“With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.”
These themes of interweaving cultures, feeling out of place and being far from home affected Said deeply and would echo in his work Out of Place. 6th chapter of the memoir takes a closer look at Said’s life between 1947 and 1949. It’s just a three years of life span but it involves the intense issues due to , Belfour declaration, which is referred in the book as the blackest day in “our” history, the foundation of Israel in 1948, the civil war between Arabs and Jews, and the dislocation of Palestinian Arabs.
The city was in a kind of social crisis when said was 12 years old. Jerusalem was divided into several zones under the control of British army and police checkpoints. However every zone was not valid to everyone. After his 12th birthday, Said was also required to use a passport and he notes in his memoir about the issue: “while I was passing nervous Tommies at the wire barricade peered into my satchel and examined my zone pass suspiciously, their unfriendly eyes looking me over as a possible trouble”
Jerusalem, then, was a city tense with politics as well as religion. There was always a competition between Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities. In the book Said narrates that once he and his cousin went to a Jewish cinema, and upon learning this issue his aunt Nabiha scolded him fiercely.
In the memoir, Said usually makes comparisons between cities, countries and in this case between languages. At that time, in Jerusalem, their daily language in school and home was in Arabic; however, in Cairo English was encouraged to speak. He notes that in Jerusalem he felt himself like he was at home as if he belonged to there as his native language prevailed in every soil of this city.
Although in the schools in Cairo he felt himself as a stranger, he tells that in Jerusalem at St. George’s School, he had a deeper relation with the college. It was a all-male English school, in which every student was familiar to Said and therefore, he felt himself at home in his college years. His teachers were mostly British and his classmates were both Christian and Muslim students. For the education he got in the college he recounts that “the academic offering made no remark on me; an indifferent teaching, a general sense of purposeless routine trying to maintain itself as the country’s identity was undergoing irrevocably change.
With the foundation of Israel and the end of British Mandate most places of Palestine became a province of Israel and therefore the unrest prevailed everywhere. Many people were driven out of their houses or they intentionally moved from Palestine to other “safer” places like Said’s family. In his memoir Said recounts how his aunt, cousins and many other middle class relatives become miserable refugees away from their motherlands. About the issue he tells that “ It is still hard for me to accept the fact that the very quarters of the city in which I was born, lived and felt at home were taken over by Polish, German and American immigrants who conquered the city and have made it the unique symbol of their sovereignty, with no place for Palestinian life, which seems to have been confined to the Eastern city, which I hardly know.”
Throughout the book, said inescapably makes comparisons between his previous city Jerusalem and his refugee city Cairo. H narrates that Jerusalem in those days was smaller, simpler and more orderly than Cairo. Compared to Cairo, Jerusalem was a cooler place without luxury and wealth. However, in Cairo the air of western influence was felt with luxurious houses, expensive shops, big cars, noisy crowds. However, Jerusalem has a more homogenous population of Palestinians mostly.
At the St. George’s School in Jerusalem, Edward Said had a Jewish friend, David Ezra, which had a huge impact on him and thanks to him he was able to make a resemblance of two societies. Ezra was the only Jewish boy in the class, with whom they always spoke in English. And he always preferred to stand apart from the rest of the class; he was “self-sufficient, less transparent, and less connected to anyone else” and all these attached Said to Ezra. At the age of 12, Said was not able to make any sense of nationalities like the meaning of Jewishness, or being an Arab. Yet the fact was that neither in school nor in the zone ways to the homes Ezra never joined to the rest. This friendship, distant but attached, actually resembled to both of the peoples of Arabs and Jews, according to Said. He narrates in his memoir; “When my family suddenly determined before Christmas that we had better return to Cairo, my ruptured connection to Ezra soon come to symbolize both the unbridgeable gap, repressed for want of words or concepts to discuss it, between Palestinian Arabs and Jews and the terrible silence forced on our joint history from that moment on.”
