Leila Aboulela presents herself and is left feeling ambivalent about the complications of such a discourse. Using extracts from her published writings and relating them to personal incidents, the writer describes some of the difficulties of her move from Sudan to Scotland. She finds encouragement in the Sufi saying, Travel away from home and the difficulties will be a medicine for your ego's badness, you will return softer and wiser. And she finds a new life as a writer. She discusses some of the challenges she has faced in writing autobiography (accuracy, context, what to stress and what to leave out) and concludes that for her, writing fiction offers more freedom and comes more naturally. It is better, she concludes, to present a specific story, a smoothed-out model. ********** Where are you from? This is a popular question in Britain where identity has come to matter more than what we achieve or whether we are kind or disloyal. So every other day, someone looks at me with cruel or gentle interest and asks 'Where do you come from, Leila?' I then have to go through the routine, a script, though sometimes I deviate, get carried away ... I say, I am Sudanese, but my mother is Egyptian, I was born in Cairo but that was only because my mother was visiting her parents. I lived in Khartoum, but every year we spent the summer months in Cairo. I met my husband when I was thirteen, no no it wasn't an arranged marriage, that's mostly an Asian custom, we're not Asian but we're Muslims and most British Muslims are Asians--look at the figures--go to a mosque in Ramadan to break your fast and you'll eat Asian food which is very nice, go on Friday and you'll hear khutbas in Asian accents ... no it was not an arranged marriage. We got married when I was twenty-one after I graduated from the University of Khartoum, no he graduated from the American University in Cairo, no he is not Egyptian, he is Sudanese, but his mother is British and he was born in Liverpool which is why, in a roundabout way, we are now living in Aberdeen. No his mother is not Scottish ... and my English? I went to an American school in Khartoum when I was seven, yes it was unusual, I was there four years then I went to a private school and that was all in English and the University was in English ... I studied Statistics, yes everyone is surprised when I say that, and I have a degree in Statistics from the London School of Economics! It was an odd place, part of London but not part of London, it had no trees and no gardens ... I actually came to Britain to study, I didn't know I was going to stay but we stayed and then I had no idea I was going to leave and I wrote a story about coming to study statistics at the LSE, but in the story I changed LSE into Aberdeen and the story won a prize--the Caine Prize for Writing--Ben Okri was the chairman of the judges and in The Times they called it the African Booker and said the story about cultural confusion was comic, though when I wrote it I didn't mean it to be comic but then they laugh at horrors in Britain, they laugh at everything and I like that, I can relate to that, sometimes you can't help but laugh ... The prize, yes it was wonderful, I travelled all the way to Zimbabwe to be given the prize, and Harare was just like Khartoum, it felt so much like home, you step off the aeroplane in a place you've never been to before and you feel at home. And so on ... By that time my listener would be exhausted and ready to sit down. I would be exhausted too and ashamed of all that clutter. Most of the time I pick and choose, I give only snippets depending on the questioner, depending on my assessment on how much truth they can swallow. Accuracy is complicated and messy. Better give an extract, a sample, a story with a main character in one or two places, specific, well-defined. Better present a smoothed-out model, after all I have done a lot of that in statistics--modelling variables. …