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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters In confessional mood
By Hala Halim
Walking down the ever-festive pedestrian 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, LA, towards Midnight Special Bookstore where Edward Said was to read from his memoir Out of Place, the overwhelming question was: how would the response of an American audience to the book, and to Said's presence, differ from that of an audience in Cairo, Beirut or Amman?
In keeping with his confessional material the Said who spoke at Midnight Special was personal, confiding, witty -- and obviously enjoying himself. Constantly interrupting his own reading of excerpts with seemingly improvised asides and one-liners -- King Farouk "was reputed to be the fattest king in the world" -- Said engaged the audience directly. And if the two dimensions of Said's public persona -- literary critic, author of the seminal Orientalism, and political commentator, spokesman on behalf of Palestinian rights -- were kept at bay, they were not altogether out of sight. There was jocular literary self-cross-referencing. The reading of an extract about his father's attempts to "mould" the young boy's body culminating when Said père takes Said fils for a corset fitting in New York, ended with Said's suggestion this might explain his fondness for Foucault.
In a memoir that constantly negotiates between recollection and hindsight, Said has written that "my early memories of Palestine... are casual and, considering my profound later immersion in Palestinian affairs, curiously unremarkable" (p. 20). Hence such prefatory asides before reading extracts about childhood visits to Palestine: "It's important to note that after 1948 Safad [in Palestine] became a Jewish place; before that it was entirely Arab."
Said introduced his reading by talking about the genesis of the memoir. Having being diagnosed with leukemia, for which he began treatment in 1994, Said "decided to do something else that would take me away... and what better thing than to go back to early memory... to recover places for my children and other friends" who will never know these places. There was the loss of Palestine; there was the Egypt which had ended with King Farouk's overthrow; and there was the pre-1975 Lebanon he knew. Then came the tour de force. In tones of mock dismay, Said explained that he had "never expected to see this book published in my life" and thought of it as "a legacy".
"Imagine my surprise," he interjected, when he "lived to see" the book in print and witnessed the reactions, and people saying "you're not who you say you are."
Referring to the title of the memoir, Said explained that "we were a minority within a minority", his mother being a Baptist while Eastern Christians were mostly Copts or Greek Orthodox. He was named after an Englishman -- the Prince of Wales -- and, through his father, held an American passport. "So there was always this sense of being 'out of place'". Although many of his classmates were Italians, Armenians and so on ("we were all mongrels"), he says he felt more out of place than the others.
Although Out of Place covers roughly the years between 1935 (the year of Said's birth) and 1962, just before he finished his doctorate, it also allusively maps in, through its reflections on those years, subsequent events and concerns. Said's selection for the reading tended to favour his earlier, formative years, with the accent falling on both the houses the family lived in (between Cairo, Lebanon and Palestine) and the schools he attended.
In the preface to the memoir, Said writes "since I am myself an educator it was natural that I should have found the school environment particularly worth describing". At the Gezira Preparatory School (GPS) in Cairo, the "lessons and books were mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles and Kings John, Alfred and Canute with the reverence that our teachers kept reminding us they deserved." Then came the startling episode about GPS. Due to "some infraction in class", Said, aged eight, is taken by Mrs Bullen, the headmistress, to her husband Mr Bullen. With a long bamboo stick, the latter wordlessly whacks him three times. Said concluded the reading of this episode by delivering, in mock-heroic tones, a poem he was to discover, years later, that Bullen had translated in a wartime Cairo literary journal published by the Salamander group. The audience, no less than Said, savoured the send-up of the mannered verse.
The staff of Victoria College, Cairo, received a similar satirical treatment, though here not through hindsight but through anecdotes about students' pranks. Said, as he puts it in the memoir, "joined in the ceaseless back and forth between the boys united in group solidarity as 'wogs' confronting our variously comic and/or maimed teachers as cruel, impersonal, and authoritarian Englishmen." This solidarity entailed responding to teachers' questions with Arabic profanities that the students would then explain away as perfectly benign classical Arabic phrases.
Towards the end of his reading Said's tone shifted to one of pathos as he compared his mother's struggle with cancer, for which she refused to be treated, and his own. "Sedatives, sleeping pills, soothing drinks, the counsel of friends and relatives, reading, praying: none, she said, did any good. 'Help me to sleep, Edward,' she once said to me in a piteous trembling voice that I can still hear... Now I have divined that my own inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her struggle for sleep. For me sleep is a thing to be gotten over as quickly as possible... Like her I don't possess the secret of long sleep, though unlike her I have reached the point where I do not want it."
The questions in the discussion that followed divided themselves neatly into the political and the literary. Solicited for a statement on the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Said spoke of their ramifications as an imposition of "apartheid" on Palestinians. Part of the reason why he had written Out of Place, Said elaborated, was to show how, until 1948, the intermingling between different religions and ethnicities was perfectly accepted. All this ended, he went on, with "the period of nationalizing" and the establishment of Israel and other nation-states in the region. "The attitude of purifying countries is one of the greatest catastrophies of the modern period," Said added.
An Arab member of the audience then asked Said why it was that Syria, Egypt and Jordan do not give much support to Palestinians. Here, Said recounted, as in the memoir, his aunt Nabiha's single-handed efforts to help Palestinian refugees in Cairo after 1948, and the Egyptian government's withholding of passports from them.
Someone asked how Said, as a literary critic, had mediated narrative, memory and imagination in his memoir. Said began by quoting the first line of the memoir: "All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language." Remarking on "the never-never world in which we lived", Said explained he was very conscious of the role invention and fantasy played. The writing of the memoir, he added, did not simply involve recollection but also demystifying and deconstruction. "The difficulty," he said, was in "finding a form that would be faithful [to memory], and also take into account things that happened later, like my illness." A linear, chronological narrative, as in straightforward autobiography, was therefore out. "A memoir ought to be one's growing consciousness -- it's a different genre," he concluded.
Later, in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, the question was put to Said of whether the issues of representation he had raised in books like Orientalism and Covering Islam had in any way influenced or conditioned the writing of a memoir largely set in the Middle East. "I wasn't that much aware of it. I felt that I was writing my own story and didn't have much in my mind that took me back to Orientalism," Said explained, "I wasn't thinking of that aspect but with one which has to do with the relationship between aesthetics and politics... [of] how a work that is non-political may have an important bearing on political issues. I felt it might be possible to write something very personal and intimate and be related to political issues. Like in my Lebanon chapter where I describe how we led an insulated life, but in an allusive way [this brings out] the faultlines in Lebanese society, later to erupt in civil war."
After the reading, a long cue of people wanting to get their copy of Out of Place signed quickly formed. While signing, the author would pause to enquire about a young man's field of study, look up as two determined young women were having themselves photographed with him, or listen patiently as someone explained that he was a friend-of-a-friend of Edward Said's.
