Out Of Place: a Memoir
Edward W. Said
Reading Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual before dealing with Out of Place is not the best choice that one can make. However, that's what I did. I am not saying that I regret it, but I should have started with this one in order to understand the other better. Indeed, Out of Place represents an account of all the events and moments that Edward Said lived, hence, it explains the issues he had tackled in his books, including the latter which is a memoir.
After being diagnosed with Leukemia in 1991, Edward W. Said had felt an urgent need to start writing this Memoir in 1994 out of approaching to death. It was published in 1999 and won the New Yorker Book Award For non-fiction.
In this book, Said evokes the fragmented life he had led as the ambiguous identity he had. Verily, the fact that he spent his life travelling from one country to another, and settling in different territories, such as Jerusalem , his mother country, Cairo, Lebanon and the United States, this fact made him suffer from a mixture of cultures, ideologies, religions that contributed to his shattered state of mind. In other words, his life in exile, travel and immigration had shaped his metamorphic identity. Furthermore, he was obliged to cope with two different civilizations that hold two different languages. In his admission that " The two [languages] have always been together in my life, one resonating in the other sometimes ironically, sometimes nostalgically, most often each correcting, and commenting on, the other. Each can seem life my absolutely first language, but neither is. I trace this primal instability back to my mother, whom I remember speaking to me in both English and Arabic, although she always wrote to me in English, once a week, all her life, as did I, all of hers.” (Said 1999: 4) ", Said underscores the multicultural and multilingual environment he has been poured in, which made him feel mentally alienated and physically displaced. His "out of placeness" is further underscored in the fact that he is an Arab that holds an American passport, A Palestinian who lives in Egypt, a Christian in a Muslim world and a British name linked to an Arab last name. All in all, his life was a set of dualities.
In addition, this book tackles several issues, including politics when it comes to the Palestinian Cause or the WWII , and family relations when it comes to his father's total control over his life and his mother's being too attached to him, especially after meeting Eva.
Another point that attracted my attention in this book is Edward Said's tendency to recount every single detail that had taken place throughout his life, as if to say that he does not have anything to hide and that , before his death, readers have the right to be aware of all the stops that Said had passed through.
In brief, Out of Place: a Memoir was a great book to read, that kind of books that would make the reader wonder what will happen next ? How did the writer manage to surmount all the obstacles he had been through? And how could he cope with all the social and cultural heritages he was obliged to cope with ? In other words, this book was worth reading and rich of information that would help any of Edward W Said's reader; thus, for this reason I have chosen to make this review, before the other book's, Representations of the Intellectual. In fact, Said's books are the kind that makes one's mind wonderfully open to thinking.
However, the only one thing that I did not like about it is the fact that it is too detailed, which leads to making the reader feels lost in some instances.
Favorite Quote:
" For me sleep is something to be gotten over as quickly as possible. I can only go to bed very late, but I am up literally at dawn. Like her I don't possess the secret of long sleep, though unlike her I have reached the point where I do not want it. For me, sleep is death, as is any diminishment in awareness."
Sources:
https://literarystudies.wordpress.com
http://www.imdb.com/
Out Of Place: a Memoir / Edward W. Said
