Although his memoir was received with widespread acclaim, its appearance coincided with the publication of a diatribe in Commentary magazine that claimed that Said had misrepresented his early life in Jerusalem and his identity as a Palestinian.1 The article was reminiscent of other politically motivated efforts to deny the reality of the Palestinian experience of dispossession. The journalist Alexander Cockburn observed that the Commentary writer was a former employee of the Israeli Ministry of Justice who had used his position to deny the validity of Israeli human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories. “To show that Said somehow isn’t Palestinian,” Cockburn wrote, “is as weirdly audacious as Golda Meir’s notorious claim many years ago that there was no such entity as the Palestinian people, only Arab transplants with no rights.”2
The Commentary article was riddled with mistakes and fabrications. In The Nation, British journalist Christopher Hitchens outlined the “farrago of inaccuracies and incomprehension” that the Commentary article put forth.3 Despite the contrived nature of the claims, the media relished the baseless charge that a prominent Palestinian intellectual had invented his past. The Wall Street Journal , for example, printed excerpts of the Commentary article without offering Said the opportunity to respond. Ironically, only the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz printed Said’s rebuttal. Said wrote, “I have always advocated the acknowledgment by each other of the Palestinian and Jewish peoples’ past sufferings. Only in this way can they coexist peacefully together in the future. [Commentary’s writer] is more interested in using the past—either an individual or collective past—to prevent understanding and reconciliation. It is a pity that so much time, money, and venom as he has expended couldn’t have been used for better purposes.”
Many reviewers of the book, however, rose above the controversy and viewed the memoir as part of the long and important tradition of exilic narrative. “The experience of dispersion, exile and rootless cosmopolitan life has been the fate of almost all Arab writers and intellectuals this century,” wrote Ammiel Alcalay. “While enriching the possibilities of our own cultural horizons, in retrospect, Edward Said’s Out of Place clearly joins itself to that embattled, often heroic and altogether much-neglected tradition.”4
All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a history, 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 character, timid, uncertain, without will. Yet the overriding sensation I had was of never being quite right. As I have said before, it took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or more exactly to feel less uncomfortable with, “Edward,” a foolishly English name yoked to the unmistakably Arabic family name “Said.” True, “Edward” was for 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 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,” or do the reverse, or connect the 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 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, or, more often, one correcting and commenting on the other. Each can seem like my absolutely first language, but neither is. I trace this primal instability to my mother who I remember speaking to me both in 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 ‘arfa shu biddi ‘amal? or rouh’ha—dozens of them—were Arabic, and I was never conscious of having to translate them or, even in cases like tislamli, of knowing exactly what they meant. They were a part of her infinitely maternal atmosphere, for which in moments of great stress I found myself yearning in the softly uttered phrase ya mama, always dreamily seductive then suddenly snatched away, with the promise of something in the end never given.
But woven into her Arabic speech were English words like naughty boy and of course my name, pronounced Edwaad. I am still haunted by the sound, at exactly the same time and place, of her voice calling me Edwaad, the word wafting through the dusk air at the Fish Garden’s closing time, and me, undecided whether to answer or to remain in hiding for just a while longer, enjoying the pleasure of being called, being wanted, the non-Edward part of myself finding luxurious respite in not answering until the silence of my being became unendurable. Her English deployed a rhetoric of statement and norms that has never left me. Once my mother left Arabic and spoke English there was a more objective and serious tone that mostly banished the forgiving and musical intimacy of her first language, Arabic. At age five or six I knew that I was irremediably naughty and at school all manner of comparably disapproved of things like fibber and loiterer. By the time I was fully conscious of speaking English fluently, if not always correctly, I regularly referred to myself not as me but as you. “Mummy doesn’t love you, naughty boy,” she would say, and I would respond, half plaintive echoing, half defiant assertion: “Mummy doesn’t love you, but Auntie Melia loves you.” Auntie Melia was her elderly maiden aunt, who doted on me as a very young child. “No she doesn’t,” my mother persisted. “All right. Saleh loves you,” I would conclude—Salah was Auntie Melia’s driver—rescuing something from the enveloping gloom.
I hadn’t then any idea where my mother’s English came from or who, in the national sense of the phrase, she was: this strange state of ignorance continued until relatively late in my life, when I was in graduate school. In Cairo, one of the places where I grew up, her spoken Arabic was fluent Egyptian, but to my keener ear, and to the many Egyptians she knew, it was, if not outright Shami, then perceptibly inflected by it. Shami (Damascene) is the collective adjective and noun used by Egyptians to describe both an Arabic-speaker who is not Egyptian and someone who is from Greater Syria, i.e., Syria itself, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan; but Shami is also used to designate the Arabic dialect spoken by a Shami. Much more than my father, whose linguistic ability was primitive compared to hers, my mother had an excellent command of the classical language as well as the demotic. Not enough of the latter to disguise her as Egyptian, however, which of course she was not. Born in Nazareth, then sent to boarding school and junior college in Beirut, she was Palestinian, even though her mother Munira was Lebanese. I never knew her father, but he, I discovered, was the Baptist minister in Nazareth, although he originally came from Safad, via a sojourn in Texas.
