A text by Iman Mersal inaugurating the "Howdunnit" series, part crime literature and part archival research, exploring how different modes of investigation converge and diverge.

To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death so much as feeling impelled, somehow, to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. Whether or not you are hoping to tell the story and share it with others, you might be able to give this corpse a name and lend a meaning to its life. The corpse is the researcher's question. Urgent, mysterious, distorted or even inconsistent, it is a question that issues from the present—the here and now—but which lacks the language required to speak it.

Iman Mersal (born 1966 à Mit 'Adlan) is an Egyptian poet, writer, academic and translator. She works as an Associate professor of Arabic literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. An anthology of her works was translated into more than twenty languages and she has five poetry collections published.