Out of Place: A Memoir Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR EDWARD W. SAID’S

  Out of Place

  “A voyage into a cruel, luxuriant, mysterious land called childhood, which makes Orientalists of us all.”

  —Newsday

  “Said is in place among the truly important intellects of our century. His examined life, from the tragic and triumphant perspective of a mortal illness, is superbly worth living. I know I shall not read a work to match this one this year, or for many years.”

  —Nadine Gordimer

  “Out of Place is an intensely moving act of reclamation and understanding, a portrait of a transcultural and often painful upbringing written with wonderful vividness and unsparing honesty.”

  —Salman Rushdie

  “As an emotional document, Out of Place is a revelation.… The deeply affecting testimony of one boy’s nearly relentless persecution by the world.”

  —New York

  “A powerful, and, at the most fundamental level, a thoroughly convincing statement about a man who has helped to illuminate our crisis-ridden world with its contradictions and complexities.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “Rich and touching.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Out of Place comes as a bolt from the blue, a dream come true. Vividly portrayed in this work is Edward Said’s path to self-realization, making him one of this fin de siècle’s most indispensable intellectuals.”

  —Kenzaburo Oe

  “The vivid portrait of a brilliant, vulnerable boy growing up in a complicated and callous world.… An undoubtedly valuable glimpse into the life of a great man.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Patently honest.… Mr. Said’s total recall for distant names, happenings, and feelings has produced a painfully truthful book.”

  —The Economist

  “Ultimately, Mr. Said’s book is about the mysterious … inner power that enables some people to overcome the stunting influences of their childhoods and stubbornly keep growing toward a light, at first dimly and intermittently glimpsed, that is their destiny to reach.”

  —Forward

  EDWARD W. SAID

  Out of Place

  Edward W. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of twenty books, including Orientalism, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Culture and Imperialism, and The Edward Said Reader.

  ALSO BY EDWARD W. SAID

  Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography

  Beginnings: Intention and Method

  Orientalism

  The Question of Palestine

  Literature and Society (editor)

  The World, the Text, and the Critic

  After the Last Sky (with Jean Mohr)

  Blaming the Victims

  Musical Elaborations

  Culture and Imperialism

  The Politics of Dispossession

  Representations of the Intellectual

  Peace and Its Discontents

  Covering Islam

  The Pen and the Sword

  Entre guerre et paix

  The End of the Peace Process

  The Edward Said Reader

  (edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin)

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2000

  Copyright © 1999 by Edward W. Said

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

  Vintage and colphon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Photograph of Aunt Melia collection of Lily and Albert Badr

  All other photographs collection of Edward W. Said

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Said, Edward W.

  Out of place : a memoir / by Edward W. Said. —1st ed.

  p. cm

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82964-1

  1. Said, Edward W. 2. Palestinian Americans—United States—Biography.

  3. Intellectuals—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  E184.P35S25 1999

  973′.049274′0002—dc21 99–331106

  Author photograph © Brigitte Lacombe

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To Dr. Kanti Rai and Mariam C. Said

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Note About the Author

  Photo Insert

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN MOSTLY DURING PERIODS OF ILLNESS or treatment, sometimes at home in New York, sometimes while enjoying the hospitality of friends or institutions in France and Egypt. I began to work on Out of Place in May 1994 while I was recovering from three early rounds of chemotherapy for leukemia. With unstinting kindness and patience Dale Janson and the superb nurses of the Ambulatory Chemotherapy and Transfusion Unit at Long Island Jewish Hospital took care of me for the days, weeks, and months I spent in their charge until I finished writing.

  My family—Mariam, Wadie, Najla—bore with me throughout the five years of work on my manuscript, plus of course my illnesses, absences, treatments, and my generally all-round state of being hard to put up with. Their humor, unconditional support, and strength made the whole thing easier to live through, for me if not always for them, and I am profoundly thankful.

  My dear friend Richard Poirier, surely America’s finest literary critic, gave me early encouragement and read through various drafts, as did Deirdre and Allen Bergson. To them I am genuinely indebted. To Zaineb Istrabadi, my excellent assistant at Columbia, must go a prize for deciphering my handwriting, reproducing it for me in readable form, helping with numerous drafts, and always without impatience or a disagreeable word. Sonny Mehta gave me his friendship and support, a rare publisher and comrade. Once again I would like to thank Andrew Wylie for seeing this work through from start to finish.

  It is customary, even routine, to thank one’s editors. In my case there is nothing pro forma about the feelings of affection, admiration, and gratitude I have for my friends Frances Coady of Granta and Shelley Wanger of Knopf. Frances helped me to see what I was trying to do, then made the most acute suggestions for sculpting a bulky, disorderly manuscript into a semblance of form. Always patiently and humorously, Shelley sat with and guided me as we went through hundreds of pages of often overwritten and inchoate prose.

