Comparative American Studies An International Journal

ISSN: 1477-5700 (Print) 1741-2676 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycas20

The Journey by Radwa Ashour

Michelle Hartman

To cite this article: Michelle Hartman (2015) The Journey by Radwa Ashour, Comparative
American Studies An International Journal, 13:4, 209-219, DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2015.1178943

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2015.1178943

Published online: 06 Jul 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 121

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ycas20

Download by: [British University in Egypt] Date: 05 December 2017, At: 04:41
 comparative american studies, Vol. 13 No. 4, December 2015, 209–219

The Journey by Radwa Ashour

Introduced And Translated by Michelle Hartman
Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

This contribution is a translation of the opening chapter of Radwa Ashour’s

The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s American Memoirs [Al-Rihla: Ayyam
Talibah Misriyah fi Amrika] and a brief critical introduction to the author and
her works. Never before published in English translation, this first chapter
shows how The Journey is a memoir deeply engaged in politics, literature, and
people’s struggles. The work charts Ashour’s years studying in the United States
of the 1970s, where she would graduate from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department
of Afro-American Studies and the English Department of the University of
Massachusetts in 1975. A political progressive and leftist writer, critic, and
activist, this memoir reflects not only on her own journey and struggles but
those of the people she met and engaged with in the United States, especially
Black Americans. Coming from an Egypt emerging from the Six Day War,
Ashour links her generation in the Arab world to politically active people in
America in a language and with a spirit that bring the 1960s and 1970s alive. 

KEYWORDS Radwa Ashour, Black-Arab solidarity, third-world liberation struggles,

US-Egypt relations, literary solidarities, Arabic literature

Introduction
Never neutral and deeply engaged in politics, literature, people’s struggles, and what
she calls the ‘most urgent causes of our times’ (1983: 215), a young Radwa Ashour
(b. 1946) charts her years as a student in the United States in her 1983 memoir enti-
tled Al-Rihla: Ayyam Talibah Misriyah fi Amrika [The Journey: An Egyptian Woman
Student’s Memoirs in America]. The book opens in 1973 as Ashour is waiting for her
flight in Cairo on her way to attend graduate school at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, where in 1975 she was recognized as the first PhD graduate of the W.E.B.
Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies (with a dissertation filed by the English
department) (W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, n.d.). This rich and
insightful account of this time of her life remains unpublished in English translation. It
deeply resonates with Ashour’s later works, many of which have recently appeared in
translation (2007, 2010, 2014, 2015). Perhaps best known for her Granada Trilogy — three

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group DOI 10.1080/14775700.2015.1178943

 210   Michelle Hartman

novels detailing life in Andalusia — all of her works are politically committed and pow-
erfully inscribe messages about contemporary society. Her reputation as a progressive
novelist in the Egyptian and pan-Arab context is also linked to her representations of
the lives and struggles of women and deep engagement with Palestine. All of this comes
together in her autobiographically inflected novel, Spectres [Atyaf] (2010). The Journey is
deeply linked not only to this novel, but also to her life’s work as an activist, advocate for
justice in Palestine, leftist writer, and scholar of African American and African literatures.
The text of The Journey narrates the years which Ashour spent in the United States,
from the day of her arrival at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to the day she
left. It includes descriptions of the places she visited in the United States, the challenges
she faced at the university, discussions she had with many friends and colleagues, and
numerous descriptions, quotations, and allusions to the African American literary works
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