Not only could I not absorb, much less master, all the meanderings and interruptions of these details as they broke up a simple dynastic sequence; I could not grasp why she was not a straight English mummy. I have retained this unsettled sense of many identities—mostly in conflict with each other—all my life, together with an acute memory of the despairing wish that we could have been all-Arab, or all-European and American, or all-Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian, and on and on. I found I had two alternatives with which to counter the process of challenge, recognition, and exposure to which I felt subject, questions and remarks like: “What are you?” “But Said is an Arab name.” “You’re American?” “You’re an American without an American name, and you’ve never been to America.” “You don’t look American!” “How come you were born in Jerusalem
and you live here?” “You’re an Arab after all, but what kind are you?”
I do not remember that any of the answers I gave out loud to such probings were satisfactory, or even memorable. My alternatives were hatched entirely on my own: one might work, say, in school, but would not work in church or on the street with my friends. My first approach was to adopt my father’s brashly assertive tone and say to myself: “I’m an American citizen, and that’s it.” He was American by dint of having lived in the United States followed by service in the Army during World War One. Partly because this alternative was not only implausible but imposed on me, I found it far from convincing. To say “I am an American citizen” in the setting of an English school, with wartime Cairo dominated by British troops and what seemed to me a totally homogeneous Egyptian populace, was foolhardy, something to be risked in public only when I was challenged officially to name my citizenship; in private I could not maintain it for long, so quickly did the affirmation wither under existential scrutiny.
The second of my alternatives was even less successful. It was to open myself to the deeply disorganized state of my real history and origins as I had gleaned them and then to try to make some sort of sense of them. But I never had enough information; there was never the right number of functioning connectives between the parts I knew about or was able to somehow excavate; the total picture was never quite right. The trouble seemed to begin with my parents, their pasts and names. My father Wadie was later called William (an early discrepancy that I assumed for a long time was only an Anglicization of his Arabic name, but soon it appeared to me suspiciously like a case of assumed identity, with the name “Wadie” cast aside except by his wife and sister for not very creditable reasons). Born in Jerusalem in 1895 (my mother said it was more likely 1893), he never told me more than ten or eleven things about his past, none of which ever changed and which hardly conveyed anything except a series of portable words. He was at least forty at the time of my birth.
He hated Jerusalem, and although I was born there and we spent long periods of time there, the only thing he ever said about it was that it reminded him of death. At some point in his life his father was a dragoman and because he knew German was said to have shown Palestine to Kaiser Wilhelm. Never referred to by name except when my mother, who never knew him, called him “Abu Assad,” my grandfather bore the surname “Ibrahim.” In school, therefore, my father was known as Wadie Ibrahim. I still do not know where “Said” came from, and no one seems able to explain it. The only relevant detail about his father that my father thought fit to convey to me was that Abu Assad’s whippings of him were much more severe than his of me. “How did you endure it?” I asked, to which he replied with a chuckle: “Most of the time I ran away.” I was never able to, and never even considered it.
One day my mother announced that John Gielgud was coming to Cairo to perform Hamlet at the Opera House. “We must go,” she said with infectious resolve, and indeed the visit was duly set up, although of course I had no idea who John Gielgud was. I was nine at the time, and had just learned a bit about the play in the volume of Shakespeare stories by Charles and Mary Lamb I had been given for Christmas a few months earlier. Mother’s idea was that she and I should gradually read through the play together. For that purpose a beautiful one-volume Shakespeare was brought down from the shelf, its handsome red morocco-leather binding and its delicate onion-skin paper embodying for me all that was luxurious and exciting in a book. Its opulence was heightened by the pencil or charcoal drawings illustrating the dramas, Hamlet’s being an exceptionally taut tableau by Henry Fuseli of the Prince of Denmark, Horatio, and the Ghost seeming to struggle against each other as the announcement of murder and the agitated response to it gripped them.
The two of us sat in the front reception room, she in a big armchair, I on a stool next to her, with a smoky half-lit fire in the fireplace on her left, and we read Hamlet together. She was Gertrude and Ophelia, I Hamlet, Horatio, and Claudius. She also played Polonius, as if in solidarity with my father, who often quoted “neither a borrower nor a lender be” as a reminder of how risky it was for me to be given money to spend on my own. We skipped the whole play-within-a-play sequence as it was too bewilderingly ornate and complicated for the two of us.
There must have been at least four, and perhaps even five or six sessions when, sharing the book, we read and tried to make sense of the play, the two of us completely alone and together, with Cairo, my sisters and father shut out.
