Out Of Place Edward Said Analysis

Chapter Three: Depiction of Edward Said’s Exilic and Diasporic Identity according to his Memoir Out Of Place

Edward Said who was born in 1935 and died in 2003 is considered one of the public and the controversial figure in the modern century. In addition, he is well-known as a talented musician, a political and intellectual aouthor who has his own and important theories about literture and culture such as Post colonialism theory, Imperialism theory, and orientalism theory. Further, he writes to the American literature many important and effective books and essays such as Out of Place , The Orientalism , and Culturalism and Imperialism. However, Neimneh, Shadi says about Said that “He comes to embody the theories of hybridity, cultural

This chapter sheds more lights on Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place that he counts as his confessional autobiography. He writes his memior Out of Place as his last book during the time he was digonised by a terminal illness called leukemia in 1991. Actually, Said records how he encounters in his childhood the sense of not belonging, exile ,and isolation. Also, he documents how these feelings caused a deep flow in his being. In his memoir, He speaks in details what makes him live in exile as an alienated person during his life. In his memoir, he describes his life as if he was “ permanently, out of place” (19). Further, he reflects that he lives in a cultural dissonance and he experiences an identity confusion which leads him to name his memior Out of Plac. In the opinning pages of his memior he says that "The main reason, however, for this memoir is of course the need to bridge the sheer distance in time and place between my life today and my life then” (xiv). Throughout his memoir, he expresses the impact of the doubleness in his identity. Also, he shows how his family tries to exclude him out of his ethnics and native culture. Beside all that, he demonstrates the impacts of cultural displacement in his life especially the sense of loss and suffering in his childhood. Indeed, There are many causes behind the diaspora of Said’s cultural identity. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to discover the

One of the most important causes is the political problem in the Meddle East during his childhood especially in his native country Palestine. Since Said was a child, he lives between Jerusalem, Cairo, Lebanon, and the United States. He leaves Jerusalem after the Jwish occupay Palestine, and he travells to Lebanon and witnesses the civil war there. Moreover, during the time of colonial Egypt, he lives in Cairo, “a city [he] always liked yet in which [he] never felt that he belongs”(43). That is why Said’s self has a divided affiliations since he was a child. Actually, he was not only torn apart between divided loyalties and cultural affiliations, but also trapped in a life of geographical dissonance. Neimneh says, "Edward Said was born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. He went to English and American schools in Cairo, thus receiving colonial education and getting shaped as a colonial subject by colonial masters. And he lived as an exile, a dispossessed Palestinian leading a life of constant