HEAD ABOVE WATER

A Kuwaiti Palestinian professor of English literature reflects on living with multiple sclerosis.

When she was 18, Alshammari was diagnosed with MS and told that she had little time left to live. “It’s strange how compelling it is to think about your own death while you’re still alive,” she writes. Despite this devastating news, the author defied the odds, going to graduate school in the U.K. and returning to Kuwait to teach university students. Yasmeen, one of her students, became Alshammari’s “friend and confidante” and encouraged her to write the book. When the author got overwhelmed, Yasmeen suggested typing up passages from her diary, a recommendation that resulted in a conversation between the two women about passages Yasmeen found fascinating or confusing. What results is a conversation that meanders from topic to topic, including Alshammari’s fiercely complicated love for her mother (“She is everywhere, a shadow, a ghost, a being that there is no severing from”); meeting an older mentor at the MS society who helped her make sense of her deteriorating body; a near-death experience she had during an experimental treatment; and her first experience teaching Othello to an all-male and an all-female class at her first postgraduate job. Throughout, the author places her personal battles with her body within the context of the disabled community’s battles with a social hierarchy that continuously attempts to rob them of agency. Alshammari’s frequent shifts between tenses and points of view generate a flowing intimacy that fully immerses readers in the traumas and triumphs of her life. While the author is honest about her pain, she never reduces herself to her trauma. This approach results in a vulnerable, compassionate narrative of tenderness and humanity. Ultimately, writes the author, the text is “the result of years of framing an illness narrative, a life-interrupted narrative, and one that captures the different angles of my kaleidoscope as I look inwards.”

An intimate and layered portrait of disabled womanhood.