  Dr. Kanti Rai’s redoubtable medical expertise and remarkable humanity kept me going while I wrote and eventually finished this book. From the beginning of my illness, he and Mariam Said cooperated benignly, and literally kept me from sinking. I gratefully dedicate this book to Mariam for her loving support and to Kanti for his humane skill and friendship.

  E.W.S.

  New York, May 1999

  PREFACE

  Out of Place IS A RECORD OF AN ESSENTIALLY LOST OR FORGOTTEN world. Several years ago I received what seemed to be a fatal medical diagnosis, and it therefore struck me as important t
o leave behind a subjective account of the life I lived in the Arab world, where I was born and spent my formative years, and in the United States, where I went to school, college, and university. Many of the places and people I recall here no longer exist, though I found myself frequently amazed at how much I carried of them inside me in often minute, even startlingly concrete, detail.

  My memory proved crucial to my being able to function at all during periods of debilitating sickness, treatment, and anxiety. Almost daily, and while also writing other things, my rendezvous with this manuscript supplied me with a structure and a discipline at once pleasurable and demanding. My other writing and my teaching seemed to take me far away from the various worlds and experiences of this book: clearly one’s memory operates better and more freely when it isn’t goaded into service by devices or activities deigned for that purpose. Yet my political writings about the Palestinian situation, my studies of the relationship of politics and aesthetics, specifically opera and prose fiction, and my fascination with the subject of a book I have been writing on late style (beginning with Beethoven and Adorno) must surely have fed into this memoir surreptitiously.

  After I finished the manuscript, I made a trip to Jerusalem and then to Cairo in November 1998: I stayed in the former while I attended a conference on Palestinian landscape held at Bir Zeit, and I journeyed to Egypt to participate in the doctoral thesis defense of a gifted student of mine who teaches at Tanta University, fifty miles north of Cairo. I discovered anew that what had been a network of towns and villages in which all the members of my extended family had once lived was now a series of Israeli locales—Jerusalem, Haifa, Tiberias, Nazareth, and Acre—where the Palestinian minority lives under Israeli sovereignty. In parts of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians had self-rule or autonomy, but the Israeli army retained overall security control, nowhere more starkly than at borders, checkpoints, and airports. One of the routine questions I was asked by Israeli officials (since my U.S. passport indicated that I was born in Jerusalem) was exactly when after birth I had left Israel. I responded by saying that I left Palestine in December 1947, accenting the word “Palestine.” “Do you have any relatives here?” was the next question, to which I answered, “No one,” and this triggered a sensation of such sadness and loss as I had not expected. For by the early spring of 1948 my entire extended family had been swept out of the place, and has remained in exile ever since. In 1992, however, I was able for the first time since our departure in 1947 to visit the family-owned house where I was born in West Jerusalem, as well as the house in Nazareth that my mother grew up in, and my uncle’s house in Safad, and so on. All of them had new occupants now, which for tremendously inhibiting and unspecifiable emotional reasons made it very hard and actually impossible for me to enter them once again, even for a cursory look.

  While in Cairo during my November 1998 trip, I went to pay a call on our old neighbors Nadia and Huda, and their mother, Mrs. Gindy, who for many years lived three floors below us, on the second floor at 1 Sharia Aziz Osman. They told me that number 20, our old apartment, was empty and up for sale, but, having thought about it for a moment after they suggested buying it back, I felt no enthusiasm for reacquiring a place we had vacated almost forty years ago. A moment later Nadia and Huda said that before we had lunch, there was somebody waiting for me in the kitchen. Would I like to see him? A small, wiry man in the dark robe and turban of a formally dressed Upper Egyptian peasant came into the room. When told by the two women that this was the Edward he had patiently been waiting to see, he drew back, shaking his head. “No, Edward was tall, and he wore glasses. This isn’t Edward.” I had quickly recognized Ahmad Hamed, our suffragi (butler) for almost three decades, an ironic, fanatically honest and loyal man whom we had all considered a member of the family. I then tried to persuade him that it was indeed me, changed by illness and age, after thirty-eight years of absence. Suddenly we fell into each other’s arms, sobbing with the tears of happy reunion and a mourned, irrecoverable time. He talked about how he had carried me on his shoulders, how we had chatted in the kitchen, how the family celebrated Christmas and New Year’s, and so on. I was astounded that Ahmad minutely remembered not only the seven of us—parents and five children—but also each of my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and my grandmother, in addition to a few family friends. And then, as the past poured out of him, an old man retired to the distant town of Edfu near Aswan, I knew again how fragile, precious, and fleeting were the history and circumstances not only gone forever, but basically unrecalled and unrecorded except as occasional reminiscence or intermittent conversation.