she had gone to study. This short excerpt from the memoir illustrates well how the work
manages to capture so vividly the spirit and ethos of the time it chronicles — the early
1970s. Anti-colonial movements, a commitment to popular struggles and people’s liber-
ation, as well as linking scholarship and work on the ground, are all alive and real in The
Journey. Just emerging from the devastation of the Six Day War in 1967, Ashour talks
about the pain of what we call the ‘sixties generation’ in the Arab world and the way
members of it faced the challenges of the times with passion and intellectual honesty.
The Journey offers us a glimpse into this world on its own terms. Rather than looking
back on this era in the disconnected way we tend to embrace now, events, figures, and
ideas based on popular mass movements for freedom truly come alive in this memoir.
Now, more than thirty years old and written about a period (1973–1975) a decade before
it was first published (in 1983), the text is still vibrant and relevant today.
At times painstakingly detailed, this autobiographical narrative could be read simply
as a mundane account of one woman’s life, as in the opening chapter’s account of her
aeroplane journey, settling into a dorm room, and meeting her graduate mentor, the
distinguished activist, scholar, and writer Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. But Ashour inter-
meshes the pressing questions and issues of the 1970s within a quotidian story, as well as
the life of an Egyptian woman within a deeply divided United States society at war both
with itself and abroad. This narrative strategy is both subtle and revealing — telling us a
lot about both her and her larger intellectual projects of valorizing and linking together
the struggles of third-world peoples, especially Arabs, Africans, and African Americans.
This chapter foreshadows the themes explored in more depth in the rest of the work.
Opening with a gesture to iconic Egyptian student-scholar-traveller-translator Rifa'a
Rafi' al-Tahtawi, credited with so much of the early translation of European works into
Arabic, Ashour pays homage to him and his Takhlis al-ibriz fi takhlis Paris (translated
as An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France, 1826–1831), while distancing herself
from him and his nineteenth-century compatriots by clearly stating that she is travelling
to the centre of world imperial power only ambivalently and with the specific goal of
learning as much as she can about Black American literature. Her affinity and solidarity
with Black America is a recurrent and important element of The Journey; her scholarship
on Afro-American literature is woven into her reflections on living in a deeply segregated
society into which she fits uneasily. Race relations in the United States and navigating this
problem as a woman with ‘light brown skin’ are explored in detail throughout the text.
 INTRODUCTION TO THE JOURNEY   211

This awareness and commitment to being exactly who she is – without compromise –
is another theme set up in this first chapter. As a political progressive and a leftist, she
is isolated and alienated in the United States and the university. She describes the first
time she is faced with a white American who may have served in Vietnam, a war she
opposes as a third-world activist. She remains silent upon meeting an Israeli who casually
introduces himself as such, just after the devastation of the 1967 war. She alludes to the
difficulty of choosing to study abroad as a woman alone who has left behind not only
the comforts and expectations of her upper-middle-class Egyptian background, but also
her Palestinian husband whom she married against her family’s wishes. Ashour and her
husband, the poet Mourid Barghouti, have both written about the ways in which they
shaped each other’s lives deeply and profoundly. In an obituary following her death in
2014, one critic referred to their life together as ‘one of the twentieth century’s great love
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

stories’ (Qualey, 2014). Their separation is documented throughout the book in their
letters to each other and in his visit to her later in the text.
Just as Barghouti appears only as Mourid in the text, other important figures populate
this chapter with brief or passing references. ‘Michael’ is the Jamaican-born Thelwell,
founding director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the
university. She speaks of her friend Shirley Graham Du Bois (b. 1896), who facilitated
her trip and acceptance at the university, as her friend who was ‘over sixty’. Other daily
names of the 1960s and 1970s appear here as well: Egyptian cartoonist and poet Salah
Jaheen, Algerian revolutionary Djamila Bouhired, iconic Egyptian singer of satirical
vernacular poetry Shaykh Imam, beleaguered Egyptian political poet Naguib Sorour,
and, of course, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The characters who populate
the chapter are icons of the left in this generation and demonstrate the cultural and
political orientation of Ashour’s world which increasingly includes African Americans
as the work continues.
Radwa Ashour’s work is deeply connected with struggles today, including a number
of recent examples that link the Arab world to North America. The allusions to student
protests deeply resonated with me as I was finishing this translation while student activists
in Montreal protested against austerity. The 2015 protests recall those of spring 2012, in
which local activists called the ‘Printemps erable’ [maple spring] an affectionate, rhyming
reference to its inspiration the ‘Printemps arabe’ [Arab spring], which so shook Egypt,
and to which Ashour herself was deeply committed. Equally important to Ashour’s
lifetime activism and creative work was justice in Palestine. The activist energy among
young people in the United States in solidarity with Palestine, particularly those that
link up with Black American organizing — Black Lives Matter and Palestine-Ferguson
connections –— resonates loudly with the work which Ashour began in the 1970s. The
growth in the United States of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement
and its commitment to ending apartheid in Palestine, as happened in South Africa, speaks
strongly of what she stood for. This translation is an homage to her, and also to those
movements which carry on her legacy in their work.
 212   Michelle Hartman

