Soueif Interview

Regular readers of this blog know about my love for Ahdaf Soueif’s work (In The Eye Of The Sun is a favorite of mine and I often re-read her short stories for pleasure or for observation.) So I was thrilled to see an interview with her in the Guardian.

MM: Where are we situated today?

AS: Well, I had believed that we had entered a historical stage which was genuinely post-colonial: a free space where the ideological, emotional, philosophical underpinnings of inequality had been repudiated, rejected by the west, our past colonial masters. In the 60s, it seemed that, along with racial discrimination, the subordination of women and queer-bashing, colonialism had become profoundly unacceptable. And now we discover that this sense of a new-found equality was not, in fact, well-founded. That the idea of there being enormous essentialist non-negotiable differences between cultures and peoples is actually one that remains powerful and might be the idea that is going to shape the world in the decades to come.