Customer Reviews

Out of Place: A Memoir

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A sensitive treasure of a book, offering rare insights into the early life of one of our finest thinkers. Richly-drawn settings in Palestine, Cairo, and Lebanon, with fascinating details of school-life, friendships and the perplexing struggle of growing up in many places. A provocative journey examining complexities of exile and mysteries of families. Stunning prose, unforgettably honest and beautiful.

It is extraordinary, and dismaying, that years -- years! -- after Said's personal account of his life was conclusively confirmed, we still see racist attacks on him in forums like this. Commentary's (and others') libels have been decisively debunked, yet they are still dragged up as fact. This alone should tell any reasonable observer that Said offered an insight that some found so troubling, and so sound, that they had to attack the man rather than the idea.

Don't be deceived by anti-Said, hate-filled diatribes. Said was in a rare position, one particularly unfamiliar to anyone who has grown up in Europe or the U.S. Here is a great intellectual thoroughly bound to one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. It is an exceptional tension. And Said had a uncommon ability to draw great insights from tenuously related subjects about his own experience and the common experience of people generally.

Said's writings also form a whole -- the mark of truly expansive thinker. That is, the more work of his you read -- from the most academic to the most personal -- the more his distinctive insight emerges.

Edward W. Said's "Out of Place" is one of the most moving books I've ever read. The great British TV dramatist Dennis Potter said that autobiography is the most fraudulent of literary modes; he just couldn't believe that people wouldn't lie about themselves. Potter himself told a lot of embarrassing truths about himself in fictional form; Said's book is a noble reminder that some people still believe that the facts are not only worth telling but can be told.

The farcical charge that this book is a "quickie" written to pre-empt an article about Said's alleged coverup of his personal history can be easily dismissed. The article came out in "Commentary", a magazine that has never ceased to encourage Israel to become the United States' hired gun in the Middle East, thereby doing a lot to destroy Israel in the process. (Fortunately, the Israeli press are less corruptible than their American counterparts, and have never ceased to treat Said as someone whose opinion was worth listening to). And anyway, the sheer literary quality of the book belies any idea that it was dashed off in a hurry.

Said hasn't spent decades teaching literature without any sense of how to write well. He brings to life a world that is literally lost - that of pre-1948 Palestine and pre-Nasser Cairo. He describes his father's terrifying inability to take his own son seriously, while still paying tribute to the man's extraordinary genius at business. His descriptions of his relationship with his mother rival Proust. His sharp analysis of his own education is generous but never sentimental. For a book written in the shadow of its author's impending death, this is an amazingly revealing portrait of the critic as a young man.

Said's intelligence, his sympathy, his vividly felt pain at what happened to the world that he grew up in, puts his mindless critics to shame. He is still working; still reminding us about the value of secular culture against religious fanaticism, still reinterpreting the classics of Western culture for a world that seems to grow smaller, not bigger, every day. He will be sorely missed, but this small book will serve with the rest of his work as a memento to the difficulty of knowing what is true and what is merely easy to get along with.

Prof. Said has indeed articulated his inner feelings and deep thoughts surrounding a crucial part of his life with an eloquence that is difficult to match. In his search for identity he revisits some of the countries he lived in and reconstructs events that have touched his life as a child and later on as a young man. In his memoir, Said takes the reader from one country to another (Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and the USA) and shares his sincere feelings about each with an unparalleled power of expression and a deep sense of the historical, geographical, political events that shaped his thoughts. His relationship with his parents and the way he analyses his feeling towards each are weaved into his memoir with such grace that keeps the reader aware of his relationship throughout the entire book without it being at all tedious. Once you start reading Said's memoir it is difficult to put it down.

There are three interesting aspects of this book. The first is the re-creation of the life and lifestyle of the Palestinian, make that Arab bourgeoise-a subject that even its own members try to dodge in their discussion of Arab issues. The second is the life of dysfunctional little Edward in his very dysfunctional family with his totally off-the-wall parents. Finally, is the story of how Said's identity as a man and as a critic emerged from that background. Two points should be made: One is the way he was always characterized by the-powers-that-be in his school as "dishonest" or "ingenuous" and usually for no real or tangible reason. As the student with the highest marks in his American boarding school, he was denied the title of Valevictorian for some unspecified flaws in his character. The second point is that because of these experiences, Said developed an accute sense of how people are classified, objectified, and placed into "boxes" by hegimonic systems. This is perhaps what is most revealing about this book: how character and childhood experiences form the general outlook of a human being and how a human being who gets to be a critic can develop these ideas in the most sophisticated of manners and then bring them in or inflict them on the world. I feel sorry for Said the child but wonder what his fate would have been if her were in more ordinary socioeconomic circumstances, let us say, American Middle Class. I symptathize with his character predictiments, and whatever flaws he has in that realm are no worse than those of others in academia.

In one section of the book, he describes his impressions of an American school after being in a British one. His way of looking at students and society in an American school are dead on accurate and dead on fatal. I liked that part of the book the most. I wish he would write a whole book of criticism on the society and system of an American high school.

Having shared some of his Palestinian-Jerusalem experiences,I found Said`s story compelling.It chronicles the daily life of the educated class of Palestinians in the pre 1948 era with great accuracy.It depicts a deserving level of sophistication of the non Jewish Palestinians, long denied by the media.He writes lyrically,and reveals his inner self all the way to a triumphant conquest of his cancer.

More than a chronicle of events, more than a literary analysis of his existence, Edward Said's auto-biography goes far beyond a story of his own, it's the ingenius account of every American, and perhaps every human being in his intellectual struggle to break away from man's fundamental lonliness and isolation.

