Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, but spent much of his youth in Cairo and Lebanon. Out of Place is a moving act of emotional archaeology and memory, a record of an essentially irrecoverable past - Palestine is now Israel; Lebanon was transformed by twenty years of civil war; and colonial, monarchical Egypt disappeared in 1952. Arab but Christian, Palestinian but the holder of a US passport, Said's sense of himself as an outsider was exacerbated by never knowing whether Arabic or English was his first language, and by having an improbably British first name yoked to an Arabic surname.
As ill health sets him thinking about endings, Edward Said returns to his beginnings in this intensely personal memoir of his ferociously demanding 'Victorian' father, and his adored, inspiring, yet ambivalent mother. Out of Place is a story of displacement and exile, a narrative of departures, and a celebration of identity as something multiple, and fluid. It brings together the two disparate halves of Said's experience as an American and as an Arab and traces how through his dissonant identity one of our most important intellectuals has been able to voice the otherwise silenced Palestinian experience of dispossession.
Contains 16 pages of b/w photographs.
