Prepared by the researcher : Abdelbassat Mounadi Idrissi, Ibn Toufail University, Kenitra, Morocco
Democratic Arabic Center
Journal of cultural linguistic and artistic studies : Thirty-first Issue – March 2024
A Periodical International Journal published by the “Democratic Arab Center” Germany – Berlin
Journal of cultural linguistic and artistic studies
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Abstract
Space and place are constant themes in Edward Said life and scholarship. This paper explores Said’s experience of both in his memoir Out of Place. I argue here that unlike many works on the subject, both historical fictional, that stress the deep sentimental attachment to native lands, Said’s memoir is rather a life narrative about a developing animosity to place and settling, peculiar in many ways. The questions this paper answers are: why had Said felt, most of his life, out of place? Why did he resent settling and preferred a nomadic lifestyle as an alternative? And how did this choice paved the way for his intellectual development and achievements?
Keywords: Space, place, Edward Said, experience.
- Spatial dialectics: Jerusalem-Safad vs Cairo
Said’s work is a work about his experience of Palestine, Egypt and other places as home with complex repercussions. A set of questions pop here: given that this is the experience of space from the other side of the 5-centuries “horror” since Columbus sat sail to the Americas mistaking it, throughout his journey, for an East Asian realm; are we to expect Said’s ‘places of mind’ –Timothy Brennan’s words- to be a version of Chief Seattle’s speech; a justifiably age-old glorification of genuine attachment to the land? Or is Said’s work a liberal milder version of sophisticated nationalism?
I argue that neither is Said’s memoir a historical testimony of what preferably be labelled here as “savage” nationalism, nor is it a liberal, sophisticated nationalist account. By savage nationalism I mean the life-affirming love of land. Said’s memoir is more like a life-long quest to answer one simple set of questions: why do I feel homeless? Why this is happening to me? What did I do to the world to merit this painfully-lonely and anxiety-ridden deal? The overly intimate nature of the genre “memoir” was chosen and the rationale was presented in different guise by Said. Quotes dealing with this aspect of the life of Said are found in the opening pages in his memoir. He confesses that he had juggled throughout his childhood between intransigence and passivity, that his English name “Edward” coupled with the Arab one “Said” had puzzled him for long, and that he couldn’t remember which language he had spoken first: Arabic or English. (Said 3- 4). These opening lines with the thesis statement that there had been something wrong with how he had been meant to fit in the world and the conclusion that he had always felt out of place and lonely, (Said 4) are clear indications that stepping into the work promises an existential personal puzzle of fatal implications and of high complexity that had haunted the man throughout his life in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon and finally the United States.
The contradictions abounding in Said’s life, early on in particular; birth in Jerusalem to a Christian family surrounded by a Jewish minority and a Muslim majority, to a merchant Palestinian father, veteran in the American army; Growing up in colonial Egypt, but receiving a strictly British education; all a cocoon of a suffocating “unsettled [and certainly unsettling] sense of many identities” (additions are mine) (Said 5) growing around his person the further the reader proceeds to the end of the work. He is seen as a child fighting it level by level.
Of the rest of his life in Palestine until the family relocation to Egypt Said has little to say, except that it was more enthralling for a child surrounded by cousins and clan members. As a child Said loved visiting relatives in Safad where his parents’ strict discipline loosened and his childhood play was unchained. (Said 21). He speaks of the sense the competing spaces of his childhood impressed on him. Adjectives, describing both realms Jerusalem-Safad on the one side and Cairo on the other, fluctuate between opposites; wherein Cairo was a realm of “cumulative daily [parental] regimen reinforcement [on Said’s person], Safad consisted of “narrow, carless streets and steep climbs, [which] made for a wonderful playground, [and where] my aunt’s cooking was exceptionally delicious.” Wherein Cairo represented “acutely felt solitude…[and] a closely organized space and time…Jerusalem stood for [enjoyable] relative freedom…was pleasant, … tantalizingly open.” Wherein Zamalek (a Cairo Neighborhood and the Saids’ residence) stood for “charged geography and atmosphere… Zamalek, [which] 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,” Talbiya in Jerusalem, Said’s birthplace on the other hand, had residents who “were mainly a homogenous group of well-to-do merchants and professionals.” (Said 21- 22).