It is unfortunate that Amazon.com has chosen to "Spotlight" the Mandel's review of Dr. Said's book. Mandel's drivel may be well written (one of the apparent requirements for being included in that esteemed space), but it is drivel nonethelesss. For those of who you are NOT interested in spin and for those of you interested in learning about the human being behind one of the most articulate (and courageous) supporter of the Palestine Movement, then this is the book for you.

Said's books "Culture and Imperialism" as well as "Orientalism" articulated how the West's gaze has defined the East, and his arguments have shaped Subaltern studies as well Postcolonial studies around the world. In this book, Said puts a human face to the effects of colonization, of expropriaton, and of exile. The book is reminiscent and deeply reflective--and in the crepuscular hues of his life, Said allows the reader to feel and experience how deeply tragic it is that Palestine no longer exists, because the deeply personal stories that Said presents are sadly memories of a past that have truly been relagated to the Rushdian space of an "Imaginary Homeland." Moreover, the constant harrasment, vandalism, abuse, and death threats that Dr. Said has suffered in the United States for presenting his views, heightens the elegiac quality of the narrative. If you have never seen Dr. Said lecture, please make an effort to do so (there are some terrific online streams)--especially after reading this book and his literary criticism. Not only has Dr. Said given the voicelesss a voice, he has also made us feel human.

This is a remarkable work of a truly fascinating man. Much of the memoir is dedicated to Edward Said's relationship with his mother and father. Said recounts the history of his father, a Palestinian, who went to America and possibly fought for it in the First World War. The father Wadie, later returned to Palestine and then moved on to Cairo to establish a great business success. The father comes across very typical Middle Eastern conservative authority figure with a rather peculiar but very strong American patriotism.

Said's mother, comes across as a truly fascinating woman; a Palestinian Lebanese Christian, who possessed a great passion for music, literature and original thought. In the tradition of the Middle Eastern mothers she had a large presence in the lives of her children. She was an original woman, who felt comfortable amongst the many different cultures of the middle east, yet held on to her views, which at times were at odds with her environment.

Said tells of the huge influence his mother had over him during her life and even after her death. The story of the mother's search for a passport, a nationality, her dislike of life in America, her eventual death in America are beautifully told by Said. The mother's early conversion to Nasser's cause is mentioned, it even alienated the mother from her Lebanese family, but Said never tells us where it led.

I loved Said's self analysis relating his behavior to his mother: "...I seem to have absorbed her worries, her tireless concern for details, her inability ever to be calm, her way of constantly interrupting herself, preventing a continuous flow of attention or concentration on anything." Said is capable of very vivid language indeed.

The school life of Said in Cairo is fascinating. He attended English Colonial schools, American and Egyptian schools in Cairo and eventually moved on to Massachusetts, Princeton and Harvard. Much of his pre college school life was problematic, at times there is too much dwelling and self-pity but it is largely interesting. On a week trip, with his mother, that for some not clearly explained reason left him indifferent to Egyptian Monuments, he says " ....I was relieved of the pressure and the continual anxiety of not getting anything right."

The "out of place" theme is repeated throughout the book, at times very eloquently told, " ...the habit of always being dressed differently from the natives, any natives." I do however find it remarkable that Said does not also seem to see how well he did apparently fit everywhere outside of his early Colonial school. In fact, from his stories at the American School in Cairo, Princeton, Harvard and mostly Victoria College in Cairo, you often see a fairly popular kid with many friends.

I laughed out loud at the part describing his episode of revisiting Victoria College in 1989. He bribed his way in to show his family his old classroom, and later got thrown out by a woman wearing an "Islamic-style dress". Said proceeds to describe Victoria College in 89 as a "privileged Islamic sanctuary" that expelled him twice. The fact that the first time he got expelled was due to punching a kid and sending him to the hospital for a week and the second through trespassing both by his own admission does not seem to matter, in both cases, to him it was discrimination. Victoria College is a million miles away from being an Egyptian Islamic sanctuary, with a mixed high school. Said's self pity and righteousness is a times reminiscent of the Maggie Thatcher memoir, well no, not 10% as bad but it does detract a bit from the book.

There is one thing I hated about the book. Where is part two? Edward Said gives you so much detail about his early pre political life. I read this book, because I often find myself at odds with Edward Said's political views, I wanted to know more about the man. I thoroughly enjoyed "Out of Place" but it has not satisfied my desire to understand his viewpoint. I often thought that he simply fails to understand Egyptians and Egyptian attitudes but had no idea how much time he actually lived there.

This is a great book, very enjoyable and full of reflection. I gave it 4 stars only because as much as I loved it I could not bring myself to give it an identical rating to Leila Ahmed's Border Passage.

Edward Said is famous for being a Palestinian and being a leading polemist on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Visciously anti-Israel he has caused many scnadals and was a renowned thinker. His memoir, written when he was sick, is insightful a true tale of what the Palestinian Arab elite looked like on the eve of the 1948 war. Said was born in Jerusalem, according to him, and was raised in Egypt, with a nanny and drivers, his father was American and had served in WWI, both his families came from Baptist protestant and Anglican backgrounds. His father made good money in Egypt in a stationary business, employing many of the diverse people that lived there then, including Armenians, Greeks, Copts and Jews. Today that community isd gone, as is the elite neigborhood where Said grew up and the private schools he attended. Said was in Jerusalem in Talbieh during 1948. He recalls the war and its aftermath. He also writes about Lebanon, about the village where he stayed there and travelling in the Middle East as a young boy. His was a life of luxury, a life that was 'destroyed' by 1948. His uncle was murdered by the Egyptian police for being a communist. His parents didnt talk politics, he makes up for that.

An interesting work, helpful for anyone interested in what the Palestinian Arab elite looked like in the 1930s.

Seth J. Frantzman