The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  Yet most of the time she was so driven by a sense of her duty as mother and supervisor of household life that the main voice that has stayed with me from those years is the one that called out injunctions: “Practice your piano, Edward!” “Get back to your homework.” “Don’t waste time: begin your composition.” “Have you had your milk, your tomato juice, your cod-liver oil?” “Finish your plate.” “Who ate the chocolates? A full box has disappeared. Edward!”

  Time seemed forever against me, and except for a brief morning period when I sensed the day ahead as a possibility, I was boxed in by schedules, chores, assignments, with not a moment for leisurely enjoyment or reflection. I was given my first watch, an insipid-looking Tissot, at the age of eleven or twelve; for several days I spent hours staring at it, mystified by my inability to see its movement, constantly worried that it had stopped. I suspected at first that it was not entirely new since there seemed to be something suspiciously worn about it, but was assured by my parents that it was indeed new, and that its slightly yellowed (tinged with orange) face was characteristic of the model. There the discussion ended. But the watch obsessed me. I compared it first with what my school-mates wore which, except for the Mickey Mouse and Popeye models that symbolized the America I didn’t belong to, struck me as inferior to mine. There was an early period of experimenting with different ways of wearing it: the face turned inwards; on the sleeve; underneath it; fastened tightly; fastened loosely; pushed forward onto my wrist; and on the right hand. I ended up with it on my left wrist, where for a long time it gave me the decidedly positive feeling of being dressed up.

  But the watch never failed to impress me with its unimpeded forward movement, which in nearly every way added to my feeling of being behind and at odds with my duties and commitments. I do not recall ever being much of a sleeper but I do remember the faultless punctuality of early-morning reveille and the sense of anxious urgency I felt the moment I got out of bed. There was never any time to dawdle or loiter, though I was inclined to both. I began a lifelong habit then of experiencing time as a wasting, while also resisting it by doing more and more (reading furtively, staring out of the window, looking for a superfluous object like a penknife or yesterday’s shirt) in the few moments left before the inexorable deadline. My watch was a help when it showed me that there was time to spare, but most often it guarded my life like a sentinel, on the side of an external order of parents, teachers, and inflexible appointments.

  In my early adolescence I was completely in the grip, at once pleasant and unpleasant, of time passing as a series of deadlines— an experience that has remained with me ever since. The day’s milestones were set relatively early in that period and have not varied. Six-thirty (or in cases of great pressure six—I still use the phrase “I’ll get up at six to finish this”) was time to get up; seven-thirty started the meter running, at which point I entered the strict regime of hours and half-hours governed by classes, church, private lessons, homework, piano practice, sports, until bedtime. This sense of the day divided into periods of appointed labor has never left me, has indeed intensified. Eleven A.M. still imbues me with a guilty awareness that the morning has passed without enough being accomplished—it is 11:20 as I write these very words—and 9 P.M. still represents “lateness,” that moment which connotes the end of the day, the hastening need to begin thinking about bed, the time beyond which to do work means to do it at the wrong time, fatigue and a sense of having failed all creeping up on one, time slowly getting past its proper period, lateness in all senses.

  My watch furnished the basic motif underlying all this, an impersonal discipline that somehow kept the system in order. Leisure was unavailable. I recall with stunning clarity my father’s early injunction against remaining in pyjamas and dressing-gown past the early morning hours; slippers in particular were objects of contempt. I still cannot spend any time at all lounging in a dressing-gown: the combined feeling of time-wasting guilt and lazy impropriety overwhelms me. As a way of getting around the discipline, illness (sometimes feigned, sometimes exaggerated) made life away from school positively acceptable. I became the family joke for being especially gratified by, even soliciting, an unnecessary bandage on my finger, knee, or arm. And now by some devilish irony I find myself with an intransigent, treacherous leukemia which, ostrich-like, I try to banish from my mind entirely, attempting with reasonable success to live in my system of time, working, sensing lateness and deadlines and that feeling of insufficient achievement I learned fifty years ago and have so remarkably internalized. But, in another odd reversal, I secretly wonder to myself whether the system of duties and deadlines may now save me, although I know that my illness creeps invisibly on, more secretly and insidiously than the time announced by my first watch, which I carried with so little awareness of how it numbered my mortality, divided it up into perfect, unchanging intervals of unfulfilled time for ever and ever.