Talbiya in Jerusalem, by virtue of being a semi-rural neighborhood, a place where young Edward had ample space to “ride his bike” and was surrounded by “cousins’ friends villas” and where everyone “knew everyone else” (Said 21). The sheer intimacy in Said’s words describing both realms from the perspective of a child indicates what looks like an inadvertent and unacknowledged attachment on the part of Said to Talbiya. On the other hand, his words describing Zamalek and Cairo in general do not vary much. He speaks of more “internal [family] cohesion” (Said 21) imposed by the articulated lack of contacts outside the small family, unlike life among “the extended clan.” (Said 20). So much so that the fleeting moments of relative freedom in the open spaces of the family home in Talbiya and the more open and rural Safad soon, Said admits, “acquire a languid almost dreamlike aspect.” (Said 21).
Though Timothy Brennan, with the usual style of American exuberance, presents a picture of lavish life that Said’s parents offered their son, Said’s account says otherwise. His life in Cairo as a young man, Brennan describes, as a “colonial dream”(Brennan 6), he felt, was suffocating. The circumscribed nodal points of school, home, club, church, garden provoked lasting boredom in him. Zamalek, Said’s dwelling neighborhood and island on the Nile, receives from Brennan the following description:
A picturesque Island in the Middle of the Nile that formed a stepping-stone by means of urban bridges from downtown to Giza and the Pyramids farther west. Unlike today, the island in the 1940s was filled with vast stretches of undeveloped parkland, woods, riding paths, golf courses, and exotic fishponds. (Brennan 5). [Italics mine]
The allure of the island Brennan describes as ‘picturesque’ with ‘urban bridges’, ‘vast stretches of land’ and ‘exotic fishponds’ didn’t seem so to young Said at the time. Notice the contrast in his words: “Our house…overlooked the so-called fish garden, a small, fence-encircled park with an artificial rock hill, a tiny pond, and a grotto; its little green lawns was interspersed with winding paths…etc.” (Said 22) [Italics mine]. The picturesque island with vast stretches of parkland and exotic fishponds turns out in Said’s narrative to be – among other things – only a small, fence-encircled park with a tiny pond, little green lawns with winding paths.
In Cairo adjectives used by Said indicates a sense of city tightness and routine order; it is a realm where roles come to sharper edges. Said feels more the grip of his role as a child, his parents re-inflate the “gigantic cocoon”, impose further strictures and rules. His early years in Cairo and his parents’ worry-stricken discipline invokes in his memory tighter spaces and condensed schedules, which wore him down and – at the time of writing several decades later – seem still like a serious bother. “For years,” he recounts describing the whole story as a senseless ordeal “Sunday meant Sunday school….school, church, club, garden, house – a limited, carefully circumscribed segment of the great city – was my world until I was well into my teens.” (Said 22). Perhaps this rather over-disciplined upbringing during character-forming years added to Said’s restless temperament. It also accounts for the confession he makes early on in the memoir that “I have no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement. Every day for me is like beginning a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain tomorrow before it.” (Said 12).
From the analysis of Edward’s spatial experience that follows it seems that the only place that impressed a sense of spontaneous childhood play and joy in him was Jerusalem and Safad in Palestine, where he spent the first ten years of his life. But this time seem not to have been enough to consolidate a sense of deep attachment to both places in him, and this is due to the constant mobility of the family between Cairo and Palestine. The play in the hills with cousins and the delicious meals he was awarded upon return from the playground were interrupted by the father’s decisions to take the family back to Cairo where young Edward was supposed to pursue his studies.
Cairo, as will be detailed in what follows, suffocated young Edward. The drawn distinctions therein between the colonial and the native quarters, the parents growing anxiety about their son’s upbringing and the restricted set of places frequented by the family squeezed young Edward’s inquisitive nature. Though Timothy Brennan, Said’s biographer, describes the places he frequented as a young child as exquisite venues reserved for colonials and Cairo’s rich, Said’s narrative tells a different story.
In Said’s case, it is the extent of warmth or lack of it thereof in relationship to the people inhabiting the place that define his images of, and sentiments towards the place. The nodal points in Cairo that the Saids visited were often places where no solid relationship could be established between Edward and his peers. They were mostly places restricted to foreigners (British, Eastern Europeans and Jews) and a handful of wealthy natives. The potential hostility lurking behind relationships to strangers prevented any alternative fulfillment for Edward outside his family home. And his experience of the home warmth was rather marred by the taboo-setting his worried parents devised for him.