Chapter One from: The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s

Memoir in America [Al-Rihla: Ayyam Talibah Misriyah fi Amrika] by
Radwa Ashour, translated by Michelle Hartman
I left Cairo at dawn on 30 August 1973. I kissed my farewells and entered the customs
area carrying a big, blue suitcase filled with clothes, books, and a small handbag, which
held my green Egyptian passport, my airline ticket, and a leather wallet. The wallet
held some money and a few pictures of my family. One of these was a small cartoon
by Salah Jaheen. As children, we used to sing his song over and over again, a chorus
accompanying the singer:
Soura, soura, soura
we all want our picture taken
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

a picture of happy people

under our victorious flag.
But now, like then, the question arises if our generation can freeze this moment in time
like a photograph taken under our victorious flag. This is why I’ve kept this picture with
me, beautifully laminated, along with another one that we took after the Six Day War,
but it has burn marks on it because it reflects what we suffered after being charred by
fire. With those two pictures, I kept a third, also of my family. It shows my father, at the
front, imposing and stubborn — torn between desiring to let me go out into the world as
an extension of himself and being a fearful Muslim man with country roots who wants
girls to be sheltered. My mother is in the background, my siblings look enthusiastic, and
I am there with a question on my face.
I wasn’t carrying a picture of handsome, turban-wearing Shaykh Rifa'a with me, but
I’m certain that he was somewhere in my consciousness even if I’d stopped paying close
attention to him. I was, like him, on my way to seek knowledge in a country, ‘far-away
from us, the furthest from consideration’. But I was unlike him too. I was leaving neither
as a neutral person who doesn’t know what she’s faced with, nor like the generation of
researchers who followed him — the ones who left and returned besotted with the bright
lights of imperialism.
When the woman at the counter gave me back my passport and ticket, I waved my
final farewells. I then went through to the departure area, sat down on a big black leather
chair and waited for my flight to be announced. My terrible toothache worsened during
the long hours of waiting and turned into a headache.
What year was this family picture of us taken? In 1962, or at the beginning of the
following year? I remember that we’d sat in front of the photographer during the same
week that I’d seen Djamila Bouhired speak at the University of Cairo. It was the first time
I’d ever entered the university campus. The lights in the big lecture theatre surprised me;
the way they shone reminded me of a bride on her wedding night. We went on a school
bus with two of our teachers and Djamila looked straight at us while talking. She was
a small, thin woman wearing a simple, traditional dress, whose two-coloured green and
white background met in a seam with a red crescent atop it, an Algerian flag behind her.
We all applauded and this tiny woman spoke. Her speech affected me as though it were
giving me guidance to find the right path in life.
‘Was I right in my decision to go abroad?’ This damned toothache — –I don’t know
how I’ll get rid of it. They announced that our flight was boarding. I sat down on the
 INTRODUCTION TO THE JOURNEY   213

plane and fastened my seatbelt, preparing for takeoff. I looked out of the window at the
lavender enveloping the land and sky, recalling that it was at this very same lavender time
of day one year and seven months earlier that the security forces imprisoned thousands
of students who had staged a sit-in inside the lecture theatres at the university. They had
walked out in orderly rows singing the national anthem, ‘My Country, Biladi’. And it was
also at this same lavender time on another day when, on behalf of the Egyptian Writers
and Artists Commission, we — two young men and myself — walked up to the employee
responsible for the central post office on Adli Street to send telegrams to the president of
the republic, head of the parliament, and the prime minister, protesting the imprison-
ment of the students. This lavender dawn is tender and sad. What compelled me to travel
abroad? I stare out of the window and Farid appears to me, looking handsome, smiling
encouragingly with frightened eyes. My toothache intensifies as the plane takes off.
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

