The Stillborn

Arwa Salih was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party. The party was founded in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War and the Egyptian student movement of the early 1970s.

Salih wrote The Stillborn more than ten years after she left the party and withdrew from political life. It was published shortly after her death by suicide. In it she looks back on the Marxism of her generation and examines the part played by militant intellectuals in the failure of both the national liberation project and the communist project in Egypt.

Her critique speaks to and about her own generation of left activists. It also addresses wider dilemmas of revolutionary politics across the developing world in the postcolonial era, questions that remain pressing today.