Said’s narrative, among other things of course, is about relationship to place. The claim made here can be justified simply by deconstructing the title of the work Out of Place. The phrase “out of place” hides the copular “I was always out of place”, or “I have lived my life feeling out of place all along”. A reader is prompted to ask why had Said had the overriding feeling of living out of place. The norm among most people is that places, homes for example, as Gaston Bachelard argues, are saturated with images, sentiments and our attitudes towards them. (Bachelard 32). The previous statement deserves further elucidation.
Both Bachelard and Yi-Fu Tuan advocate the argument that places, for us, hold values within them. The position of both, and this is due to our self-positioning as sapiens who have developed different feelings towards the above and the below, (Tuan 10), high and low (Tuan 17), chaos and form (Tuan 14)…etc. dictate certain associations of feelings that determine the value of each. Tuan, for example, argues that humans’ representations of places to themselves constitute a dynamic relationship that is constantly modified with our consecutive experiences of them. “Place”, after all, “is an organized world of meaning.” (Tuan 179). Home for us is like a gravity centre to which we constantly revert after every adventure, while other places are often of less value to us.
Home, in other words and by virtue of being home, is mostly resplendent with images of family intimacy, care and reminiscences of childhood play and spontaneous laughter. (Bachelard 32). Other places often invoke in us sentiments of passing admiration at best, or even hostility. The climate, the flora and fauna plus interaction with people inhabiting the place usually determine the amount of our attachment to or repulsion from them.
To answer the question asked above about Said’s feeling of being out of place requires a keen eye for his experiences of the places he had lived in from birth to the time of the writing of his memoir. Upon doing so it turned out that Said’s feeling of homelessness in the many places he lived in had been mostly an outcome of the traumatic experiences he had had in each. By the time he could remember the earlier phases of his life, he acutely felt the overwhelming sense of isolation that hemmed in his parents’ life in Cairo. The parents, traumatized early on by the death of their first-born child, apparently didn’t see eye to eye with regard to attachment to their birthplaces; Palestine. While the father, admits Said, hated Jerusalem, not much does Edward say about Hilda, the mother’s attitude to her birthplace, though in passing, he notes that she remained attached to her school. The narrative tells of a housewife rather content with the maternal universe she helped create with the husband, Wadie.
- School and the Colonial quarters as seen by a native
Neither the places Edward frequented nor the schools he pursued his studies in succeeded in instilling in him a lasting attachment to Cairo either. School for Edward was a place where heartless Victorian teachers, racist superintendents and segregationist British students prevailed handing him instead a marginal place that intensified his sense of isolation. At one point in the narrative, Said relates an incident; a “colonial encounter” (Said 44) that took place within the walls of a colonial club of which he and his family were members. While riding his bike he was approached by a suited Englishman who scolded him, the child he was, for trespassing on the grounds of a colonial club: “get out boy. Arabs aren’t allowed here. And you are an Arab!” (Said 44) The literature of the empire is redolent with colonial encounters of this kind throughout the lands the British Empire expanded to. George Orwell for one published a gripping narrative centered on the struggle and intrigue involving British colonials with a scheming Burmese native collaborating with the imperial project developing meanwhile an urge to join the exclusively colonial club.
Modern Western colonialism developed as a way of looking at the world that saw in space a raw component that needs the controlling intervention of man, now open to further control and efficiency. To extrapolate from Michel Foucault’s specified realms where spaces are rearranged for purposes of dominance and productivity, modern knowledge/power sought and got the chance to produce space anew. Space became instrumental. The contemporary positivist conceptions of space immediately banished metaphysical distinctions common during previous times between sacred and profane realms, fertile soils blessed by the fertility Goddess and barren ones, and so on. Space became an object of the desire to dominate and re-order. This appetite coincided with European imperial expansion which held on to the same notion; this unsympathetic, calculative stance that space in itself is but a chance for profit and dominance.
To give examples of the idea propounded above we will digress here giving a chance to Michel Foucault idea of how re-ordering space for purposes of power and profit was proposed by modern thinkers. Modern enclosures found in the art of detail a way to create spaces for hospitals, workplaces, prisons and the pre-existent celled life in the monastery; a way of arranging space by distributing individualised spaces for individualised, specified and detailed roles for respectively patients, workers and inmates, which made the accompanying efforts of supervision, control and productivity all the more easier and efficient. The space arranged in the form of cells is not a passive recipient of students, workers or soldiers for example. It was a realm of calculated hierarchy. Capacity, performance and rank determined the distribution of population thereof. (Foucault 146-147).