‘University students should wait for the next stop’, the driver announced as he pulled
into town. The passengers all got off except me and the young man sitting next to the
window in the row across from me. When the bus stopped again, it was the last stop,
inside the university campus. I got off and the young man followed me. I then also saw
a young woman with thick eyebrows who must have been sitting behind me because I
hadn’t seen her before. The driver gave us our suitcases and I looked around in order to
figure out what to do next. The young man and woman had started having a conversation
in a European language that I didn’t understand. I walked over to them and, in English,
asked them if they were new students. When they responded that they were, I picked up
my suitcase and walked beside them. We put our luggage in the Student Union storage
area and then went to the administration building that had been described to us. We
forgot to introduce ourselves, I thought, so I slowed my pace and said: ‘I’m from Egypt,
my name is Radwa Ashour’.
The young woman was Polish and the young man was Israeli. I was taken aback; I
said nothing. We arrived at the foreign students’ office and I sat down on a chair alone
across from them. When the young woman and man finished speaking with the person
in charge of the office, I looked at him questioningly and he said, pointing at the two of
them: ‘They are going to Prince House, the Graduate Students’ residence. I explained the
way to them; we’ll all meet there in the afternoon’. He gave me an envelope with a map
of the university, some pamphlets, as well as information about the town of Amherst,
the University of Massachusetts, and the other universities in the area.
We went back to the Student Union to get our luggage, and then set off to look for
Prince House. I started to worry about how heavy my suitcase was. I was about two
or three paces behind Theresa, the Polish woman, who had started chatting with the
young man. Eventually we found the building but, not knowing how to get in, we started
walking around it. Every time we thought that we’d discovered the entrance, it was just
another locked door. It was the last day of August; the weather was hot, the humidity
suffocating. I started dripping sweat and shifting my heavy suitcase from one hand to
the other. Finally, we found the entrance.
The director of the house told me that I couldn’t stay there because I hadn’t sent a
prior request and so I would have to sort myself out somewhere else, at least for a night
or two. When the director of the International Students’ Office arrived, he took me in
his car to another student residence to find a room where I could stay for a night. The
man was about thirty, polite, and friendly. He took a lot of care in how he dressed; he
 214   Michelle Hartman

looked like a turn-of-the-century British colonial functionary. His smooth blond hair
was carefully parted to one side. He had rosy cheeks and shiny shoes. He wore a jacket
and tie and spoke in a slow, crisp voice, careful to pronounce every word as though he
were presenting an English language lesson on the radio. He looked odd, especially
surrounded by students wearing shorts and blue jeans, most of them with messy long
hair, hippie-style. To break the silence, I asked him: ‘Have you ever visited Egypt or any
countries nearby?’ ‘No, but I spent several years stationed in Indochina’. Never in my life
had I believed in that old adage, ‘silence is golden’, as much as I did at that moment. But
I felt like, if I opened my mouth once more, he would have just casually added that he’d
been a solider in Vietnam carrying the banner of democracy into the jungles of Asia.
Everything here had started off on the wrong note: in the morning, I had met an Israeli
and, in the evening, a dapper young man who spent ‘several years stationed in Indochina
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

[…]’! What was I doing here?

