Open Filters

Autobiography Posts

It Happened to Me Thus

Qazi ‘Abd al-Ghaffar
1950
Muradabad, India (Original Language: Urdu)

In the same way that a broken film projector fails to display the full image on the screen, these blind impressions of the beginning [of my life] hardly remain on the forgotten shelf of my memory. How strange it is! The first thing [of my childhood] that I remember is a corner of our house …

The Book of Life

Qaisari Begum
1936
Medina (Original Language: Urdu)

In Medina Now it was time for us to travel to the holy city of Medina. My heart was bursting with happiness. When the dawn of that blessed day arrived, we went down the stairs of the chambers we were staying in and waited for the car to arrive. First, we went from Mecca Mu’azzama …

American Letters

Herawati Latip
1941
Barnard College, New York, NY (Original Language: English)

Across the Pacific August 24. (pg. 19): How queer that after having been two years in Japan, I finally met the right girlfriend on the boat bringing us to America. I just met her tonight. She is Japanese, not that pale white woman face, but she is just like any other modern girl. Modern in …

Meatless Days

Sara Suleri
1989
Lahore, Pakistan (Original Language: English)

    Suleri Meatless Days   Extract reproduced by permission of The University of Chicago Press.   Further reading:  Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (The University of Chicago Press, 1989) [http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3774918.html] Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (The University of Chicago Press, 1992) [http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3697182.html] Sara Suleri Goodyear, Boys will be Boys (The University of Chicago …

Village Childhood

Muhammad Radjab
1950
West Sumatra, Indonesia (Original Language: Bahasa Indonesia)

FROM: Chapter 1: A Lake Singkarak Child Why I was born into this world, I do not know.  Why I was born in Minangkabau puzzles me even more.  These two things have surprised me very much and have bothered me since I was little.  But I will not bother with things I do not know …

Femme d’Afrique

Aoua Kéita
1975
Bamako, Mali (Original Language: French)

From Medical School in Dakar to the Maternity Clinic in Gao Upon graduating from the medical school in Dakar in 1931, I found myself in Gao (northern Mali) towards the end of December. As soon as I was notified that I would be posted to this city, considered by Bamako residents to be another world, …

A Border Passage

Leila Ahmed
1999
Cambridge, MA (Original Language: English)

Leila Ahmed, ‘A Border Passage – And Some Further Thoughts and Afterthoughts’ [http://barnard.edu/sfonline/heilbrun/ahmed_03.htm]

Nowhere in my Father’s House

Assia Djebar
2007
Algeria (Original Language: French)

‘THE RIPPED UP LETTER’ A ripped up letter: we are still in the village, during the first days of July 1952. It is my sixteenth summer, I believe. My father’s angry face hovers over the letter written to me by a person I do not know, a letter my father has just ripped up. I …