An Egyptian Childhood
I think the main character, or “our friend,” captured me more than any part of the story. This was my first time reading an autobiography—although it read much more like a memoir—about someone who grew up in a vastly non-Western setting, and as I sat down with the clay and imagined myself sculpting a 3-D version of one of the striking landscapes described in the novel, I found myself creating the face of the author instead.
Through the vivid descriptions of his childhood, I felt like I had come to know this Egyptian child, who might have been an abstract concept in my head previous to reading the novel. Even though our cultures, upbringing and circumstance (his blindness) were not the same, I found that I could relate to the general nostalgia that encompassed his childhood memories—the striking and precious memories that he whispered onto the pages of the novel. The “soft, gentle, delicate light,” a fence that seems to loom over his small body as a child, the “greenstuffs” beyond it, and the “sweet” sound of prayers in the air, for example, all reminded me of my own childhood that was also closely acquainted with nature and sensory images.
Thus, even though a memoir of a childhood in Egypt was unfamiliar and strange for me at first, I found many details of the author’s childhood relatable and endearing. I understood what it was like to not cry even though one is in pain because one does not want to be a “whimperer or whiner”, though I might not understand the extent of the pain itself. I understood that to the young author, the fence seemed to literally “stretch on to the end of the world”, as many borders and contained environments did for me as a child.
I loved this novel because I felt like I could not only experience another person’s worldview which is vastly different from mine, but also coincidentally similar because of familiar traits from the human childhood. I liked that I had the opportunity to imagine this child more complexly and understand him more comprehensively as an individual, who has certain ways of viewing the world because of distinct elements of his maturing years.