A Border Passage Analysis

Ain ShamsFor Ahmed and her family, Ain Shams is an oasis at the edge of the desert. Its garden is magical and becomes the hallmark of the family home:What we had most loved about our house, its mos...

Since Ahmed is penning an autobiography, she can hardly avoid using first person. The deeply personal revelations and historical observations also make it pretty easy to locate the narrator of this...

In case you were wondering about the authenticity of Ahmed's personal narrative, you need only to check the blurb on the back cover of the work. It straight up tells you that you're reading the mem...

Although there is a fair bit of lyricism woven into Ahmed's memoir, her characteristic style in this work is truthfulness: she's extremely interested in being accurate and fair and in telling thing...

Thankfully for us, the title is no mystery: Ahmed is literally crossing many national borders to get to her current destination in life. But, she's also having to "cross borders" in other respects:...

Ahmed opens her work with a reference to the sound of the reed pipe that she remembers from her early childhood days at Ain Shams. It has a mournful sound to it, as though the instrument yearns for...

Ahmed ends her work by recalling the lives of Bilalia Fula and Al-Hajj Omar ibn Said, Muslim men brought to America as slaves in the early 19th century. Said wrote what is thought to be the first M...

Ahmed writes like an academic with a poetic bent…or maybe like a poet who's super into ever-so-slightly-dusty academia. Basically, she's equally fond of long, discursive sentences and lovely, wel...

Naw, guys. This is a non-linear autobiography infused with academic musings. This doesn't fit any classic plot template. And we'd be willing to bet that your life—including all your personal rumi...

This one's comparatively idyllic. We chart Ahmed's early childhood, schooling, family life, and her move to Girton College. Times aren't 100 percent glorious, but because of things like familial lo...

The City of the Dead sounds like a place where you wouldn't find, uh, living people. In fact, el-Arafa in Cairo hosts many live inhabitants, including families and cemetery workers—all living ins...

There's nothing full frontal in Ahmed's work, but she does speak of two near-molestations, one of which had disastrous consequences for her personal freedom and her relationship with her mother. Ah...

Ahmad Amin, Egyptian historian and writer (42, 45)Roland Barthes (214)Simone de Beauvoir (33)Ludwig van Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata (153)Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (143)Albert Camus (33)R...