Out of Place: A Memoir. By Edward W. Said. Granta Books. 295pp. £25 in UK
Ever since the settlements of 1948, the Palestinians have been a stateless people, and for the past two decades Edward Said has been their foremost apologist in the United States. His memoir suggests, however, that he felt himself dislocated even before that catastrophe.
For one thing, his youth (like that of many members of the Levantine upper bourgeoisie) was split between many locations: Jerusalem, where he was born in 1935; Cairo, where he grew up and was educated; and Lebanon, in which his family summered. For another thing, he found himself caught between languages: a native Arabic and an educational English. Even his name seemed to presage that splitting: "Edward" betokening his parents' Protestant love of order and control and "Said" indicating the Arab element, represented here by a dance-like whirl of uncles and aunts whose voices add depth and colour to the book. Yet he dutifully learned what his teachers taught about King Canute and King John: and he read the Billy Bunter and Blyton books provided for boys such as he.
Far from being a "designer Arab" (as a few critics in the Middle East sometimes complain), Said was, in fact, turned into a designer European by loving parents who sent him to the best colonial schools in Cairo. On the "inert stage set" of that city, where his father owned a prosperous stationery business, they were "a mock European family". Wealthy and privileged, they never thought of themselves as repressed, though Edward's bouts of obstreperousness, the father's nervous breakdown and the mother's sense of life as an anticlimax may have hinted at how much was being battened down. The world in which they carefully moved was, as Fanon would much later write of other settings, "not so much the imitation of Europe as its caricature".
Like the young W.B. Yeats in a similarly confused setting, Said saw his father's mind only in fragments. This memoir puts the patches together into a compelling portrait, at once tender and probing, of a man who was a business genius in a Third World city still in the grip of feudal economies. Wadie Said was an enigma, forever holding emotion in check by the compulsive playing of card and board games. Once, when his only son fell and grazed his knee on a Zamalek pavement, he called "Daddy, please". The father glanced briefly back before moving on. The same man turned his face to the wall before dying. " Had he, I wonder, ever wished to say any more than he actually did?"
Such a book might have been called Father and Son but for the fact that the mother Hilda is an equally mesmeric character. Beautiful, young and cultured, she loves her children but finds them, like Cairo, a disappointment. As a boy, Edward is both intransigent (like her) and shy (like the father). His parents instill in him a shame of the body and guilt at his laziness.
Their world is claustrophic. They mix little in public places like restaurants and never feel fully at ease, even with each other. Until he is 15, Edward cannot buy an operatic record on his own without supervision. His happiest hours are in the walk to and from school, for then he is free to dawdle and to study the teeming metropolis.
This will be true for the rest of his days. The Palestinian feels most himself, he has written elsewhere, not when rooted but when in motion. Yet, wherever the young Said travels in this narrative, he invariably takes far more luggage than he needs, lest he may never get the chance to return. When ordinary people depart, they feel that they are abandoning someone; when Palestinians leave, it is they who fear that they are being abandoned. Even the affluent Wadie Said chose to live only in rented accommodation. (Years later his son, in a famous article, would notice a similarly transitory quality to the lodgings of Yasser Arafat.)
Some of the most brilliant descriptions here are of overnight rides in luxury trains along the Levant, or of desperate midnight drives through the desert in flight from oncoming armies. Already the boy is like an Elizabeth Bowen character: secretive, dandiacal, doomed to feel real only when crossing a border.
The Gezira Prep School is his "first experience of an organised system set up as a colonial business by the British". The account of school life recalls Orwell: the chain of servility is run by sadistic masters who write limp-wristed neo-Georgian poetry on their days off. At Victoria secondary college, a stylish but bullying prefect tortures a boy "because, frankly , I enjoy it". A decade later, he resurfaces as Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia.
THE British empire is expiring on the streets outside, but the teachers continue to spread its values. Wounded, they are dangerous. An enfeebled headmaster, too weak to beat Said himself, has his Arab flunkey do that for him. "Fair play " means complaining about your opponent; "sportsmanship" means being quiet about injustice.
What sweetens this life is art, a world in which grubby humiliation may be briefly transcended. A mundane girl in his class performs Alice in Wonderland on the school stage and suddenly becomes mysterious and beautiful. Hilda and her son read the parts of Gertrude and Hamlet to one another at home, and when they go to watch Gielgud they feel a shock of joy.
Intelligence, as so often, prevents our subject from being a model student. Passed from the "authoritarian Brits" to the "benevolent Yanks", he discovers that American bonhomie is but a subtler form of mind-control. At school, and then college, in the US, he is dismayed at the hidden hierarchies which blot everything from fraternity clubs to academic careers. In particular, he is upset by anti-semitism.
This bears some stressing, because extreme Zionist commentators are now accusing Said of overstating his family's suffering for the sake of propaganda. Yet the references to Jewish people in the narrative are all warm and even wistful about contacts later lost. It contains remarkably little political analysis, because it deals with dramatis personae who had little idea of the catastrophe in store for them. The mother who loved to discuss The Idiot with her son would spend weary decades after 1948 searching for an alternative citizenship, but the woman in these pages is a study in self-repression. For years after 1948, marvels the son, his parents' generation continued to repress the pain, and therefore the debate, about what had happened.
In previous books, Said has accurately described Palestinians as "victims of victims". In his critical masterpiece, Orientalism, he showed how the old anti-semitic stereotypes of swarthy, hook-nosed Jews were transferred in the 1970s to the Arabs, the new outcasts. Far from producing anti-semitic propaganda, he has at all times tried to see Jews and Arabs as sharers of a common problem.
This memoir goes well beyond journalistic commentary on the Palestine question to reveal the underlying beauty and disorder of a way of life that died before 1948. If Said saw his parents only in fragments, that was also generally true of the way Arabs saw their fragile world. Hence the ease and speed with which a proud people was cast out.
Out of Place recreates the sights and sounds, the smells and shouts, of a lost world, as Gunter Grass did for Danzig or Joyce for turn-of-the-century Dublin. It is a moving homage to two brilliant, flawed but spellbinding parents, who live again in its pages with an intensity perhaps more deep than they ever allowed themselves to feel in life. Which is to say that their son, one of the great critics of our age, has produced a work of art, one of the noblest autobiographies of our time.
Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD