With Matrilineage as a Map

Right from the first chapter, you tell me that Sara Tarek Al-Ameed’s story is not only her own. Sara, a philosophy professor, is spending the night in the women’s section of a Kuwaiti jail, arrested for blasphemy (under a fictional version of a law that nearly came to pass). She reads the graffiti on the walls and floor and toilet of her cell; the words left behind by its previous inhabitants are in many languages: “Arabic, Urdu, Tagalog, Malayalam, French, Hindi, English…messages from one woman to another or to someone far away.” If convicted, Sara knows, she could hang. But in this moment, the writing on the