My life in books

Edward Said, the Palestinian-born literary theorist and public intellectual who helped found the critical-theory field of postcolonialism, comments in his introduction to his deeply personal and yet subtly political volume of memoirs, that "Out of Place is a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world." Indeed, this memoir focuses on his early life, spent in Palestinian Jerusalem, pre-Nasser Cairo, and pre-civil war Lebanon, all places that changed dramatically during the first 25 years of Said's life, with only casual mentions of his later life as a scholar in America.

Said, who died in 2003, over a decade after being diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, began revisiting, and then writing, his life story after learning of his illness.

So many returns, attempts to go back to bits of life, or people who were no longer there: these constituted a steady response to the increasing rigors of my illness. In 1992 I went with my wife and children to Palestine, for my first visit in forty-five years; it was their first visit ever. In July 1993 I went on my own to Cairo, making it a point in the middle of a journalistic mission to visit old haunts. All this time I was being monitored, without treatment, by Dr. Rai, who occasionally reminded me that I would at some point require chemotherapy. By the time I began treatment in March 1994 I realized that I had at least entered, if not the final phase of my life, then the period—like Adam and Eve leaving the garden—from which there would be no return to my old life. In May 1994 I began work on this book.

Said's sense of being an outsider, out of place, began early: growing up as a foreigner in Cairo, visiting family in Palestine, spending summers in Lebanon as the cousin from Egypt, Edward Wadie Said was the child of a relatively wealthy Palestinian Christian family, whose father had lived in the U.S. and had American citizenship, whose parents had named after the Prince of Wales, a Levantine child schooled first among the children of the British Colony in Egypt, and later among children of Americans living in Cairo. His accounts of his family life give the picture of a young boy who was never quite able to live up to the expectations of a domineering father or to please an emotionally manipulative mother who expressed ambivalence and disappointment about her children.

He was not seen as a promising scholar; his later academic interests in music and literature were nurtured quietly, outside of both the family circle and the school environment, a secret interior life neither his parents nor his teachers and schoolmates saw.

Slowly I found ways to borrow books from various acquaintances, and by my middle teens I was aware of myself making connections between disparate books and ideas with considerable ease, wondering about, for example, the role of the great city in Dostoyevsky and Balzac, drawing analogies between various characters (money lenders, criminals, students) that I encountered in books that I liked and comparing them with individuals I had met or known about in Dhour or Cairo. My greatest gift was memory, which allowed me to recall visually whole passages in books, to see them again on the page, and then to manipulate scenes, characters, giving them an imaginary life beyond the pages of the book. I would have moments of exultant recollection that enabled me to look out over a sea of details, spotting patterns, phrases, word clusters, which I imagined as stretching out interconnectedly without limit.

Said's family was in Palestine in 1947, where he experience the first of many dislocations from the places and environments of his childhood. Despite the tension in Jerusalem, Said was experiencing a brief period of feeling "at home" in his life - attending an all-boys Arabic school, he felt for the first time he was with others like him. This was short-lived, as between november of 1947 and summer of 1948, most of his family and their social circle left Jerusalem. Said and his parents returned to Cairo just before Christmas.

On November 1, 1947 - my twelfth birthday - I recall the puzzling vehemence with which my oldest Jerusalem cousins, Yousif and George, bewailed the day, the eve of the Balfour Declaration, as “the blackest day in our history.” I had no idea what they were referring to but realized it must be something of overwhelming importance. Perhaps they and my parents, sitting around the table with my birthday cake, assumed that I shouldn’t be informed about something as complex as our conflict with the Zionists and the British.

Said's own family, mostly middle class and well-off, did not suffer materially from the erasure of Palestine. But he saw the plight of Palestinian refugees who lacked such privilege through the work of his aunt Nabiha, a physician who moved to Cairo and worked with displaced Palestinians.

