The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt

A poignant reckoning with the Marxism of a generation and its militant postcolonial intellectuals.

Arwa Salih was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party, founded in the wake of the Arab–Israeli War and the vibrant Egyptian student movement of the early 1970s. Written more than a decade after Salih quit the party and left political life―and published shortly after she tragically took her own life―The Stillborn offers a devastatingly honest look at the tragic failure of both the national liberation and communist projects in Egypt.

This powerful, unflinching critique speaks not only to and about Salih’s own generation of left-wing activists, but also extends its gaze outward. The Stillborn addresses the broader, still fiercely salient dilemmas of revolutionary politics that continue to echo throughout the developing world in the postcolonial era.