Salwa

Author's name: Karim Jamal

Oh dawn, a schoolgirl in gardens, or her laughter is audible, and her angel is gentle, the rose was afraid to meet autumn, Fouad Haddad, a famous broadcaster, a Francophone poet, and a holy martyr; these were the three faces of Salwa Hegazy, since her dramatic disappearance in February 1973. I started this project while searching for the image of Salwa Hegazy engraved in our minds, but at the end of the road, with the discovery of her private and unpublished papers, I found myself in front of a person who had not yet been discovered, and the radiance of her face did not shine as it should have. Salwa Hegazy’s biography was an anxious poetic biography, and a tragic narration of the meanings of fear and the ugliness of the enemy. So, when my steps in research led me and I climbed the stairs of most of the journalistic archive institutions to read what was written about her, all that concerned me was finding a thread that would lead me to understanding Salwa. Despite what was written about her life and after her death, her mystery remains, and the question about her remains unanswered: Why did Salwa Hegazy live her death before she died?