It was through Aunt Nabiha that I first experienced Palestine as history and cause in the anger and consternation I felt over the suffering of the refugees, those Others, whom she brought into my life. It was also she who communicated to me the desolations of being without a country or a place to return to, of being unprotected by any national authority or institutions, of no longer being able to make sense of the past except as bitter, helpless regret nor of the present with its daily queuing, anxiety-filled searches for jobs, and poverty, hunger, and humiliations. I got a very vivid sense of all this from her conversation, and by observing her frenetic daily schedule.

Despite feelings of "not fully belonging," the dominant social environment of Said's youth was the community of wealthy non-Egyptian Cairo residents - Levantine, Jewish, American, British - in which he grew up. But like the other environment in which he spent time, the Palestinian Jerusalem of his youth, this began to dissolve as unrest in Egypt grew through the 50s and 60s with the development of Arab nationalism and Muslim fundamentalism.

In 1948, Said travelled with his family to the U.S., where his father sought treatment for a medical condition. This was in a sense the beginning of his slow departure from the Middle East, even though the family returned to Cairo, where he continued to attend school for three more years.

In the summer of 1951 I left Egypt and spent two weeks in Lebanon, three weeks in Paris and London, and one week on the Nieuw Amsterdam from Southampton to New York, for the rest of my schooling in the United States. This included high school then undergraduate and graduate degrees, a total of eleven years, after which I remained until the present.

The sheer gravity of my coming to the United States in 1951 amazes me even today. I have only the most shadowy notion of what my life might have been had I not come to America. I do know that I was beginning again in the United States, unlearning to some extent what I had learned before, relearning things from scratch, improvising, self-inventing, trying and failing, experimenting, canceling, and restarting in surprising and frequently painful ways. To this day I still feel that I am away from home, ludicrous as that may sound, and though I believe I have no illusions about the “better” life I might have had, had I remained in the Arab world, or lived and studied in Europe, there is still some measure of regret.

After 1951 Said spent most of his time in America, studying at school and later at Princeton University. He continued to spend summers in the middle east, in Cairo and Lebanon, with his family. In his autobiography, his discussions of these times are increasingly linked with mentions of growing instability in the region. Eventually his family left Cairo for Beirut, where his widowed mother remained for much of the Lebanese civil war. Said eventually made his permanent home in America, and though he came to see personal benefits to his sense of being the eternal outsider, he remained for the rest of his life, out of place.

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are “off” and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.

Orientalism, Edward Said

I have, at long last, read this classic work that is considered to be one of the foundations of post-colonial studies. As I understand it, Said's underlying premise - one that is now very much a part of post-colonial criticism and political activism - is that the colonial and imperial cultures of Europe (and North America), by the very fact of their colonial and imperial position, create images of colonised nations and peoples that are not congruent with how these colonised people and nations perceive themselves, or with the realities of life and culture in these nations and among these peoples. Nonetheless, colonial powers, even after they lose direct control of colonised people, continue to impose these images from a position of assumed superiority, and this colours all discourse in colonial and former colonial powers about the colonised nations and peoples. The representation of a colonial nation in literature, art, and other cultural artefacts, becomes the nation itself, in Western eyes, and all discourse - including consideration of current economic and political policy - occurs within the framework imposed by the representation.

Said applies this premise to an examination of Orientalism - at the time of his writing (in 1978) the term used to describe the academic field of study devoted to the literature, history and culture of countries of "The Orient" - with particular focus on how Orientalists represented in their work the cultures of the Middle East.

It is a fascinating jounrney through the processes by which first, all Islamic, Arab and Middle-Eastern cultures are elided into one, and that one is represented as both oppositional and inferior to Western cultures in very specific ways.

What is particularly important about Said's argument is that he directly connects cultural representations with political ideology and goals:

Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically, innocent; it has regularly semed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has convinced me... that society and literary culture can only be understood and studies together. (p. 27)

My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting. In other words, representations have purposes, they are effective much of the time, they accomplish one or many tasks. (p. 273)

While I had gleaned many of the principles of Said's arguemnts from later discourses in both post-colonial literary criticism and political theory, it was well worth it to go back to the beginning and look at the evidence, so to speak.