How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #4
[...] what wouldn't I give now to have all those poets and writers to remember and write about and remind people of? I loved the lines she was quoting—but I appreciated them, I realized, only the way I might the poetry of a foreign tongue that I only somewhat knew. They did not have for me the resonances of lines learned long ago. (253)
We know that Ahmed never learned to read classical Arabic as a young person. She's of two minds about this. On one side, she feels that too much authority is given to the textual tradition in Arabic. But she also has some regrets. When she hears the novelist Hanan al-Shaykh read Arabic poetry, she feels like an outsider to the experience. While Egyptian Arabic was the language of her youth, literary Arabic is another creature entirely.
The language barrier is also a reflection of her awkwardness in the Arabic community. While she feels part of the community at the reading, she resists being swept up into a politically defined identity—and that keeps her at arm's length from the others present.
Quote #5
I did feel kin, of course, and I did feel that I was among people who were, in some quite real sense, my community. But was this because of "Arabness"? Was I, for instance, really likely to feel more kin, more at home, with someone from Saudi Arabia than with someone, say, from Istanbul? I doubted it. (254-255)
Ahmed comments on her experience at a reading given by Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh. While Ahmed feels close to the largely Arabic audience, she wonders where the kinship comes from. As she also happens to be "unraveling" Arabic identity for her work, she paradoxically finds herself at a distance from these people. Ahmed quietly resists the idea that people from completely different cultures should be forced into a single identity simply for political convenience.
Quote #6
If I didn't live where I live, I thought to myself, if I were still living in Egypt, I probably wouldn't feel that it was so absolutely necessary to extricate myself from this enmeshment of lies. In Egypt the sense of falseness and coercion would be there in the political sense, but at least in ordinary daily life I'd be just another Egyptian, whereas in the West it's impossible for me ever to escape, forget this false constructed Arabness. (255-256)
At this point, Ahmed is living and teaching in the United States and realizes two things about her search for the origin of Arabness. First, because she lives in America, she can untangle this political construction with a fair amount of freedom—and she must do it to confront the truth about her identity. She's coming up against a lot of ignorance and preconceived notions about what an Arab is, and she needs to get to the bottom of it all.
Second epiphany? If she still lived in Egypt, people would get it. Everyone would understand the falseness of an "Arab" identity and she'd have a lot of simpatico people around her every day. It's the absence of a sympathetic community that compels Ahmed to push forward and free herself from an identity she firmly believes isn't really hers.