The architectural figures that were erected not only as prisons, but also as schools, military barracks and factories lay out a field of vision; a vision that is situated in a particular place to allow the gaze of power to traverse and insure visibility of those subjected to the gaze. (Foucault 174). Through hierarchized observation, workers, prisoners and students are subjected to the alert eyes of authority, bent on inculcating in its object of vision discipline, good conduct and productivity. (Foucault 175). An entire edifice of knowledge accompanies the “means of correct training” in barracks, schools, hospitals and factories, all taking after, and also creating new trends in the supervision, training and correction of attitudes of the objects of surveillance. Its tools are classifications, coding and reporting.
The ultimate building plan that expresses the urgent need current during the 18th and the 19th centuries was Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: a circular building lined with cells packed over each other, below which there is a square. At the middle of the square rises a spacious tower. This tower is the seat of surveillance before which lies a large field of visibility exposing the said cells to the gaze of the guards in the tower. The inmate, student or factory worker, according to this principle, are seen, but cannot see. They are “the objects of information”. (Foucault 200). The effect of the panopticon is an internalization of the surveilling gaze in the object of surveillance rendering the work of the function of power automatic. (Foucault 201).
The panopticon is a spatial arrangement wherein one is relegated to their ‘right’ place with the purpose in the mind of authority of subduing the powers of their bodies to its own ends. The modern and new disciplinary methods in Foucault’s account should not be remembered as the grim, gloomy spaces of suffering, but as a creative force behind several branches of knowledge like “clinical medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychology”. (Foucault 224). It has also helped in rationalising work. This observation added to another passage, which I will quote here, pays a nod to questions of the relationship of nationalism to modern forms of parcelling space, and rearranging it along new lines in the service of power; the imperial partitioning of Africa is an example. Foucault rightly attributes to modernity and enlightenment the creation of the new disciplinary methods, with its obsession with classifying, hierarchizing, and individualizing surveillance by allocating individual particular spaces cast under the supervision of authority. The aim varies according to the spaces wherein objects of the gaze are placed. In the factory, surveillance insures the constant rhythmic movements of workers contributing each in their allocated roles in a whole machine of ever-increasing production, efficiency and continuous effort. In schools, the survielling gaze insures the perfection of competences, well-behaviour. In prisons, the surveilling gaze guarantees permanent visibility of its objects; recording, reporting and devising means of adjusting behaviours and discipline of the inmates, and so on. The aim is to inculcate in those subject to the gaze of power a sense of self-monitoring that insures the automatic work of surveilliance and power.
But perhaps no Postcolonial critic has dedicated as much analysis of the grand spatial divide perpetuated by colonial agents on native lands than Frantz Fanon. The panoramic violence the colonizer wrings on the colonized, argues Fanon, is overwhelming. So much so that the colonized live in agonies of envy and the nerve-wrecking “why?”, for while the colonizer’s town is “strongly built, … brightly lit,” (Fanon 39) evenly-asphalted, clean, with his feet covered in comfortable shoes, and he is well-fed; while the native town is “a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute,” (Fanon 39) overcrowded and its people walk barefeeted in roads full of holes and the natives are starving.
But it must be noted that despite the Fanonian characterization of rigid separation between both towns, the case of Edward Said doesn’t apply here: the two towns here do not “follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity.” Said was certainly not starving, nor did he walk barefeeted. Yet the envy stemming mostly from fear of not belonging wrenches young Edward’s spirit. It is plain in moments of childish wishful thinking as he reiterates them throughout the narrative in expressions like: “I wish we were all whites.” Though by the time of Said’s childhood, the late thirties and the early forties, the rigid colonial separation between the two towns had grown a little less rigid, which his family belonging to the club itself testifies to, earlier phases of British colonization everywhere witnessed categorical refusal on the part of the colonizers to accept entry of even native collaborators with the colonial project into colonial clubs. Here Orwell’s semi-autobiographical novel Burmese Days stands witness. The narrative is about the set of circumstances that force a handful of colonials to accept a scheming native collaborator into the colonial club.
Few insightful theoretical maxims, if at all, would explain the nuanced differences between the colonial conditions that gave life to Algeria’s violent revolution against the French colonial-settlers on the one hand and someone with interest in decolonization in the form with which Edward Said is famous for now, on the other, other than Karl Marx’s table-turning maxim that material conditions determine thought and action. For while the average Algerian suffered the conditions Fanon describes amply in his many works on the subject, i.e. violence in both material and spiritual forms, Said, being the son of a well to do father, had a little less cruel, though no less spiritually damaging, living conditions in colonial Cairo. Therefore the vengeance of each is bound to be different.