My first meeting was with the director of the Afro-American Studies Department with
whom I’d only corresponded about my programme of study a few times. Now that I had
arrived I would face a number of ironic and comical situations with him. I hadn’t come
here because I’d wanted to study in the United States particularly, but rather because
of my very specific interest in Black American literature, about which I wanted to write
my doctoral dissertation. In Egypt, I’d been advised to enrol in this particular degree by
Mrs Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Black American writer and widow of the great leader
whose last name she still carried. She was sure of its anti-colonial, liberation-oriented
outlook and the structure of its teaching programme. Mrs Du Bois herself brought me
the university’s application form and recommended me for a departmental scholarship,
telling them that I was a serious Egyptian researcher, a professor at Ain Shams University,
and also a politically progressive writer. This friend of mine, who was over sixty, had
told me that the departmental head was a friend of hers. She thought that I would enjoy
meeting him because of his exceptionally humane personality and intellectual qualities.
While sitting and waiting for my older friend’s friend, I wondered if he would, like her,
be approaching his seventies. I didn’t know if there was a retirement age for university
professors in this country. ‘Here he is. He’s come’, said the departmental administrator
whose office I’d been waiting in. He walked over to me and said, ‘Ms Radwa Ashour’.
A tall young man with a Ho Chi Minh beard extended his hand to me. His hair was
combed up in a neat Afro and he was wearing a loose, brightly coloured, African-print
shirt. Around his neck hung a necklace with a small, ivory, African mask suspended on
it. His skin was light brown, like mine. He had wide eyes with long eyelashes that closed
over them when he was speaking as if he didn’t want to see anything while he was talking,
except what was in his head.
I didn’t know if I felt alienated by this man’s appearance because of my preconception
that he would most probably be a white-haired professor, carrying his years heavily, per-
haps swaying corpulently and seeming shorter than he actually was. Or was it because of
his unexpectedly untraditional appearance within this very traditional university context?
What compelled me to talk to him with a frankness that surprised even me? Was I over-
come by feeling foreign simply because I was faced with someone who appeared different
than what I had expected? Or did something about this man and the way he talked catch
my eye and give me a feeling of familiarity? I told him that I had been wrestling with a
sense of alienation and had started to feel afraid. I carried on by saying, I’m not sure,
 INTRODUCTION TO THE JOURNEY   215

I may just pack my bags and leave. I told him that I wanted to study Afro-American
literature because of my interest in the relationship between literature and the reality
of people’s struggles. I also said that I taught in an English literature department, but
didn’t want to become someone so embroiled in their research that I spent my whole
life and all my efforts studying things which are not at the heart of the urgent issues I’m
preoccupied with — the most pressing causes of our times.
He listened to me and didn’t speak much. He proposed some specific practical steps: I
should meet the Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department, the department
granting me my academic degree. I should then see if this very same professor might be
the supervisor of my work. He then continued on: ‘I also suggest that you add a course
in African literature to your schedule this semester. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe
is here and attending his lectures is an opportunity not to be missed’.
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

As I left the department, my feelings of anxiety and alienation dissipated in the novelty
of this situation, particularly because of the disparity between my mental image of the
professor and the young man who I’d just met. I laughed as I wrote a letter to Mourid
about it. At that time, I still didn’t know that there was yet another ironic aspect to this
situation – I had surprised that man as much as he had surprised me. Didn’t the old
woman say that I was a friend of hers? And didn’t my official papers declare that I had
finished a master’s degree and had six years of teaching experience in the university? Who
was this sitting across from him? In the fall of 1973, I was a petite young woman with a
round face, symmetrical features, a very short, young boy’s haircut, simple clothes, and
the appearance of someone barely twenty years of age!
Michael drove his red convertible with abandon, not paying attention to the speed
even when zigzagging on the mountain roads with their sudden curves. We exchanged
a few words at the beginning of the journey. Then we were silent. Perhaps the place
overwhelmed us with its total greenness, despite a few small signs that fall was at the
doorstep. Yellow and orange and red were all lost amidst the thick green. This took me
back to the house I was born in overlooking the river. The Nile valley stretches up to the
north because of the richness of the river and has become so green thanks to the toil of
emaciated peasants who break their backs to cultivate the land; and it stretches down
to the south, only to be startled by the desert which interferes with it and overpowers
it until it becomes only a narrow strip of green. I sat there, preoccupied. Is it isolation
that I feel in this place? Or the difficulty of connecting with this young Jamaican man
absorbed in something far away that I don’t understand? We were on our way to a town
near Amherst to meet the professor who Michael suggested could be the supervisor of
my work.
This time the professor did not surprise me. He was a man in his sixties, with white
hair, and movements slowed down by the weight of the years carried on his body although
he was still active. He seemed to me to be a fully American professor in his chequered
jacket, a silver chain around his wrist, and rubber-soled shoes. We sat on a spacious
balcony with nothing separating us from the wild plants of the forest except a wooden
trellis that stretched along the balcony’s walls to its roof. We spoke about my programme
of study without great detail. Before I left, this old American professor patted my shoul-
der, saying: ‘Try not to feel so isolated!’ Did my face betray my timidity? The professor’s
words definitely surprised me and I was embarrassed that he’d noticed how much I didn’t
fit in — I hadn’t realized that he could see it.
 216   Michelle Hartman

