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Quote #1
Father admired Mother's voice enormously and would say that she could have been a professional singer. "But Mother was not a professional anything!" I find myself involuntarily thinking, in a thought that is really only an echo or ghost of an old thought that I once harbored intensely and angrily as an adolescent. (24)
Ahmed regrets thinking of her mother in the negative whenever she remembers her life with her. In this case, she probably can't be blamed: Ahmed is a teen and in full-blown rebellion against everything her mother represents. At the time, she's not willing to admit that her harsh judgment of mom is influenced by her own ambitions and the perception of Arab women by other cultures. When she remembers her mom, she's got to fight with this adolescent response, which refuses to die gracefully.
Quote #2
Sometimes, though, she and her sisters and other women relatives would gather together to make an evening of it, listening to one of Um Kulsum's concerts the first Thursday of every month. They would sit, consuming coffee and lemonade, smoking, relishing this singing as if it were some rich and subtle feast. To us children, it sounded like endless monotonous wailing. (24)
Ahmed is judging her mother's way of being (i.e., not professional) and her native culture, as embodied by the women in her family. Ahmed, along with her father and siblings, has left Arab things behind in favor of European culture and "modernity." The music, movies, and literature of Europe seem very shiny and promising to them in ways that Arabic culture does not. Ahmed remembers her mother as intimately connected to Arabic culture because of moments like these—and that adds to her negative perception of her mom. It's something that she will later regret.
Quote #3
Had Samia been a close relative...love and lyricism would have been dismissed as just so much nonsense, the indulgence of which could lead to the jeopardizing of one's honor and purity and the honor and purity of one's name and the family name—and nothing, absolutely nothing, was worth that. (70)
Ahmed observes that her mother—normally strict when it came to matters of female sexuality—showed great compassion to a second cousin who found herself caught between two men. It seems like a type of hypocrisy to Ahmed, that her mother could be loving in this instance and like steel when it came to her own daughter.
She later understands that her mother had tried to cope with the enormous pressure her culture placed on women to preserve their sexual purity—and that if Samia had been her own daughter, their own family honor at stake, her mother would have reacted very differently. However, it's almost impossible for Ahmed to figure out which side of her mother is her natural state.