Despite Brennan’s insistence on the, somewhat, inaccurate self-depiction on the part of Said, the latter is the only one who can tell his own truth. As if playing a contrapuntal note the two vary a lot; so much so that the narrative in the hands of Brennan paints a totally different ‘Said’ than the one, anyone who had read the latter’s memoir, expects. While Said spells the beans about ‘the hectoring parents with the “fibbering” and “loitering” child’ ‘the inquisitive mother,’ ‘the aloof, pompous father,’ ‘the taboo on friends and relations outside home,’ ‘the suffocating spatial rhythms’ and a world wherein nothing suffices, Brennan draws the opposite picture: that of Said’s mother telling visitors of his transgressions “with a sparkle in her eyes,” of her along with his teachers holding him as the ideal to his sister for his “triumphs, good-looking,…[and for being] the model of excellence,” (Brennan 6) for singing as he spearheaded a running competition with the neighbor’s daughters, and for being “the instigator of pranks.” He was, Brennan claims concluding this lauding episode, “simply the doer while others looked on.” (Brennan 7)
Edward’s school experience illustrates how miserable he had felt his whole childhood. School is usually a locus of dense meanings for children. First impressions fade early leaving place to subsequent experiences to constantly define and redefine this stress-laden locale. The move from the intimacy of a mother’s care and warmth to a realm strewn with rules of ‘dos’ and ‘donts’ and where stricter versions of the father and the mother, giants as they are in the eyes of a child, dominate, arrange queues, overlook rituals of entrance and exit, animate classrooms, inculcate and teach, yell orders and whisper feedback and make the more you stay the harder what you acquire gets, is an exceptionally hard experience for every child. Therefore it is not that strange that children, easily bored as they can be, usually dislike school or at least harbor reserve over certain teachers, principals or headmasters along with particular school subjects. Edward Said does a fascinating job recollecting the perspective of his childhood self striding the school yard fascinated with the Gezira Preparatory School and the giants running it. He recalls the names of the colonial school staff, the agents of colonial civilizing mission; a Mr. and a Mrs Bullen, with apparently a sort of intrigue pervading his narrative as to what they do behind doors, what happens upstairs in the senior classes, what is the place like. Without much details Said tells us that his curiosity led him once on an exploratory mission upstairs, and with no further details he comments, “not very happily” (Said 36) that he did so.
The British colonial racist attitudes, Said tells us, didn’t even spare children, towards whom the Bullens couldn’t hide their contempt. The impressions Said’s memory recapitulates are of a school with a fully English staff bandying about, by their contempt, what he calls “a remoteness and hauteur.” (Said 38). The school subjects he studied had nothing to do with his Arab environment: “our 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.” (Said 39). Instead of bridging this gap of difference the school, Said recalls, by its English-centeredness, made it clear that “there was never to be any perceived connection between…[what I learned] and me.” (Said 39). “We were all treated” Said adds “as if we should (or really wanted to) be English.” (Said 39) [The brackets are Said’s.]
The time young Said spent inside school was not a time he enjoyed. Qualifying the sense of space, he stresses that the school yard inside the GPS was “a little enclosed yard completely shut off from” (Said 39) the bustling native life surrounding it. Neither school time and space nor the colonial city, as it was, rigidly separated from the rest of the native bubbling slums surrounding it in colonial Cairo, provided any outlet out of this exceedingly suffocating atmosphere. The school yard, Said affirms, was “a frontier between the native urban world and the constructed colonial suburb we lived, studied and, played in.” (Said 40). Being an Arab, yet not mixing with Arab peers, going to a colonial school run by, and for the children of the servants of the empire and a handful of religious and racial minorities, yet not blending in either increased Said’s loneliness and clumsiness with school chores. His behavioral infractions were met with severe punishments by his Victorian principals and teachers.
