Book Review - Out of Place: Edward Said's Autobiography of Palestinian Life
Arab Media Syndicate
(Permission granted to reproduce in full.)
November 14, 1999

By Ray Hanania

Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward Said. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999. 295 pp. Autobiography.

Edward Said is a Palestinian icon. The author of 16 books, Said is considered Palestine's most eloquent and intellectual son.

But for most Americans, none of his 16 books offers to them much of interest outside of a limiting circle of the academic elite from which Edward Said is a quintessential derivative. Nor do Said's books reach beyond the much larger body of Arab and Jewish social and political activists who read such titles as his "Orientalism" or "The Question of Palestine" or even "The Politics of Dispossession." Both groups devour his books with deliberate precision in search of polemical nourishment.

Edward Said and his writings are used as intellectual weapons by the Palestinian Revolution, its allies and its advocates in much the same manner as the AK-47 has led their many guerrilla battles.

I have always been captivated by Said's literary dissertation. There is a certain eloquence in Said's writings that is missing from most of the many other books that have tried desperately to argue the Palestinian cause. These authors would all probably acknowledge that the typical book reader is reluctant to believe in the justice of our Palestinian cause, even though it is a just and righteous one.

The only exception is the incomparable book by Said's friend and fellow Palestinian academic, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, whose "The Transformation of Palestine" is the little Red Book that drives Palestinian aspirations to the need for justice.

I have long argued that the literature of the Palestinian Diaspora has been too political, too academic and too elitist to attract the non-involved American reader. These books are slaves to format and lack the imaginative essence that is required of a best-seller that can tempt the reader's soul and that can easily capture their minds.

So it is with great pleasure, and some surprise, that I found myself captivated in a personal way by Said's new book, "Out of Place: A Memoir," his autobiography.

I am drawn to it because I see many similarities in the experiences of his mother and father, his family and himself, but also because Edward Said masterfully captures in Out of Place the heart and the soul of the Palestinian tragedy.

For generations, we have written about ourselves in a way that portrays us, the Palestinians, as complex and difficult to understand victims. This defensive writing style is incapable of capturing the real sympathies of the general public. Yet the tale of our Palestinian tragedy is one that is made to win over the hearts and the minds of everyone.

Finally, someone has written such a book; one that portrays us not as victims, but as normal human beings. We had and have lives. We have a personal history. We have faces and names, and are more than the colorful United Nations' maps and the endless statistics that have come to signify the Palestinian cause.

Said takes us through a personal narrative of his life as a child, and provides background on his parents and family. As a Palestinian, I immediately can identify with his experiences. Like his parents, my father was much older than my mother. Like his family, my parents had more control over the destiny of their own lives than the majority of our Palestinian community. Like Edward Said, who is Christian, I share both an American given name and a Palestinian surname, a combination that in the United States and most Western countries raises eyebrows and some subtle skepticism. It is a common source of problems even among other Palestinians.

"Out of Place" is not an argumentative narration that struggles to defend Palestinian rights, although it does in the most effective manner. It is, however, the kind of autobiography that, given some of Said's professional notoriety, will appeal to the typical American or Western reader.

Especially in light of the controversy surrounding the organized and incessant attempted character assassination of Said that we have recently seen in Commentary Magazine and other anti-Arab publications, Said's book can easily find a place in the reading line-up of typical Americans. I can picture American tourists lazily lounging on beaches and pool side on vacations reading this book, or imagine Americans sitting on commuter trains engrossed in his story as they travel during rush hour to and from their work.

That is where the battle for American minds is being waged and is being won by Israel and the coterie of anti-Arab propagandists whose writings dominate the West. It is not being fought on the academic battlefield where most of our Palestinian generals expend most of their energies. The fight is in the minds of the average American who seek out good stories and are not afraid to embrace pulp fiction, fact-based novels or compelling non-fiction.

The experiences of the Said family are experiences that can be stripped of identity, and yet remain familiar and appealing to the reader. The children of Italian, German, Irish and even Jewish immigrants will easily find similarities in the Said experience. It is a struggle to find identity, to build businesses, and to achieve in a society that casts one as outsiders. I might even compare his story -- and the unwritten story of millions of other Palestinians -- with Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memories.

I wish only that his book may someday find itself as the storyline for a Hollywood movie. It is filled with Said's characteristic dedication to articulation and clever linguistics. He is a master story teller and he should, more frequently than not, break from the habits of academic writing and produce something that allows the story, rather than the underlying argument, tell itself.

The best stories are those that tell themselves, without being footnoted, archived, or documented in dry clinical analysis.

As a Diaspora Palestinian, I am constantly searching for a role model, not for myself, but for my children; someone outside of the family, of some note who has told a personal story that might cling to their memories in a passionate way.

Said's book achieves that and so much more.

Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 of a wealthy Palestinian Christian family that traveled much. His experiences living in Jerusalem, Nazareth, Cairo, Beirut and New York, are reflected in his work. Said is an example of a privileged Palestinian exile, yet not any less a powerful spokesman for the Palestinian experience.

(Ray Hanania is an award winning Palestinian American journalist, author and writer. His columns are archived on the World Wide Web at www.hanania.com)

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