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The Child of Nowhere
Danny Rubinstein
WITNESS FROM THE SIDE: A young Edward Said and a sister `dress up' as Palestinians |
(November 8, 1999)The Palestinians� most articulate spokesman grew up in an environment of luxury and privilege - with little awareness or interest in what was happening to his brethren
Edward Said tells us he doesn�t remember just what language he spoke first, Arabic or English. More than anything else, this reflects his estrangement as a child and young man from the social, political and cultural environment of the Arabs of Palestine, whose spokesman he was nevertheless to become.
How to explain this estrangement? It could derive from the fact that Said didn�t grow up in Palestine - neither in the city of his birth nor in the vicinity of his extended family, which is one of the major components of identity of Arabs in the East. He was far away from all of this.
In contrast, another Palestinian of the same age, Fawaz Turki, who gravitated as a child in 1948 with his family from Haifa to Lebanon wrote in his memoirs how it was only when he left the place of his birth that he began to pay attention to the fact that he was Palestinian. In the foreign environment of Beirut, Lebanese children would point him out as a foreigner; only then, he explained, did he "discover" that he was a Palestinian.
For Said, the discovery came much later, and is dealt with only in the most oblique way here. Instead, this memoir is a highly detailed description of those childhood and teenage years when Said was occupied with more personal matters. The account stops in the early 1960s, when Said completed his studies, at Harvard, and moved to New York, which is to say, several years before the shock of the 1967 Six-Day War brought him back "to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine."
Said, who was born in Jerusalem in 1935, was already a mature adult, 31 years of age, when his world changed and he began his political-intellectual activity on the Palestinian front. In the years following 67, he became the most polished and well-known spokesman in the West of the Palestinians, and in a sense of the Arabs in general. His comments, and the prestige he garnered, as a writer, lecturer and famous intellectual, elicited great resentment in Zionist and other circles around the world.
So much so that an American-born Israeli researcher named Justus Reid Weiner spent (by his own account) three whole years accumulating material about Said with the aim of discrediting him. The result of Weiner�s labors was an article in the September edition of Commentary magazine, claiming Said was less than accurate in the biographical facts he had provided over the years.
But Weiner�s obsessive effort, so manifestly odd, did not justify itself. Even if Said was himself never a refugee, and never suffered personally as a victim of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, there�s no doubt that almost every member of both his father�s and mother�s families were uprooted from their homeland. They lost their property, honor - and to an extent their identity. Said became their spokesman perhaps for the very reason that until he was in his 30s, he was in a sense a witness of events from the side.
Said�s recollection that he doesn�t know what his first language was is highly startling for a Palestinian. But it stemmed from Said�s father, Wadie (William), having had a personal and social status that was extraordinary for the Arab-Palestinian-Jerusalemite society into which he was born: as a Christian living among a Muslim majority, and as a member of the tiny Anglican community in the midst of the far larger Orthodox and Catholic communities. Furthermore, Wadie Said was an American citizen, having emigrated in 1911, and returning to Palestine in 1920, after fighting with the U.S. Army in World War I. When he came back, he joined the family office supply firm, a business that flourished greatly in Jerusalem at the start of the British Mandate. Edward�s father invested in and worked for the company in Egypt, where it opened a branch in 1929, and prospered. In 1932, Wadie married Hilda Musa, daughter to a Baptist minister from Nazareth by way of Safed, and after a three-month honeymoon in Europe, they set up their household in one of Cairo�s most prestigious quarters.
The Saids spent part of their time in Jerusalem, on family and working visits, and Edward was born in 1935 in the large family home in the Talbiyeh section of Jerusalem, where his aunt (his father�s sister) lived with her family.
The details of Said's childhood in Cairo, and the home he grew up in, are the core of the book. Few, if any, Arabs could have had a more elite education than that of the young Said. He was an only son, with four sisters, in a well-off home. Beyond his regular studies, he spent his time in music lessons, tennis, swimming, riding, cricket, sailing and other cultural and athletic pursuits. His education had a puritan quality, and took place in the company of children from other well-off families, almost all of them from minority communities: Armenians, Greeks, Jews and Copts.
What all of these had in common was an almost complete lack of connection to the Egyptian society that encompassed them. Most of his teachers were foreigners. At Cairo�s School for American Children (which he attended from age 10 until 13 with a break of several months� study in Jerusalem), his friends were the children of diplomats and of representatives of foreign companies. And at his high school, Cairo�s famous Victoria College (known as the Eton of the Middle East), he and his classmates were compelled to speak English only: Arabic speakers were punished.
Said tells how his parents warned against talking to strangers, forbade him to buy food in the street, and reminded him over and over that the home and the family are the only refuge from the sinful environment. In Cairo his family had a narrow circle of friends composed mainly of foreigners, who belonged to an exclusive social circle that frequented the opera and classical concerts. The picture that arises is of an aristocratic family connected to a small Christian-Arab economic and cultural nobility. It�s little surprise, then, that his parents were loath to have any involvement in politics. "Politics," writes Said, "always seemed to involve other people, not us." Even after 1967, when her son joined the PLO, Said�s mother said to him, "It will ruin you," and his father added, "You�re a literature professor ... stick to that." Wadie Said�s last words to his son, uttered just hours before his death, in 1971, were: "I�m worried about what the Zionists will do to you. Be careful."
Not that Edward, either as a boy or an adolescent, was completely insulated from the tragedy that had befallen both his family and his people in Palestine. The family spent the autumn of 1947 in Jerusalem and he witnessed violent confrontations between Palestinians and Jews. Later, back in Cairo, family members and others who had fled Palestine and arrived in Egypt with nothing, showed up at the Said house and requested - and received - assistance. But even after he left Egypt at age 16 in 1951 to study in America, once again at the finest private institutions, he says he didn�t take much notice of the pain and suffering of the Palestinian refugees. He recalls the order his father gave him to keep his distance from other Arabs in America ("they will always pull you down"). In fact, once when he did try to converse in Arabic with one of his teachers, who was of Egyptian origin, the latter stopped him, saying, "No Arabic here ... Here we are Americans."
All the potholes of Said�s youth, all the alienation and estrangement of his elite education, all the identity problems of the multi-talented Arab-Egyptian-Palestinian-American - came to the fore only with the trauma of the Arab defeat of 1967, an awakening not covered here. It was only then that the memories of the loss of his family�s home and homeland rose to the surface for him and the Palestinians became the "people of nowhere," as Said called them in his "The Question of Palestine."
In "Out of Place," Said chooses to deal with the political aspects of his childhood only in an incidental matter. Most of the book consists of the memories of family and home of a youth reaching maturation: schools, vacations, hobbies, foremost among them music, and of course first love. The political context appears only as an accompaniment to the personal story, but tells us little about how Said became and continues to be a key figure in the world of Palestinian nationalism.
One may reasonably ask, then, what brought Edward Said to write "Out of Place." In the Middle East, Said is known because of his political essays, because of his attacks on Israeli policy and recently because of the tough criticism he has directed against Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian authority. But in the U.S. and elsewhere many know him as well because of his work and many publications in the fields of literature and music. It�s common for intellectuals of Said�s standing to share the story of their lives with their public. This book will appeal, then, to whoever is interested in the personal life of Said, in his family and his education. But anyone wanting to read more about his political polemic and his cultural endeavors won�t find much to hold their interest here.
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