Family History and Place in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey

The chapter explores Leila Ahmed’s autobiography A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey (2012; originally published in 1999). The socio-political circumstances of Egypt and Cairo are interwoven throughout the text, along with Ahmed’s family history. The relational aspect of place becomes particularly important in the autobiography, as Ahmed’s childhood memories and later experiences of living abroad are intricately connected with the places she lived in and visited. The cultural and social aspect of personal memory is here particularly central, as Ahmed ponders the meaning of Arabness in her book and the gendered spaces in which she spent her childhood. The relationship between history, self, and nation are therefore central in Ahmed’s autobiography and the focus of this chapter. Her autobiographical text reveals the impossibility of returning to childhood and the difficulties involved with having one’s identity defined from the outside.