Making The Life Of A Modern Bedouin Nomad Into Literature

Miral al-Tahawy was born and raised in a Bedouin village in Egypt, moved (against her family’s wishes) to Cairo and earned a Ph.D., and then came to New York. “The foreigner was the Orientalist,” she says. ‘He was there to watch us. The first time for me to live this role was in Brooklyn Heights. I was the foreigner and I watched them. I was the one doing the ethnography and I was the one drawing them.”