Behind this rigid policy of separating the colonial from the native realms stood a philosophy wherein the native was looked upon as almost a being from a different, less developed species, imbued with a malicious essence that disqualifies him from sharing life with the masters. Enduring the aforementioned loneliness, and the bullying he was subjected to by whimsical peers, who, Said recounts, hated his person, denigrated his looks and hurtled threats at him, so fearsome were the threats that young Said became obsessed with avoiding them. The ultimate blow to this already fragile relationship to school was the punishment meted out to 8-years old Said for an un-recollected infraction. The punishment consisted of a ruthless caning by the fearsome English school principal (Said 42), while the parents’ response, Said recollects, only added salt to injury. They admonished their son for his stubborn delinquency and took the side of the Victorian rigid principal whose memorable image heightened young Said’s sense of humiliation and loneliness and made his need to belong all the more painful. His recollection of the atmosphere following this demeaning incident is one of a poisoned air within the walls of a “colonial business” – he uses the phrase to describe the school –, which “was not interesting as a place of learning” and which was hated by both the students and the teachers. (Said 42).
Said’s growing sense of isolation and his developing dependence upon his mother’s approval, chameleon-like and unsustained as it was (Said 45), intensified his feeling of desolation. He grew painfully aware of the gulf that separated him from his peers saying that “an invisible cordon kept them hidden in another world” – this invisibility grew proportionate to the disregard meted out to him by both his peers and the contemptuous school staff. Said’s keen curiosity and sense of observation broadened the cold distance he noted between himself and the rest of the school. Noting this painful distance he enviously reports: “I was perfectly aware of how their names were just right, and their clothes and accents and associations were totally different from my own.” [Last emphasis mine. The earlier Said’s.] Said concludes this episode “Cairo, a city I always liked yet in which I never felt I belonged…,” (Said 43) “Very little of what surrounded me at the school—lessons, teachers, students, atmosphere – was sustaining or helpful to me.” (Said 45).
This was one of the many encounters Said had with British colonials, which instigated in him a sense of both hatred and the need to disobey. These sentiments would find better expressions in the classrooms of the all-English staffed Victoria College (VC). While Said’s boyhood powerlessness made of resisting the British colonial system at GPS impossible, the new atmosphere of VC; the fact that Said had mostly Arab peers, sharing in the same contempt for the British schooling system, its arrogant, violent teachers and racist staff, teenage Said led a sort of school-scale civil disobedience movement intended to deter the violence and racist contempt of the British school. There was a feeling, admits Said, among the largely Middle Eastern students in VC that being taught the history, geography, and mores and customs of the Empire (Said 184), in the language of the empire to native students was tasteless and alienating. (Said 206). But nowhere in the book does Said say that the group of misbehaving students who targeted the teachers of VC were motivated by liberation ideals. They were mostly teenagers imbibing the reciprocal hatred the Arab natives had for their colonizers. And being taught about another country, in another language, while yours counts for far less than to deserve to be in curriculums added to the mischief the teenagers became capable of. Said’s rebellion against VC teachers and staff led to the temporary suspension of his enrollment and finally to his banishment from school.
- From Place to topos: the development of Said’s intellectual powers.
Early on in his teenage years Edward relates how the censorious vigil that his parent devised and developed over the years actually backfired. For while the parent sought to inculcate in his very character a sense of being monitored, his excessive curiosity about the world increased. What dominated Said’s view of the world was a fundamental lack: for him Tarzan stories in cinemas, Greek myths in books, of example, never end when the screen or the last page says so, their ends are threads for new narratives, in Edward’s imagination, involving new events and new relationships between the characters, all contributing to newer adventures, the sheer pleasure of whose imagining enthralled him. His way from and to school was a lonely walk in which his unsatiated curiosity led him to imagined events that the real world failed to provide, sometimes in the form of attempts to complete en event, to push a potential action to what could occur next and so on. So much so, he narrates, that his waking hours were spent, if not in reading or listening to music, they were consumed in filling this lack in the world.
Early on in the narrative Said fails to understand why and for what, this leaning in his behaviour to fantasize. Later on he admits that it was an impulsive behaviour indulged in as a substitute for the parent’s growing worry about him, which comes out in the form of further restrictions and taboo-setting that suffocated his desire to be a fully functional member of the family. His parents hid family secrets and even things they considered unnecessary to a growing child to know. By the time of Nakbeh in 1948 Edward was already thirteen years old. Yet the why of why were Palestinians ‘leaving’ their property, their houses, their lives and their land remained a mystery to him until he witnessed firsthand, through the charity work of one of his aunts on behalf of the Palestinian refugees, what was taking place. He was shocked by the thousands upon thousands arriving daily to his aunt’s apartment door, within which she worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk to help them and cater for their immediate medical and living needs. He experienced closely what exile means. His appreciation for the sufferings of the Palestinians led him to spare an entire chapter to describe the daily details of the activities a bunch of by-now unnameable heroes, doctors, pharmacists, clerks, businessmen and women and ordinary employees, who contributed generously to the alleviation of the refugees’ suffering. The parent’s insistence not to involve the child in events affecting the family, added to the restrictions imposed on his personal life, resulted in efforts, by him, to sublimate this desire to be part of something bigger into the world.
