“It was excrutiatingly hard to find myself having to conclude that my father, whom I had admired for his integrity, clarity of vision, and open-mindedness, had after all, and in spite of himself, had a colonized consciousness, cherishing things European and undervaluing the very heritage that had shaped him. Now I no longer struggle with this. I have been through many revolutions in my understanding of my father, my mother, and my own consciousness—understanding them now this way, now that, convinced at one moment that they are this and at another that they are that. For the truth is, I think that we are always plural. Not either this or that, but this and that. And we always embody in our multiple shifting consciousnesses a convergence of traditions, cultures, histories coming together in this time and this place and moving like rivers through us. And I know now that the point is to look back with insight and without judgment, and I know now that it is of the nature of being in this place, this place of convergence of histories, cultures, ways of thought, that there will always be new ways to understand what we are living through, and that I will never come to a point of rest or of finality in my understanding.”
— Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage
