Leila Ahmed, "A Border Passage - And Some Further Thoughts and Afterthoughts"
(page 3 of 6)

So much, then, for my readings from the memoir. What I am going to do next is just reflect on the process of writing it.

When I think back to this, I think, first of all, about the fact that the way the book now opens, with a reference to music, had actually been how I had begun writing it on a day in July 1991, soon after mailing off the manuscript of my last book to Yale. This was long before I had an outline or even any notion as to what this book might be. And so, those opening words and also the sounds with which the book now begins, were there from the start. They were its beginning.

But I now realized I hadn't, after all, just been spontaneously thinking about how the book opened. Rather, these thoughts had been part of an ongoing rumination in response to something I had read recently in a book about memoirs in preparing to come to this conference. Someone in one of those books had said that women, and in particular, Third World women, write back. Reading this I'd had one of those moments of thinking - ah, yes, of course that's what I was doing - writing back. And my evidence, in the case I was now making in my head to prove this, was precisely that the book opened in the way that it did - with a reference, as you heard, to music.

Why else, this argument in my head went, would I have begun in that way if I weren't writing back? Wasn't I in fact responding quite precisely by beginning in this way, to the beliefs and myths in the midst of which I lived, about the miserable, oppressed lives of Muslim girls in those backward Muslim Arab countries? Wasn't I plainly saying through this: no, that's not it at all, far from it and on the contrary - it was as marvelous and sweet and replete as music. I actually no longer agree now with this passing theory I had as to why I began as I did. And I mention it only to explain my train of thought. It's true, though, I think, that we write back, in the sense that we are always in the midst of conversation, many conversations. And it's true too that I'd no doubt have written a different book had I been living in Egypt and writing firstly for that audience.

Later, when I glanced at the early draft of this book, I saw that though I had been right in remembering that music and the sounds with which the book begins had always been its starting point - the actual words I had written had, in fact, been different. All the ingredients were there. Trees, desert, birds, reed pipe and so on. But set down, I suppose, just as they came. The sentences in that first draft distinctly did not flowing as fluently as they do now in print. Of course, we routinely edit and rewrite as we write - or I do, at any rate.

But I find myself now sometimes imagining somehow freeing myself of this practice, figuring out some way of writing without revising, refusing to let myself rewrite. Because, though, as I tell myself, I do this in the interest only of greater clarity and readability, or whatever - not to impose conformity, nevertheless, that process itself must surely always be introducing and imposing conventions as we bring thoughts and words into line with norms of thinking and writing.