The journey

Author's name: Radwa Ashour

Running is a state I always live in. In my childhood, the energy of life within me was insistent and overflowing, so I ran. In my adolescence, I ran out of fear of my growing body and the awaited harem. Then I kept running so as not to lose my standing with the men of my generation. I ran to learn, I ran to become independent, I ran so that my family would not return me to the fold of their love and guardianship, and I ran so that society would not throw me into the box of inferiority pre-destined for women. I kept running until it became second nature to me. Thus, since I arrived in America, I also found myself running to ward off alienation; to fulfill multiple academic obligations; in pursuit of a quick education that would bring me back to Egypt)). Radwa Ashour, on her journey to obtain a doctorate in Afro-American literature from Amherst College in Boston, shares with us the details and memories of the journey, her observations, and her relationships with those around her in a new society. She did not go to it with the neutrality of someone ignorant of what lay ahead, nor was she like generations of envoys who went and returned, enamored with the lights of imperialism. Rather, she went with the awareness of a struggling Egyptian woman and the wife of a Palestinian poet whose cause she believed in.