I did not understand many of the lines, though Hamlet’s basic situation, his outrage at his father’s murder and his mother’s remarriage, his endless wordy vacillation, did come through half-consciously. I had no idea what incest and adultery were, but could not ask my mother, whose concentration on the play seemed to have drawn her in and away from me. What I remember above all was the change from her normal voice to a new stage voice as Gertrude: it went up in pitch, smoothed out, became exceptionally fluent and, most of all, acquired a bewitchingly flirtatious and calming tone. “Good Hamlet,” I remember her clearly saying to me, not to Hamlet, “cast thy nighted colour off, / And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.” I felt that she was speaking to my better, less disabled and still fresh self, hoping perhaps to lift me out of the sodden delinquency of my life, already burdened with worries and anxieties that I was now sure were to threaten my future.
Reading Hamlet as an affirmation of my status in her eyes, not as someone devalued, as in mine I had become, was one of the great moments in my childhood. We were two voices to each other, two happily allied spirits in language. I knew nothing consciously of the inner dynamics that link desperate prince and adulterous queen at the play’s interior, nor did I really understand the fury of the scene between them when Polonius is killed and Gertrude verbally flayed by Hamlet. We read together through all that, since what mattered to me was that in a curiously un-Hamlet-like way, I could count on her to be someone whose emotions and affections engaged mine without really being more than an exquisitely maternal, protective and reassuring person. Far from feeling that she had tampered with her obligations to her son, I felt that these readings confirmed the deepness of our connection to each other; for years I kept in my mind the higher than usual pitch of her voice, the unagitated poise of her manner, the soothing, conclusively patient outline of her presence, as goods to be held onto at all costs, but rarer and rarer as my delinquencies increased in number, and her destructive and dislocating capacities threatened me more.
When I saw the play at the Opera House I was jolted out of my seat by Gielgud’s declaiming “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” and the sense it conveyed of being a miraculous confirmation of what I had read privately with Mother. The trembling resonance of his voice, the darkened, windy stage, the distantly shining figure of the ghost, all seemed to have brought to life the Fuseli drawing that I had long studied, and it raised my sensuous apprehension to a pitch I do not think I have ever again experienced. But I was also disheartened by the physical incongruities between me and the men whose green and crimson tights set off fully rounded, perfectly shaped legs, that seemed to mock my awkward carriage, my unskilled movements, my spindly, shapeless legs. Everything about Gielgud and the blond man who played Laertes communicated an ease and confidence of being—they were English heroes after all— that reduced me to buglike status, curtailing my capacity for enjoying the play. A few days later, when an Anglo-American classmate called Tony Howard invited me to meet Gielgud at his house, it was all I could do to manage a feeble, silent handshake. Gielgud was in a grey suit, but said nothing; he pressed my small hand with an Olympian half-smile.
It must have been the memory of those long-ago Hamlet afternoons in Cairo that made my mother, during the last two or three years of her life, enthusiastic once again about us going to the theater together. The most memorable time was when—her cancer afflictions already pronounced—she arrived in London from Beirut on her way to the United States to consult a speciali
st; I met her at the airport and brought her to Brown’s Hotel for the one night she had to spend there. With barely two hours to get ready and have an early supper, she nevertheless gave an unhesitating “yes” to my suggestion that we see Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Dalton as Antony and Cleopatra at the Haymarket. It was an understated, unopulent production, and the long play transfixed her in a way that surprised me. After years of Lebanese war and Israeli invasion she had become distracted, often querulous, worried about her health and what she should do with herself. All of this, however, went into abeyance, as we watched and heard Shakespeare’s lines (“Eternity was in our lips and eyes, / Bliss in our brows’ bent”) as if speaking to us in the accents of wartime Cairo, back in our little cocoon, the two of us very quiet and concentrated, savoring the language and communion with each other—despite the disparity in our ages and the fact that we were mother and son—for the very last time. Eight months later she had begun her final descent into the disease that killed her, her mind ravaged by metastases which, before striking her completely silent for the two months before she died, caused her to speak fearsomely of plots around her. The last lucidly intimate thing she ever said to me was “my poor little child,” pronounced with such sad resignation, a mother taking final leave of her son. Eighteen months later I was diagnosed with the leukemia that must have already been in me when she died.
When I was growing up I always wished that she might have been the one to watch me play football or tennis, or that she alone could have talked to my teachers, relieved of her duties as my father’s partner in the joint program for my reform and betterment. After she died, and I no longer wrote her my weekly letter, nor spoke directly to her in our daily phone call, I kept her as a silent companion. As a small boy to be held in her arms when she wished to cuddle and stroke me was bliss indeed, but such attention could never be sought or asked for. Her moods regulated mine, and I recall one of the most anguished states of my childhood and early adolescence was trying, with nothing to guide me and no great prospect of success, to distract her from her role as taskmaster, and to tease her into giving me approval and support. A good deed, a decent grade, a well-executed passage on the piano might bring about a sudden transfiguration of her face, a dramatic elevation in her tone, a breathtakingly wide opening of arms, as she took me in: “Bravo Edward, my darling boy, bravo, bravo. Let me kiss you.”