  This chance encounter made me feel even more strongly that this book, which revealed as much as I could of life lived in those days, mostly between 1935, the year of my birth, and 1962, when I had about completed my doctorate, had some validity as an unofficial personal record of those tumultuous years in the Middle East. I found myself telling the story of my life against the background of World War II, the loss of Palestine and the establishment of Israel, the end of the Egyptian monarchy, the Nasser years, the 1967 War, the emergence of the Palestinian movement, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Oslo peace process. These are in my memoir only allusively, even though their fugitive presence can be seen here and there.

  More interesting for me as author was the sense I had of trying always to translate experiences that I had not only in a remote environment but also in a different language. Everyone lives life in a given language; everyone’s experiences therefore are had, absorbed, and recalled in that language. The basic split in my life was the one between Arabic, my native language, and English, the language of my education and subsequent expression as a scholar and teacher, and so trying to produce a narrative of one in the language of the other—to say nothing of the numerous ways in which the languages were mixed up for me and crossed over from one realm to the other—has been a complicated task. Thus it has been difficult to explain in English the actual verbal distinctions (as well as the rich associations) that Arabic uses to differentiate between, for example, maternal and paternal uncles; but since such nuances played a definite role in my early life I had to try to render them here.

  Along with language, it is geography—especially in the displaced form of departures, arrivals, farewells, exile, nostalgia, homesickness, belonging, and travel itself—that is at the core of my memories of those early years. Each of the places I lived in—Jerusalem, Cairo, Lebanon, the United States—has a complicated, dense web of valences that was very much a part of growing up, gaining an identity, forming my consciousness of myself and of others. And in each place schools have a privileged place in the story, microcosms of the cities or towns where my parents found these schools and put me. Since I am myself an educator it was natural that I should have found the school environment particularly worth describing and telling about, although what I was not prepared for was how well I remembered the earlier institutions I attended, and how comparatively more the friends and acquaintances I had there have been a part of my life than those from university days, or my boarding school years in the United States. One of the things I tried to explore implicitly is the hold those very early school experiences had on me, why their hold persists, and why I still find them fascinating and interesting enough to write about for readers fifty years later.

  The main reason, however, for this memoir is of course the need to bridge the sheer distance in time and place between my life today and my life then. I want only to mention this as an obvious fact, not to treat or discuss it, except to say that one of its results is a certain detachment and irony of attitude and tone, as I have set about reconstructing a remote time and experience. Several people described here are still alive and will likely disagree with or dislike my portrayals of them and others. Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone’s feelings my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences, and feelings. I, and only I, am responsible for what I recall and see, not individuals in t
he past who could not have known what effect they might have on me. I hope it is also clear that, both as narrator and as character, I have consciously not spared myself the same ironies or embarrassing recitals.

  I

  ALL FAMILIES INVENT THEIR PARENTS AND CHILDREN, GIVE each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life. Sometimes I was intransigent, and proud of it. At other times I seemed to myself to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without will. Yet the overriding sensation I had was of always being out of place. Thus it took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or, more exactly, to feel less uncomfortable with, “Edward,” a foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family name Said. True my mother told me that I had been named Edward after the Prince of Wales, who cut so fine a figure in 1935, the year of my birth, and Said was the name of various uncles and cousins. But the rationale of my name broke down both when I discovered no grandparents called Said and when I tried to connect my fancy English name with its Arabic partner. For years, and depending on the exact circumstances, I would rush past “Edward” and emphasize “Said”; at other times I would do the reverse, or connect these two to each other so quickly that neither would be clear. The one thing I could not tolerate, but very often would have to endure, was the disbelieving, and hence undermining, reaction: Edward? Said?

  The travails of bearing such a name were compounded by an equally unsettling quandary when it came to language. I have never known what language I spoke first, Arabic or English, or which one was really mine beyond any doubt. What I do know, however, is that the two have always been together in my life, one resonating in the other, sometimes ironically, sometimes nostalgically, most often each correcting, and commenting on, the other. Each can seem like my absolutely first language, but neither is. I trace this primal instability back to my mother, whom I remember speaking to me in both English and Arabic, although she always wrote to me in English—once a week, all her life, as did I, all of hers. Certain spoken phrases of hers like tislamli or mish rfa shu biddi mal? or rouha—dozens of them—were Arabic, and I was never conscious of having to translate them or, even in cases like tislamli, knowing exactly what they meant. They were a part of her infinitely maternal atmosphere, which in moments of great stress I found myself yearning for in the softly uttered phrase “ya mama,” an atmosphere dreamily seductive then suddenly snatched away, promising something in the end never given.