We got into the car to return to Amherst. On the road, Michael invited me to have
dinner with him and I agreed. As he was stopping the car in front of a shop that sold
fish, he asked me: ‘Do you like lobster?’ ‘I don’t know!’ He got out and returned after a
few minutes carrying a big brown paper bag with some holes in it. I looked inside and
I saw two big sea animals with long, moving legs ending in huge claws. Michael said,
smiling: ‘Don’t despair, I’ll cook you something else!’ We stopped in front of another
shop in Amherst and bought meat, bread, and some vegetables. Then we stopped again in
Amherst and went up the hill rising along the north side of the town across the winding
mountain roads amongst the towering trees whose thick, green, intertwined branches
block out the sunlight. Finally Michael stopped his car, announcing, ‘We’ve arrived!’
Right in the middle of a cloudy greenness in the impending dusk, this place looked
beautiful and unusual to me. This silence that I was listening to resonated strangely, as
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

if it were something new. Michael opened the door and I walked into a spacious kitchen,
bathed in light. He washed his hands, filled two big pots with water and put them on
the stove. He then seasoned the meat before putting it in the oven. I went next door into
the living room, which had a sofa, several chairs, and a little table. Hanging on one wall
was a giant black and white photograph of Che Guevara riding a horse in the jungle, his
face glowing like the star adorning his black beret. On the next wall hung a neat, sym-
metrically arranged collection of small weapons — a rifle and two revolvers. Alongside
the third wall were two wooden planks with books piled up on top of them, rising all
the way up from the ground along its full length. I walked over to examine the titles of
the books, leafing through some of them in order to push aside my recurrent question.
The place was totally silent, confirming this secluded mountain house’s complete isola-
tion and triggering a strange feeling within me to keep asking: ‘What am I doing here?’
Is this simply a foreign young woman looking for a way to feel safe? Or is it a sort of
vague, deeply rooted, anxiety derived from that old-fashioned idea that, when a man
and a woman are alone, the third party is temptation? I went back into the kitchen and
found Michael putting the lobsters into the first pot full of boiling water, just like that,
whole and alive. He also put four ears of corn into the second pot, to boil them. He asked
me: ‘What will you drink?’ ‘Juice’. ‘You won’t drink something else?’ ‘Just juice, thanks’.
We sat down and ate in silence. Michael sat across from me, the picture of Che on his
horse behind him. Why right now did I think about that man, Naguib Sorour, as if he
were a third person there with us? I saw him then just as he was before I had left Cairo,
stern faced and with an obvious but slight limp in one of his legs. Without planning it,
I started telling Michael about the personality of Abdel Nasser, the Six Day War, my
family disowning me for my marriage to someone they didn’t approve of, the student
protests, and the amazing love poem that Shaykh Imam sang about Alexandria and two
specific lines which always gave me solace to recite: ‘I feel like a student at the heart of
this protest / who chanted your name, only to die celebrating’. I’m sure I spoke about so
many topics that evening, or was it only one? I must have spoken quite a lot, how else
could I have been able to talk about the suffering of a generation that was thrust from
these energetic chants into the hell of the Six Day War, its massacres, and their ashes?
When we got in the car so Michael could drive me back to Prince House, I felt relaxed
because I’d lightened the load I was carrying around. I suddenly turned to him and
said, smiling: ‘It’s true. Perhaps we will be burned by the flames and become ashes. But
 INTRODUCTION TO THE JOURNEY   217

