Out of Place: A Memoir Book

Edward Said's autobiography Out of Place suggests that even the most gifted on inhabitants of this planet can be forced to endure a lifelong sense of exile. Said was a gifted scholar & writer who also had a considerable ability as a pianist but who felt an almost constant feeling of dislocation throughout his life, whether living in Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon or the United States.

Much of Out of Place is a bildungsroman or coming of age story, with Edward Said being shifted from one school to another in his Palestinian birthplace, celebrating his 12th birthday on what he terms the inception of the "Balfour Declaration" in 1947, disrupting life his Jerusalem neighborhood. Next, he is off with his family to Cairo where his father decided that his business interests would prosper to a much greater degree, especially given the increasing uncertainty in Palestine. In Cairo Edward has to adapt to a school with a distinctly British curriculum, full of international students, many the children of diplomats as well as wealthy Egyptians, one of his fellow students being a boy who later became film actor Omar Sharif, after a name change.

Eventually, Said again has to adjust to yet another new school, this time an elite boarding school in New England, each time being forced to deal with a somewhat new identity. As an Arab-Christian living in the Middle East, whose parents hold a coveted American passport and especially in Egypt, Said always feels himself something of an outsider and the awareness of loss as his old Palestinian area is marginalized with the birth of the nation of Israel & a return to his former roots doubtful, only complicates his struggle to define himself.



There is what seems like a fairly typical boyhood quest to comprehend his parents, with his father pushing & prodding him at every step on the road to maturity, warning him about defiling himself through masturbation & worried about his lack of excellence as a student, but with a rather more positive identification with his mother who seems a compatible spirit.Reading Hamlet as an affirmation of my status in her eyes, not as someone devalued, which I had become in mine, was one of the great moments of my childhood. We were two voices to each other, two happily allied spirits in language. I knew nothing conscious of the inner dynamics that linked a desperate prince & adulterous queen at the play's interior, nor did I really take in the fury of the scene when Polonius is killed & Gertrude is verbally flayed by Hamlet. We read together through all that, since what mattered to me was that in a curiously un-Hamlet-like way, I could count on her to be someone whose emotions & affections engaged mine without her really being more than an exquisitely maternal, protective & reassuring person.Beyond being a precocious reader but an occasionally delinquent student, Edward Said falls under the passionate grip of music, much of it classical and is transfixed by the sounds of Jeanette MacDonald & Nelson Eddy, Richard Strauss, Paderewski, Paul Robeson, Deanna Durbin & Bach. Later, he discovers Wagner & longs for Bayreuth, birthplace of Wagner's Ring Cycle. Said reminisces that he can date his most important musical discoveries, almost to the minute, all of them occurring in private & away from the hectoring demands of his piano instructors, suggesting that...this disjuncture between what I felt about music & what I actually did in music seems to have sharpened my memory considerably, allowing me first to retain, then to play over in my mind's ear, a sizable number of orchestral, instrumental & vocal compositions without much understanding of period or style.It is his passion for music, that first brought Edward Said to my serious attention, though I'd taken a shot at reading Orientalism & had time run out before my library edition was no longer renewable, having found the book rather difficult reading. When Said met conductor Daniel Barenboim, just by chance it seems, though they knew of each other's reputation and connection to Palestine/Israel, they quickly form a deep & lasting bond.

I became fascinated by the depth of their friendship and their work together on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded in 1999, composed of Arabs, other Muslims from throughout the Middle East & Israeli Jews who are brought together to make music but who in many cases form lasting social as well as musical bonds with each other, this in the face of opposition from parents & governmental forces on all sides. This endeavor, continuing after Said's death in 2003, represents a heart-warming story in an area of great tension & more than occasional animosity.



Finally, Edward Said, having emigrated to the U.S. with his parents following large-scale unrest in Cairo & the torching of his father's prosperous business there and after his graduation from prep school, becomes an undergraduate at Princeton, where once again, he fails to fit in with the "poisonous social atmosphere" of the exclusive "Eating Clubs" on campus. In spite of the social isolation at Princeton, he excels as a student, changing his major in mid-stream from Pre-Med to Humanities.

Then it's off to Harvard for a PhD & eventually a tenured position on the faculty at Columbia. For someone like Edward Said who became a scholar known in large measure for his commentary on the cultural impact of the west & colonialism on the Middle East and the defining, occasionally controversial nature of his views on "Orientalism", there is, by way of a preview, almost nothing about that in his autobiography. He does mention that the only Arab he encountered while a graduate student at Harvard was American-born Ralph Nader, a student at the Law School.

Said comments that as an adolescent, he was completely in the grip, "at once ambiguously pleasant & unpleasant, of time passing as a series of deadlines", an experience that stayed with him throughout his life. What prompts the autobiography is the realization that there is a more ominous deadline, "attempting with reasonable sense to live in his own system of time while dealing with the diagnosis of leukemia", a disease that would ultimately cause someone who had for so long felt out of place to ultimately be out of time. The autobiography focuses extensively on how someone caught between cultures has to struggle to craft an identity.

I was very taken by the dust jacket comments in support of Out of Place by Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe and especially by Salman Rushdie who spoke of the Edward Said autobiography as "an intensely moving act of reclamation & understanding" by someone who like Rushdie has lived a life between cultures, suggesting that Said "has given eloquent personal expression to the experience of multiplicity--its torments & confusions but also its liberations & possibilities, encompassing both gift & loss."

*The 1st photo is of Edward Said, while the 2nd is E.S. with Daniel Barenboim.