Edward W. Said - Out of Place: A Memoir

A voyage into a cruel, luxuriant, mysterious land called childhood, which makes Orientalists of us all.

Newsday

Said is in place among the truly important intellects of our century. His examined life, from the tragic and triumphant perspective of a mortal illness, is superbly worth living. I know I shall not read a work to match this one this year, or for many years.

Nadine Gordimer

Out of Place is an intensely moving act of reclamation and understanding, a portrait of a transcultural and often painful upbringing written with wonderful vividness and unsparing honesty.

Salman Rushdie

As an emotional document, Out of Place is a revelation. The deeply affecting testimony of one boys nearly relentless persecution by the world.

New York

A powerful, and, at the most fundamental level, a thoroughly convincing statement about a man who has helped to illuminate our crisis-ridden world with its contradictions and complexities.

The Times Literary Supplement

Rich and touching.

The Washington Post Book World

Out of Place comes as a bolt from the blue, a dream come true. Vividly portrayed in this work is Edward Saids path to self-realization, making him one of this fin de sicles most indispensable intellectuals.

Kenzaburo Oe

The vivid portrait of a brilliant, vulnerable boy growing up in a complicated and callous world. An undoubtedly valuable glimpse into the life of a great man.

St. Petersburg Times

Patently honest. Mr. Saids total recall for distant names, happenings, and feelings has produced a painfully truthful book.

The Economist

Ultimately, Mr. Saids book is about the mysterious inner power that enables some people to overcome the stunting influences of their childhoods and stubbornly keep growing toward a light, at first dimly and intermittently glimpsed, that is their destiny to reach.

Forward

Edward W. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of twenty books, including Orientalism, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Culture and Imperialism, and The Edward Said Reader.

Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography
Beginnings: Intention and Method
Orientalism
The Question of Palestine
Literature and Society (editor)
The World, the Text, and the Critic
After the Last Sky (with Jean Mohr)
Blaming the Victims
Musical Elaborations
Culture and Imperialism
The Politics of Dispossession
Representations of the Intellectual
Peace and Its Discontents
Covering Islam
The Pen and the Sword
Entre guerre et paix
The End of the Peace Process
The Edward Said Reader

(edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin)

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2000

Copyright 1999 by Edward W. Said

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

Vintage and colphon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Photograph of Aunt Melia collection of Lily and Albert Badr
All other photographs collection of Edward W. Said

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Said, Edward W.
Out of place : a memoir / by Edward W. Said. 1st ed.
p. cm
eISBN: 978-0-307-82964-1
1. Said, Edward W. 2. Palestinian AmericansUnited StatesBiography.
3. IntellectualsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
E184.P35S25 1999
973.0492740002dc21 99331106

Author photograph Brigitte Lacombe

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To Dr. Kanti Rai and Mariam C. Said

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN MOSTLY DURING PERIODS OF ILLNESS or treatment, sometimes at home in New York, sometimes while enjoying the hospitality of friends or institutions in France and Egypt. I began to work on Out of Place in May 1994 while I was recovering from three early rounds of chemotherapy for leukemia. With unstinting kindness and patience Dale Janson and the superb nurses of the Ambulatory Chemotherapy and Transfusion Unit at Long Island Jewish Hospital took care of me for the days, weeks, and months I spent in their charge until I finished writing.

My familyMariam, Wadie, Najlabore with me throughout the five years of work on my manuscript, plus of course my illnesses, absences, treatments, and my generally all-round state of being hard to put up with. Their humor, unconditional support, and strength made the whole thing easier to live through, for me if not always for them, and I am profoundly thankful.

My dear friend Richard Poirier, surely Americas finest literary critic, gave me early encouragement and read through various drafts, as did Deirdre and Allen Bergson. To them I am genuinely indebted. To Zaineb Istrabadi, my excellent assistant at Columbia, must go a prize for deciphering my handwriting, reproducing it for me in readable form, helping with numerous drafts, and always without impatience or a disagreeable word. Sonny Mehta gave me his friendship and support, a rare publisher and comrade. Once again I would like to thank Andrew Wylie for seeing this work through from start to finish.

It is customary, even routine, to thank ones editors. In my case there is nothing pro forma about the feelings of affection, admiration, and gratitude I have for my friends Frances Coady of Granta and Shelley Wanger of Knopf. Frances helped me to see what I was trying to do, then made the most acute suggestions for sculpting a bulky, disorderly manuscript into a semblance of form. Always patiently and humorously, Shelley sat with and guided me as we went through hundreds of pages of often overwritten and inchoate prose.

Dr. Kanti Rais redoubtable medical expertise and remarkable humanity kept me going while I wrote and eventually finished this book. From the beginning of my illness, he and Mariam Said cooperated benignly, and literally kept me from sinking. I gratefully dedicate this book to Mariam for her loving support and to Kanti for his humane skill and friendship.

E.W.S.

New York, May 1999

Out of Place IS A RECORD OF AN ESSENTIALLY LOST OR FORGOTTEN world. Several years ago I received what seemed to be a fatal medical diagnosis, and it therefore struck me as important to leave behind a subjective account of the life I lived in the Arab world, where I was born and spent my formative years, and in the United States, where I went to school, college, and university. Many of the places and people I recall here no longer exist, though I found myself frequently amazed at how much I carried of them inside me in often minute, even startlingly concrete, detail.

My memory proved crucial to my being able to function at all during periods of debilitating sickness, treatment, and anxiety. Almost daily, and while also writing other things, my rendezvous with this manuscript supplied me with a structure and a discipline at once pleasurable and demanding. My other writing and my teaching seemed to take me far away from the various worlds and experiences of this book: clearly ones memory operates better and more freely when it isnt goaded into service by devices or activities deigned for that purpose. Yet my political writings about the Palestinian situation, my studies of the relationship of politics and aesthetics, specifically opera and prose fiction, and my fascination with the subject of a book I have been writing on late style (beginning with Beethoven and Adorno) must surely have fed into this memoir surreptitiously.