perhaps the fire will make us more mature and we will rise from it like prophets […] or
loaves of bread!’
When we got back to Prince House, I said: ‘Wait here one minute!’ I went up to my
room and returned with a small wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl that I had
bought in Cairo. I handed it to Michael through the car window, saying with a smile: ‘I
imagined you much older than me and when I found out that we were close in age, I was
too embarrassed to give you the gift that I’d brought to you from Egypt. Now everything
is different – We’ve become friends, no?!’
To the outside observer, I was a model of the ability to quickly become familiar with
a new reality. I was good at English, I found connecting with people easy, and I like both
to chat and to listen to other people chat. Within a week of my arrival, I knew a lot of
students, both Americans and foreigners. But despite this, my inner anxieties got the
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

better of me, since everything seemed strange and different. From the moment I walked
through the glass doors at Logan Airport in Boston, I stepped out into a new world.
Even the way the rain fell was new to me — it rained heavily on a scorchingly hot day
at the end of August. I was sitting in a taxi, watching the relentless back and forth of
the car’s windshield wipers against the rain, while dripping with sweat because of how
hot and humid it was.
When I first got to the university, classes hadn’t begun yet. Most of the male students
were wearing just shorts, the female students added tiny cotton blouses hardly as big as
your hand, leaving their bellies and backs exposed to the sun. They sometimes walked
barefooted around the place, exchanging passionate kisses in public, and despite this
amusing scene which didn’t offend me or my beliefs, I was certain that I was far away,
so very far away, from everything that I had known and that was familiar. And that I
was alone.
Indeed alone I was. I was in my room in Prince House, days after my arrival, when
someone knocked at my door and a middle-aged woman entered carrying suitcases. She
nodded at me, walked in, put down what she was carrying and left. Then a man came
carrying things too. The woman returned a second time with more things in her arms.
They carried on like this, coming and going, until I realized that the woman must be
my roommate.
But it wasn’t so. At last, a tall, thin, blonde woman appeared. She greeted me and I
greeted her. Then she busied herself with the two people who clearly were her parents
arranging her things: putting her clothes in drawers, her sheets and covers on the bed,
and a typewriter and reams of unopened paper on the desk. I gathered that, despite
how young the woman was, she must have been at the stage of typing up her doctoral
dissertation. I didn’t deduce this solely from the extraordinary amount of paper that
she put next to the typewriter on the desk, but rather from the obvious self-sacrifice and
affection in her parents’ behaviour. The man and woman said goodbye to me and left.
Louisa went out with them. When she returned she was carrying a cotton teddy bear, a
child’s toy the size of a well-built toddler, and put it on her bed. As soon as she sat down,
I asked her: ‘What’s your area of specialization, Louisa?’ ‘Physical education’. ‘Sorry?’
But I had heard right. Louisa had come to university to study physical education. She was
southern, from Maryland she later told me. This was her first time coming to Amherst
and she informed me that her father’s ancestors had Portuguese royal blood, ‘And my
mother’s ancestors […]’.
 218   Michelle Hartman

I didn’t hear the rest of what she was saying; I finally had understood why she looked
down on me, and the reason for the conceited way she had been treating me. She never
spoke to me unless I asked direct questions. She would always respond extremely politely,
reinforcing the distance between us. She woke up very early to the sound of the alarm
clock and ate by herself silently. In the evening, she put her cotton teddy bear under her
head, laid down in bed, and read the Bible. Only once did Louisa initiate a conversation
with me. She seemed anxious, nervous, and apprehensive, as she asked me: ‘What is
your religion?’ ‘I come from a Muslim family’. Total silence. Louisa’s presence in the
room only made me feel more lonely. I sometimes asked myself: ‘Have I lost my mind to
have traded my house in Cairo and Mourid’s companionship for this white American
southerner and her cotton teddy bear?’
I waited for a letter from Cairo. I kept waiting every day, despite all the calculations
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