By the time he was in primary school in Cairo he cherished what life offered him by way of simple daily events on his way to school:
“What I cherished in those dawdling walks was the opportunity to elaborate on the scanty material offered me. A red-headed woman I saw one afternoon seemed – just by walking by – to have persuaded me that she was a poisoner and (I had without specific comprehension heard the word recently) a divorcee. A pair of men sauntering about one morning were detectives. I imagined that a couple standing on a balcony overhead spoke French and had just had a leisurely breakfast with champagne.
Fantasizing about other lives and especially other people’s houses was stimulated by my quite rigid confinement in our own.” (Said 37 -38).
The tendency to fantasize on Edward Said’s part in order to substitute for the parent’s behavior and character regimen will, though harsh on a child, open up vistas of intellectual feats that would make of him one of the foremost public intellectual of his age in the West and the world later on. The trajectory that Said followed from early on is informative here. The instant the quote above describes was an imaginative sport for young Edward. Added to the pleasure he had from indulging such a habit, it was stimulated further by the sexual content of magazines, books and cinema movies that both, entangled in his experience from early on, became hard to separate. The school’s loads of irrelevant information about British glory (Said 39) in history and colonial project failed to draw Edward’s attention and ostracized him further from the rather mostly hostile atmosphere of the schools he attended throughout his childhood and early adolescence. The parent’s tabooing of friends visits, added to their constant warnings to Edward not to talk to strangers left him fantasy as the only possible escape from the growing misery of his life.
It was during summer breaks that the family spent in Lebanon that Said discovered a hidden, deeper layer to himself, which, for him, constituted his true character. While there he was introduced to members of the extended family, most of whom were university professors and students, or politicians with astonishing educational backgrounds and flourishing careers. The meetings introduced Edward to new intellectual challenges. There Edward learned first “about Kant, Hegel, and Plato…[and] heard Furtwangler.” These discussions and books-and-records borrowing from friends and acquaintances equipped him with a “gradually emerging sense of complexity, complexity for its own sake, unresolved, unreconciled, perhaps finally unassimilated.” (Said 164). The sheer passion Said felt these meetings provided him with rescued him from rather “a time of my greatest deprivation, while I wandered the summer resort’s bleak streets with only the heat and a generalized dissatisfaction.”
It was in the late 40s of the last century that the family started to spend summer vacations in Lebanon and continued to do so throughout the 50s when Wadie saw it fit to send his son Edward to the US to finish college and pursue university studies. The humane approach to teaching US schools developed as opposed to their British Victorian counterparts helped Said develop a keen eye for assessing professorly intelligence and enhanced his readiness to learn. Though he admits several times in the work that as an adult he characterized himself as sexually repressed, other aspects of his curious character were satiated and nourished with further interests, and in further figures and subjects, that he majored not in literature as is sometimes commonly believed, but in the humanities; “an honors program that allowed me to take as many courses in music, philosophy, and French as in English.” (Said 276). In fact early on at the university Edward discovered that
My [his] greatest gift was: memory, which allowed me to recall visually whole passages in books, to see them again on the page, and then to manipulate scenes, characters, giving them an imaginary life beyond the pages of the book. I would have moments of exultant recollection that enabled me to look out over a sea of details, spotting patterns, phrases, word clusters, which I imagined as stretching out interconnectedly without limit. (Said 165).
This hobby was not only an exclusively intellectual feat for Said, but also something he tried even connecting to his relations in Dhour Shweir, Lebanon, tirelessly looking for patterns of conduct, mannerisms and repeated phrases that defined a family, their taste in furniture…etc. this was a developing awareness on his part “of another life of beauty, interrelated parts—parts of ideas, passages of literature and music, history, personal memory, daily observation – nourished…by my inner, far less compliant and private self, who could read, think, and even write independent of ” (Said 165) the version of himself that his parents, mentors, teachers made.
