How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #1
Postwar revelations about the death camps in Germany and America's dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki now called into question the very notion of European and Western civilization. Many, including people of the class and generation who had once so admired the West, found themselves compelled to ask in what human values, indeed in what garbling of human values, this civilization of Europe was after all grounded. Toward what abyss was this flagship civilization leading humanity? (8)
While Ahmed and her father—and many other Egyptians—admired Europe as the height of modernity and civilization, WWII Europe was showing a very brutal side of itself. The irony doesn't escape Ahmed: her British teachers spent a lot of time chatting up the superiority of European civ, yet current events proved that they had some of the worst vices of humanity. It may not have been a wake-up call for Europeans, but it certainly was for Egyptians, who now had to evaluate their own sensibilities and values as a way to move in to the modern era independently.
Quote #2
Sometimes from my window I saw, across the stretch of wasteland between us and the next neighbors, men crouching by the railway line, defecating. And the dead, borne on litters, passed by on that side of the house toward some burial ground beyond sight on the desert side. (14)
While Ahmed remembers Ain Shams as a kind of garden paradise, an idyllic and comfortable place to grow up, she doesn't have to look far to see a completely different world. It's as if the rest of the world and all of its scariness and uncertainty was swirling around Ain Shams, reminding young Ahmed that reality is waiting for her beyond the garden.
Quote #3
Even in my own childhood, Zatoun, my mother's paternal home, was a place palpably apart, imbued with some unnamably different order and way of being. The aura and aroma of those other times and other ways pervaded it still, in the rustle and shuffle of silks and the soft fall of slippers along hallways and corridors, in the talk and the gestures and in the momentary tremor of terror precipitated by the boom of Grandfather's voice... (99)
Though Zatoun isn't far from Ain Shams, Ahmed remembers it as a completely different realm. That is because it has a sadness to its history—including the death of a beloved son—and a stern but loving grandfather who presides over it. There's also the reminder of more oppressive times, when a great-grandmother was "gifted" to a man (i.e., given as a slave) to start a family. Though Ahmed also has fond memories of her grandmother's receiving room and the female companionship she found at Zatoun, it has a forbidding vibe that she never got at her own home.