A Border Passage Themes

Ahmed realizes two important things about memory in this work: 1) It's crucial to an autobiography, which is pretty much a recollection of things past; 2) It's completely subjective and unreliable....

Because of the complicated relationship with her homeland, Ahmed truly becomes a citizen of the world. (In fact, she's now an American citizen.) As such, you might think a sense of alienation would...

In many ways, Ahmed's life story is a continuous coming-into-being narrative. She speaks of those crucial moments when one part of her life ends (sometimes spectacularly) and another opens out befo...

Ahmed focuses intently on the granting (or taking back) of power and authority in this work. In the realm of politics, we see the struggle between colonial authority and the need for self-determina...

Ahmed's work is especially awesome at defining spaces, both physical and conceptual: gender limits, inner spaces (think "colonized consciousness"), geographical/cultural boundaries (East versus Wes...

Oh, where to start? Ahmed and her family suffer at the hands of colonial powers and from spiteful domestic politics. It takes a while for Ahmed (who loves all things British) to understand that the...

Ahmed confesses that she feels almost nothing but negativity for her mom. As a youngster, she thinks of her mom as backward and somewhat useless: she has no profession and seems to uphold all the s...

An autobiography is the perfect genre for any author to dig deep and learn/reveal important truths about herself. And Leila Ahmed does not disappoint in this department. From her earliest confronta...

Ahmed often meditates on the difference in perspective between men and women. As a woman who has lived in gender-segregated societies, she believes that there's a "gulf" between men and women in ho...

Ahmed's relationship with religion is complicated…to say the least. She sees a duality in Islam: there's a women's version (part of a living and oral tradition) and a men's version (based on text...