which told me that it couldn’t possibly have arrived yet. Hadn’t I sent my address only
after I’d arrived? Didn’t the address have to arrive there first before the response could
come? Didn’t the letter take at least a week to arrive in Cairo and another week for a letter
to arrive here from there? I kept in mind how illogical my stubbornness was; I just had to
wait. But I had a persistent need to do something daily in the shadow of this letter. Even
if it never came, anticipation loomed at just the prospect of it! This was the beginning
of my relationship with the little mailbox with my room number — 224 — on it on the
ground floor of Prince House. Each day I checked it several times, looking through its
glass window, not seeing anything, and then opening it just to be sure. I found it empty
and then I left. Was I afraid? At that time I wasn’t yet aware of the extent of my fear, but
I did know that I was anxious. It seemed to me that Mourid and I, who had already lived
in the shadow of a disjointed geography for so long, might be lost in our separation this
time. A boy and a girl […] yes, lovers. But each of us walks down somewhat different
paths in this big, wide world, characterized by its total instability. Seven years had passed
since we’d been friends and we’d been married for three. In Cairo, after we’d discussed
me winning a scholarship to study abroad and I’d accepted it, I felt that perhaps people
I knew were right and it was really stupid to leave the warmth of home: ‘A home is made
by the connections between places and friends and a man you love. And yet off she goes
just like that!’
Those six envelopes piled up on top of each other on our brown desk contain our old
letters, our stories from throughout the three years before we were married, when we
would see each other for one month per year. How many envelopes will we add to this,
how many more letters? The very idea made me ill, I was so upset that I needed to get
in bed and call for a doctor.
But actually I was afraid, even terrified. I was standing like a warrior who feels he’s
betrayed himself by caving in the minute he sees the face of his adversary attacking him.
I told myself that I was going to back out, but I didn’t. I went.
A week after my arrival, the university administration announced that new students
should come to the Student Center the following day to have their photos taken for their
university ID cards. I went to the building at the time indicated. A light rain was falling
through the humidity. In the Center I waited on a long line, in a narrow corridor, feeling
suffocated by the mix of heat and humidity. Eventually it was my turn. The photographer
took my picture and I left.
 INTRODUCTION TO THE JOURNEY   219

A few days later I got my university ID. It had a small colour picture, just a tiny bit
bigger than a postage stamp, showing a young woman with short, unkempt hair and
big, glaring eyes. A look of confused anxiety destroys any of her face’s possible beauty.
If you looked at this picture, you might think she was stupid or a completely terrified
young woman!

References
Ashour, R. 1983. Al-Rihla: Ayyam Talibah Misriyah fi Amrika. Beirut: Al-Adab.
Ashour, R. 2003. Granada [Ghranata], trans. by W. Granara. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Ashour, R. 2010. Specters [Atyaf], trans. by B. Romaine. Northampton: Interlink.
Qualey, M.L. 2014. Poet Mourid Barghuoti on his Wife Novelist Radwa Ashour (1946–2014) [online] 2 December
[accessed 30 January 2016]. Available at: <http://arablit.org/2014/12/02/poet-mourid-barghouti-on-his-wife-novelist-
Downloaded by [British University in Egypt] at 04:41 05 December 2017

radwa-ashour-1946-2014)>.
W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. n.d. [online] [accessed 30 January 2016]. Available at: <http://
www.umass.edu/afroam/alumni/index.html>.

Notes on contributors
Radwa Ashour (1946–2014) was a celebrated Egyptian activist, writer, translator, and
literary critic. She was also a professor of English of Comparative Literature at Ain Shams
University in Cairo, with a specialization in African and African American literature,
which was the field of her doctorate earned at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
In addition to her many novels, most of which have appeared in English translation,
Ashour also published two volumes of memoirs and important works of literary criticism
in Arabic. She won many prizes and honours in her distinguished career, including the
Cairo International Book Fair’s Book of the Year award in 1994 for the first volume of
the Granada Trilogy.
Michelle Hartman is a literary translator and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature
at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, Montreal. She has translated
a number of novels and short stories from Arabic and French into English, including:
Iman Humaydan’s Wild Mulberries, Other Lives and The Weight of Paradise, Alexandra
Chreiteh’s Always Coca-Cola and Ali and His Russian Mother, and Jana El-Hassan’s The
99th Floor.  Her current research is focused on the politics of translation, as well as
connections between the theory and practice of Arabic-English translation. She has
also written on literary connections and solidarities between Arab and Black American
writers and poets.
Correspondence to: Michelle Hartman, Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill
University, Montreal, Canada. Email: michelle.hartman@mcgill.ca