arwa emerge from two vastly different social worlds, almost two different Egypts, yet their connection and love feel inevitable. “Your Egypt was different, and I craved it without realising it.”
Music binds them, too. Arwa is an oboist. She plays freely at parties, on the streets, wherever she chooses. Mariam, in turn, finds herself drawn to this instrument, its sound enchanting her soul and body, bringing rhythm back to her life.
Finding home
“Egypt, the apartment on Champollion, the revolution, the oboe.” Within the apartment on Champollion Street, set against the backdrop of a roaring revolution, Mariam and Arwa find love, and with it, a delicate healing.
Mariam discovers warmth and refuge in Arwa, who, in her own way, longs for peace and companionship among their shared loneliness.
The apartment, once shared by Arwa’s parents, becomes a symbol of deep love and a quiet rebellion against inherited rules and traditions.
In this space, Mariam and Arwa’s relationship offers a cure to their soul, a home they’ve long been missing.
Even the revolution unfolding outside mirrors their rebellious love, becoming a witness to their passion. “The revolution is raging just a few steps away from us. Tomorrow, I’ll take you down there, fanning to its flames, and letting it fan our own.”
For Mariam and Arwa, what matters most is to break free from the weight of the past and to discover a space where they can live, hope, and exist on their own terms, that is, a space defined by intimacy and freedom.
After years of suffering and displacement, Mariam, orphaned at a young age, finds something closer to home, something like salvation.
Arwa, a lost soul searching for belonging, finds shelter that brings her closer to her parents and their love story. “You were there, and you weren’t, a leaf on the surface of the river, leaving the world behind and floating to the microbus stop, and why? Just so I could go back home.”
A vision of hope and humanity
Mariam, It’s Arwa presents a reflection on human experience: on what it means to endure, to connect, and to begin again.
Mariam and Arwa, two young Egyptian women whose past was unfair to them, find a chance in the present to live and fall in love anew.
From vastly different worlds, they are brought together by the oboe and a shared apartment on Champollion Street, which allows them to heal and love without fear.
In her compelling narration, Areej Gamal delves into the deeply personal and emotional dimensions of human experience, often neglected in times of conflict in the Arab world.
She explores divisions of class, tradition, and thought, while suggesting that love can bring together even the most profound differences and restore a sense of shared humanity.
Mariam, It’s Arwa ultimately offers a powerful vision of hope and humanity in a region long shaped by loss and despair.
Joyce Bou Charaa is a Lebanese freelance writer and book editor, with a keen interest in writing about literature, culture, and history
Follow her on Instagram: @joyboucharaa