Edward’s life in Princeton and summers in Dhour Shweir consisted of environments wherein his intellectual and debating capacities were tested. He reiterates several times in the last chapters of his memoir that he was preoccupied with what looked like an undercover self that was extremely ascetic, highly demanding intellectually, and incessantly involved in exercises of meditation on subjects that the politics of the age brought to the fore like: Palestine, Palestinian exiles, the attitudes of Lebanese Christians to the rise of Nasser and Nasserism, all of these worldly issues of the time were seen as a foreground to Edward’s intellectual commitments to certain authors that were subject to one or another of his graduation theses. What began for Edward as pastime has turned into a defining personal trait, a question of personal and intellectual identity. And what gave further value to Edward’s intellectual adventures, in his eyes, was the interest his debating capacities drew to him and his person. His first romance involved a strong intimate relationship with an older female, who, though less educated than him, admittedly, substituted in part Edward’s dependence on his mother for intellectual and intimate companionship. Though the relationship didn’t last, it was a chance for adolescent Edward to discover how his intellectual interests made him a better and more charming companion.
The birth of this underground self took years as daily depredations in Edward’s life like failed romances and a marriage, his father’s health issues, which lasted and overwhelmed him, and the constant displacements. Edward confesses:
The underlying motifs for me have been the emergence of a second self buried for a very long time beneath a surface of often expertly acquired and wielded social characteristics belonging to the self my parents tried to construct , the “Edward” I speak of intermittently, and how an extraordinarily increasing number of departures have unsettled my life from its early beginnings. (Said 217).
Leading a life in which as soon as comfort creeps in, a sense of something going wrong takes over him. Though this was the norm in his life early on, due to conditions beyond his control, Edward, in a sense, became the first to refuse Edward comfort and pleasure on earth. In fact, there is what Max Weber characterizes as the Protestant ethic of devote and constant hard work in search for God’s revelation of one’s destiny running through, and in sense, defining Edward’s self to himself. As if his life attracts meaning only when exploring, extrapolating, substituting, experimenting with intellectual feats that gave the world sense and gave life a needed dose of seduction, which in turn nourished further this ongoing adventure. The adventure turned from the many failed attempts to settle territorially into situating oneself in mental topos vis a vis issues and figures in the world and in history; a topos consisting mainly of an ethical and political fabric.
No words express this state better than Edward’s confession himself: “the fact that I was never at home or at least at Mount Hermon, out of place in nearly every way, gave me the incentive to find my territory, not socially but intellectually.” (Said 231). This confession comes after Said details how he entirely and intently brushed aside all distractions his mates were succumbing to. Though, admittedly, loneliness weighed on him, but intellectual life seemed, when juxtaposed before his eyes, the less guilt-ridden pleasure among alternatives like flirting, dates, students’ clubs; their rites and rituals. Less guilt-ridden, we argue, because Said reports that his mother’s anguishedly expressed sentiments about his departure to the US served as an antidote to pleasure, the same pleasure he banished, postponing laughter until he met her. For him, avoiding pleasure was a faithful act of devotion to his mother.
This lasting and ascetic effort on his part not to indulge in the pleasures of the day; a sophist-like renunciation of what made sense in the world for most men, resulted in a drastic transformation on the mental level. The earthly territory that the world refused him; a place he could claim home, feel attached to, defend and protect, was to become an intellectual possibility; a sacrificial postponement of what is, to what could, by conscious human effort and critical insurgency, be. This intellectual edifice consisted of, crudely assessed here, a judicature consisting of informed human conscience condemning injustice wherever it be, unafraid at every moment to turn in on itself, all in pursuit of the ultimate ideals of Platonic justice and truth. Nowhere does Said explain this mental territory than in two prominent books on the subject. These are Representations of the Intellectual and The World, the Text, and the Critic.
Conclusion
In conclusion Said’s traumatic experience of the places he lived in throughout his life explain enough why he had this animosity with settling, with belonging, for at a time when he was vulnerable and in dire need for belonging, the world, at the hands of different colonial agents, from the Zionist Forces in 1948 Palestine to colonial Cairo, where he was refused entry into clubs and expelled from school, refused him that. Unlike hard core nationalists who would opt for arms to set foot on a soil he calls his, Said, helpless as he had been, reconciliated himself to the fact that he would never belong, whence his reiteration throughout many of his works that exile for him became a personal, intellectual choice that define the true public intellectual, sets his work in motion and determine his stance versus the very authority that made this choice a mandatory living condition.
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