Key Facts

full title ·  A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey

author · Leila Ahmed

type of work · Memoir

genre · Nonfiction

language · English

time and place written · 1990s, United States

date of first publication · 1999

publisher · Farrar, Straus and Giroux

narrator · Leila Ahmed

point of view · The narrator tells the story in first person, describing her thoughts and feelings about events in her life, though she does give a broad overview of the historical context.

tone · Critical, descriptive, poetic, personal

tense · Past

setting (time) · 1940s–1980s

setting (place) · Cairo, Egypt; Cambridge, England; Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates; the United States

protagonist · Leila Ahmed

major conflict · Ahmed struggles to define her identity in the world.

rising action · Ahmed’s education and increasing awareness of her identity as an Arab and Egyptian in the world open her eyes to new perspectives and create new problems in her search for her identity.

climax · Ahmed comes to the United States to establish herself as a women’s studies scholar.

falling action · Ahmed decides to write about her Egyptian heritage in a memoir.

themes · The existence of two Islams; the richness of cultural pluralism; the politics of language; the prevalence of colonial consciousness

motifs · Place; cultural displacement; communities of women

symbols · The harem; angels; music

foreshadowing · As this is a work of nonfiction, there is no real foreshadowing per se. Instead, repeated motif and symbols, such as music, serve to reinforce the connections that the author is making between events and experiences.