Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities ...

Leila Ahmed’s memoir, A Border Passage, relates a personal experience and an interpretation of that experience as it closely connects with political and social events of the time. Ahmed reconstitutes her identity as an Arab Muslim woman living in Egypt through the British occupation and the Nasserite dictatorship, then in England with its racism, and finally in America. This chapter examines the story of A Border Passage in terms of the cultural implications of the constructs of the Arab Muslim female identity as Leila Ahmed experienced and remembers it. Experimenting with autobiography, memoir, documentary, history, and fiction, Ahmed crosses geographical, literary, and historical borders in search of her identity. These geographic movements and border crossings reveal to Ahmed nuances in the varying constructedness of Arabness and stir her intellectual curiosity to active inquiry. This strand of inquiry runs through the entire memoir as Ahmed examines different constructions of Arab identity to “examine, analyze and think about the world which [she is a part of] from the vantage point [of] the margins” (288). Combining her child’s-eye account of Egypt’s twentieth-century transformation and her later account as an enlightened Egyptian scholar after travels to the West, Ahmed examines her identity as an Egyptian woman. Reading the history of Egypt and analyzing the vivid memories of her own childhood, Ahmed comes to a clearer understanding of what it means to be a Muslim Arab woman—in the Arab world and in the West. As a result of this enlightenment, Ahmed understands that “the world was not as [she] assumed it to be and its seas and continents were not after all what [she] thought they were” (249).

The complexity of Ahmed’s emotions about her own sense of Arabness trace back to a number of experiences: first as a non-Western Arab and, more specifically, as one who grew up during the transition from British occupation to national independence; then as a student in England; then as a temporary resident in Abu Dhabi, a country in the heart of Arabia; and finally as a permanent resident and citizen of the United States. Ahmed enjoys a “white life” in Egypt and “gets colored” at Girton College in England.