“I saw in Stan Henry and Alex Miller the much more enviable, rocklike hardness of an identity at one with reality. Jean-Pierre Sabet, Malak Abu-el-Ezz, even Albert Coronel — who, though obviously Egyptian and Jewish, carried a Spanish passport — all could be themselves, they had nothing to hide, had no American part to play.” (90)
Imagine the picturesque Lebanese mountain village of ضهور الشوير (Dhour El Choueir) in the late 1940s: its streets, alternately chalked and cobbled, meandering beneath the sunlit embrace of burnt sienna facades that crown the brick-and-mortar shops encircling its bustling roundabout. In Out of Place, Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said remarkably traces an exalted recollection of his life between cultures — Cambridge’s academic halls and Cairo’s teeming streets, Jerusalem’s contested sanctity and Beirut’s cosmopolitan allure — tangled and torn apart by the dispossessing and seismic reverberations of the Arab-Israeli War, Egyptian Revolution and, later, the Lebanese Civil War.
Throughout the memoir, we witness the Middle East gradually receding from Said’s consciousness — an identity increasingly relinquished through the trajectory of his education. From Gezira Preparatory School to the Cairo School for American Children, from Victoria College to Princeton University, then Harvard College, and ultimately culminating in his appointment at Columbia University, each step seems to disparately widen the chasm between Said and the region that so intensely shaped his earliest memories. The once-vivid image of Dhour El Choueir’s hot, cloudless summer skies has faded into near nonexistence, replaced by a vision of a ruined town marred by bullet scars and strewn with rubble. As Said reflects on this afflicting and disorienting reality, while battling leukemia, his recounting is marked by the poignant weight of loss and transformation.
The current, desolate state of Palestine is no stranger to this crumbling disposition and pain of degeneration — a mere twenty-one years after Said’s passing. For many diasporic individuals, confronting the lingering ache of disconnection often requires seeking solace in the smallest, most intimate corners of art and memory. Like Said, who found refuge in the balcony seats of the Rivoli Cinema, the teetering keys of a spinet piano and the soaring ballads of Umberto Giordano, these moments of artistic engagement resonate with a peculiar intensity for those uprooted. They become sanctuaries where the fractured pieces of identity can momentarily coalesce, offering both an escape from dislocation and a means of processing it.
For Said, this duality manifested not only in the grand geopolitics of his time but in the deeply personal dissonance of existing between worlds. His identity — torn between the demands of Western academia and the cultural imperatives of his Middle Eastern roots — was not simply a matter of intellectual exploration; it was an emotional and existential struggle. As he ventured further into the corridors of Western institutions, from CSAC to Columbia, his sense of self became ever more fragmented, as if the very act of education required him to shed the person he had once been. In this process of self-erasure, there was a constant undercurrent of insecurity and the gnawing feeling that he was never quite enough to fit either world.
This tension lies at the heart of the diasporic experience: to be neither fully of one place nor the other and to grapple with the underlying insecurity that accompanies such a split identity. The journey through this liminal space is marked by moments of doubt, a yearning for a home that feels ever more distant and the painful recognition that, despite all efforts to reconcile these fragments, some parts of the self may remain forever unfulfilled. Yet, it is through these very fractures that the diasporic individual often finds the strength to redefine identity — not as a fixed point, but as a constant negotiation between past and present, home and exile.
Leaderboard 2
Aima Raza is sophomore in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She can be reached at [email protected].