In his early childhood there was another man who deeply affected Sid in his advocating for equal rights for Palestinian Arabs. Khalil Beidas was a cousin of Said’s father and he was also an Arabic teacher at St. George’s school. He went to Jerusalem’s Russian Colony school in his childhood and then, to Russia for higher education to return with a mind refreshed with 19th century Russian Christian nationalists, like Dostoyevsky. When he returned to his homeland, he began to achieve a fame as a literary figure and with this tile, he contributed to the construction of a Palestinian national identity, especially in its encounter with the incoming Zionist movement, thanks to which Said was heavily fascinated.
Edward Said in his childhood, unknowingly and unconsciously was a witness of the events of miserable 1948. as a boy of 12, he experienced the scale of dislocation, his family endured. And in Cairo, he witnessed the miseries and sadness in the faces and lives of refugees, who were formerly known as ordinary middle class people in Palestine. Unfortunately, after the dislocation of people and civil war, Palestinian Arabs generally seemed to have given up Palestine as a place; now it was a place never to return and it was barely mentioned yet missed silently. People all around Said were gradually disappearing; some of them moved to other places as refugees, some of them were driven out of their houses and some of them were killed in this social crisis. People, according to Said, not only lost their houses and belongings; they also lost their Palestine. When they moved to Egypt as a family, the issue of Palestine, at home or in public, was barely mentioned and in all circumstances they avoided discussing Palestine, however, the strict comments of Said’s father Wadie, showed the catastrophe collapse of a society and a country’s disappearance.
Another figure Edward Said narrates in the chapter to deeply affect him was his aunt Nabiha. She was the only one who reminded the family of the Palestinian reality of misery. She was a charity women in Cairo, helping the Palestinian refugees about medical, governmental and residential issues. In her case of charity, she was all alone to work on behalf of Palestinian Arabs in the soils of Egypt and was obsessed with helping them, even by sparing all her time for them. She would approach to English- speaking charities and missions connected to Protestant churches for help. Without any attempt to convert, she would aid them directly on her will and all alone, working day and night. Said narrates about the issue, “It was Aunt Nabiha that I first experienced Palestine was history and cause in the anger and consternation I felt over the suffering of the refugees, those others whom she brought into my life. It was also she who communicated to the desolations of being without a country or a place to return to, of being unprotected by any national authority or institutions of no longer being able toke any sense of the past except as bitter, helpless regret nor of the present with its daily queuing, anxiety-filled searches for job and poverty, hunger and humiliations.”
In Cairo, as there was no Jerusalem to return, the family and relatives of Said came closer and stick to each others. However, the inevitable family disagreements were there in business. The disappearance of Palestine, led to shifting political situation in Egypt and Arab world. In 1948 and onwards, the British impact slowly diminished, as well as the monarchy. When Said was 13, in 1948, he and his family went to the US due to family battles intensifying, the political situation worsening and the health of Said’s father worsening. When Said arrived in New York City, he was stunned by the “modern” way of life he faced. While his father had illness treatments at an New York Hospital, Said was sent to a summer camp in Maine for a month. At the camp he felt himself as a shameful outsider. Nationality, background, real origins, past actions all seemed to be sources of his problem; he could not lay the ghosts of past that haunt on him from school to school, from city to city. So, beginning in the US, he find the solution in living as if he was a simple, transparent soul in not speaking about his family and origins unless necessary. He found the solution in turning into the “others”.
After Said returned to the US and stayed there ever since, he had a sharp disconnection about relationship with Israel. Said criticizes those who attack on the US due to its support of Israel, yet still who goes on their business relations with Us or who still send their children to American Colleges. The remoteness of Palestine, his family’s silence about its role, the long disappearance of Palestinians from his life, repressed, undiscussed Palestinian issue and politics, his discommunication with Palestinians in his eleven years American life made his American life to be in a distance from Palestine.
by
nesesizasla (student)
