Kuwaiti-Palestinian author and academic Dr. Shahd Alshammari had to fully reshape the relationship with her body, as diagnosed with MS at a very young age. Her well-written collection of personal essays at different turns of her sickness, Head Above Water, is not only a much deserved intellectual inquiry into this chronical illness, but also a testimony about the challenges faced by a woman academic in the Middle East surviving every day with disability.
There may not be too many reliable memoirs about life with MS, and even less which integrate cultural and academic reflection on illness, in a wider ableist and exclusionary society. She tells her story with the knowledgeable reflection of someone dealing with the body challenges on a very everyday basis. But the reflection includes as well relationship, women perception on themselves and less-than-perfect-bodies, as well as academia´s unfriendliness towards, again, less-than-perfect-bodies.
Multiple Sclerosis is rarely featured outside the defined medical and scientific context, but memoirs like Head Above Water contributes, on one hand, to share an unique experience to as many - most probably non-medical - readers as possible, and on the other hand to raise awareness about additional approaches such as perception of the bodies and academic exclusion, among others.
For all those reasons, this collection of personal insights on chronic illness is mind- and heart-opening.
Rating: 5 stars
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