Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman's Journey.
             1999- 2000 New York: Penguin Putnam Inc.
             In regard to Leila Ahmed's latest novel, the truth is definitely in the title. A border passage is an intimate account of life, and the journey one embarks on when one truly wishes to 'live life.' Ahmed writes about 'border passages,' passages from girlhood to womanhood, citizenship to immigrant, from Arab nationalism to Western feminism, and perhaps most importantly Egyptian to Arab. This book is a memoir, but it doesn't confine itself to the restrictions of the entirely personal. A Border Passage embodies the notion that the personal is political: and the political is also personal. And it's her 'personal' that take on the events that fashioned Egypt, her mother nation, which makes this novel brilliant. Leila Ahmed calls her book just a "work of memory," however it is much more than that. She delves into the Suez Crisis and Nasser's Arab Nationalism, what it means to be Arab and when exactly Egyptians became Arab, and finally the Harem reexamined in regard to "aural" Islam.
             A Border Passage, is the story of her intellectual and emotional journey from a advantaged childhood in post-world War II Egypt to Cambridge University in the sixties and finally to the United States, where she now teaches and lives. It is a luxuriously perceptive account of the internal conflicts of a generation coming of age during and after the disintegration of European imperialism. Ahmed grew up in the final days of the British Empire, when the words 'the West' 'imperialism' had not yet obtained the implications they embody nowadays, they had not yet become synonyms for 'racism,' 'oppression' and 'exploitation'. (5). Her correlation to colonialism and to English speaking culture is complicated. Race, culture, and language ...