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COLUMBIA FORUM
Out of Place

One of Columbia's most popular teachers, University Professor Edward W. Said is an internationally acclaimed literary theorist who is recognized as a founder of post-colonial studies. Said, the author of 17 books (notably Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism) is equally well known for his championing of Palestinian causes. Faced with a diagnosis of leukemia in the early 1990s, he decided to write a "subjective account" of his upbringing and formative years in the Middle East, Europe and America. In Out of Place: A Memoir (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95), Said describes his sense of not belonging, which grew out of his education in a series of schools, the pervasive influence of a devoted mother and demanding father, and his family's dispossession and exile from Palestine after 1948. It is also offered as an "unofficial personal record" of Palestinian life in the years immediately before and after the establishment of Israel. In this excerpt about his earliest years, Said describes a lost era, when his Palestinian Christian family could travel freely between a home in Jerusalem and an apartment in a prosperous quarter of Cairo.

Even though they lived in Cairo in 1935, my parents made sure that I was born in Jerusalem, for reasons that were stated quite often during my childhood. Hilda had already given birth to a male child, to be called Gerard, in a Cairo hospital, where he developed an infection and died soon after birth. As a radical alternative to another hospital disaster, my parents traveled to Jerusalem during the summer, and on the first of November, I was delivered at home by a Jewish midwife, Madame Baer. She regularly visited us to see me as I was growing up; she was a big, bluff woman of German provenance who spoke no English but rather a heavily accented, comically incorrect Arabic. When she came there were lots of hugs and hearty pinches and slaps, but I remember little else of her.

Until 1947 our off-and-on sojourns in Palestine were entirely familial in character - that is we did nothing as a family alone but always with other members of the extended clan. In Egypt, it was exactly the opposite: there, because we were by ourselves in a setting to which we had no real connection, we developed a far greater sense of internal cohesion. My early memories of Palestine itself are casual and, considering my profound later immersion in Palestinian affairs, curiously unremarkable. It was a place I took for granted, the country I was from, where family and friends existed (its seems so retrospectively) with unreflecting ease. Our family house was in Talbiyah, a part of West Jerusalem that was sparsely inhabited but had been built and lived in exclusively by Palestinian Christians like us: the house was an imposing two-story stone villa with lots of rooms and a handsome garden in which my two youngest cousins, my sisters, and I would play. There was no neighborhood to speak of, although we knew everyone else in the as yet not clearly defined district. In front of the house lay an empty rectangular space where I rode my bike or played. There were no immediate neighbors, although about five hundred yards away sat a row of similar villas where my cousins' friends lived. Today, the empty space has become a park, and the area around the house a lush, densely inhabited upper-class Jewish neighborhood.

When we stayed with my widowed aunt Nabiha, my father's sister, and her five grown children, I was routinely a straggler behind the twins, Robert and Albert, who were about seven years older than I; I had neither any independence nor a particular role to play, except that of the younger cousin, occasionally used either as an unthinking, blindly obedient loudspeaker to yell insults and nasty messages to their friends and enemies from atop a wall, or as an assenting audience to extremely tall tales. Albert, with his rakish air and sporty sense of fun, was the closest I came to having an older brother or a good friend.

We also went to Safad, where we stayed for weeklong visits with my maternal uncle Munir, a doctor, and his wife, Latifeh, who had two boys, and a girl roughly my age. Safad belonged to another, less-developed world: the house had no electricity, the narrow, carless streets and steep climbs made for a wonderful playground, and my aunt's cooking was exceptionally delicious. After the Second World War, our visits to Jerusalem and to a greater extend Safad provided an escape from the regimen already forming around me with cumulative daily reinforcement in Cairo. The Safad visits were mostly idyllic times for me, broken occasionally by school or a tutorial, but never for very long.

As we increasingly spent time in Cairo, Palestine acquired a languid, almost dreamlike, aspect for me. There I did not as acutely feel the solitude I began to dread later, at eight or nine, and although I sensed the absence of closely organized space and time that made up my life in Egypt, I could not completely enjoy the relative freedom from it that I had in Jerusalem. I recall thinking that being in Jerusalem was pleasant but tantalizingly open, temporary, even transitory, as indeed it later was.

The more significant and charged geography and atmosphere of Cairo were concentrated for us in Zamalek, an island in the Nile between the old city in the east and Giza in the west, inhabited by foreigners and wealthy locals. My parents moved there in 1937, when I was two. Unlike Talbiyah, whose residents were mainly a homogeneous group of well-to-do merchants and professionals, Zamalek was not a real community but a sort of colonial outpost whose tone was set by Europeans with whom we had little or no contact: we built our own world within it. Our house was a spacious fifth-floor apartment at 1 Sharia Aziz Osman that overlooked the so-called Fish Garden, a small, fence-encircled park with an artificial rock hill (gabalaya), a tiny pond, and a grotto; its little green lawns were interspersed with winding paths, great trees, and, in the gabalaya area, artificially made rock formations and sloping hillsides where you could run up and down without interruption. Except for Sundays and public holidays, the Garden, as we all called it, was where I spent all of my playtime, always supervised, within range of my mother's voice, which was always lyrically audible to me and my sisters.

I played Robinson Crusoe and Tarzan there, and when she came with me, I played at eluding and then rejoining my mother. She usually went nearly everywhere with us, throughout our little world, one little island enclosed by another one. In the early years we went to school a few blocks away from the house - GPS, Gezira Preparatory School. For sports there was the Gezira Sporting Club, where I learned how to swim. For years, Sundays meant Sunday School; this senseless ordeal occurred between nine and ten in the morning at the GPS, followed by matins at All Saints' Cathedral. Sunday evenings took us to the American Mission Church in Ezbekieh, and two Sundays out of three to Evensong at the cathedral. School, church, club, garden, house - a limited, carefully circumscribed segment of the great city - was my world until I was well into my teens. And as the timetable for my life grew more demanding, the occasional deviations from it were carefully sanctioned respites that strengthened its hold over me.

One of the main recreational rituals of my Cairo years was what my father called "going for a drive," as distinguished from his daily drive to work. For more than three decades, he owned a series of black American cars, each bigger than its predecessors: a Ford, then a deluxe Plymouth sedan, then in 1948 and enormous Chrysler limousine. He always employed drivers, two of whom, Faris and Aziz, I was allowed to chat with only when he was not there: he insisted on complete silence as he was being driven to and from his office. On the occasions I rode with him, he started the journey from home very much in a domestic mood, so to speak, relatively open to conversation, and would even vouchsafe me a smile, until we reached the Bulaq bridge that connected Zamalek to the mainland. Then he would gradually stiffen and grow silent, pulling out some papers from his briefcase and beginning to go over them. By the time we reached the 'Asa 'af and Mixed Courts intersection that bordered Cairo's European business center, he was closed to me completely, and would not answer my questions or acknowledge my presence: he was transformed into the formidable boss of his business, a figure I came to dislike and fear because he seemed like a larger and more impersonal version of the man who supervised my life.

From Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said. Copyright © by Edward W. Said. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of Randon House, Inc.

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