  In early September 1991, on the eve of the Madrid Peace Conference and forty years after I left the Middle East for the United States, I was in London for a seminar I had convened of Palestinian intellectuals and activists. After the Gulf War and the Palestinian leadership’s fatal stand alongside Saddam Hussein, we were in a very weak negotiating position. The idea of the conference was to try to articulate a common set of themes that would assist our progress towards self-determination. We came from all over the dispersed Palestinian world—the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian diaspora in various Arab countries, Europe, and North America. What transpired during the seminar was a terrible disappointment: the endless repetition of well-known arguments, our inability to fix on a collective goal, the apparent desire to listen only to ourselves. In short, nothing came of it except an eerie premonition of the Palestinian failure at Oslo.

  Midway through the debate, during one of the scheduled breaks, I phoned Mariam, my wife, in New York to ask her if the results of the blood test I had taken for my annual physical had been satisfactory. Cholesterol was what had concerned me and no, she said, everything was fine on that front but added with some hesitation: “Charles Hazzi”—our doctor—“would like to speak to you when you get back.” Something in her voice suggested to me that all was not well, so I immediately rang Charles at his office. “Nothing to get excited about,” he said, “we’ll talk in New York.” His repeated refusals to tell me what was wrong finally provoked me to impatience. “You must tell me, Charles. I’m not a child, and I have a right to know.” With a whole set of demurrals—it’s not serious, a hematologist can very easily take care of you, it’s chronic after all— he told me that I had chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), although it took me a week to absorb the initial impact of my diagnosis. I was asymptomatic and sophisticated diagnostic techniques were needed to confirm the original finding. It was another month before I understood how thoroughly shaken I was by this “sword of Damocles,” as one doctor called it, hanging over me, and a further six months before I found the extraordinary doctor, Kanti Rai, under whose care I have been since June 1992.

  A month after I was diagnosed I discovered myself in the middle of a letter to my mother, who had been dead for a year and a half. Somehow the urge to communicate with her overcame the factual reality of her death, which in mid-sentence stopped my fanciful urge, leaving me slightly disoriented, even embarrassed. A vague narrative urge seemed to be stirring inside me, but I was too caught up in the anxieties and nervousness of my life with CLL to pay it much attention. During that period in 1993 I contemplated several changes in my life which I realized without any fear would be shorter and more difficult now. I thought about moving to Boston to return to a place I had lived in and enjoyed when I was a student, but I soon admitted to myself that because it was a quiet town relative to New York I had been thinking regressively about finding a place to die in. I gave up the idea.

  So many returns, attempts to go back to bits of life, or people who were no longer there: these constituted a steady response to the increasing rigors of my illness. In 199
2 I went with my wife and children to Palestine for the first time in forty-five years. In July 1993 I went on my own to Cairo, making it a point in the middle of a journalistic mission to visit old haunts. All this time I was being monitored, without treatment, by Dr. Rai, who occasionally reminded me that I would at some point require chemotherapy. By the time I began treatment in March 1994 I realized that I had at least entered, if not the final phase of my life, then the period—like Adam and Eve leaving the Garden—from which there would be no return to my old life. In May 1994 I began work on the memoir I am writing.

  These details are important as a way of explaining to myself and to my reader how the time of the memoir is intimately tied to the time, phases, ups and downs, variations in my illness. As I grew weaker, the more the number of infections and bouts of side effects increased, the more the memoir was my way of constructing something in prose while in my physical and emotional life I grappled with the anxieties and pains of degeneration. Both tasks resolved themselves into details: to write is to get from word to word, to suffer illness is to go through the infinitesimal steps that take you from one state to another. With other sorts of work that I did, essays, lectures, teaching, journalism, I was going across the illness, punctuating it almost forcibly with deadlines and cycles of beginning, middle, and end: with this memoir I was borne along by the episodes of treatment, hospital stay, physical pain and mental anguish, letting those dictate how and when I could write, for how long and where. Periods of travel were often productive since I carried my handwritten manuscript with me wherever I went and took advantage of every hotel room or friend’s house I stayed in. I was therefore rarely in a hurry to get a section done, though I had a precise idea of what I planned to put in it. Curiously the memoir and the phases of my illness share exactly the same time, although most traces of the latter have been effaced in the story of my early life. This record of a life and the ongoing course of a disease are one and the same, it could be said; the same but deliberately different.

  And the more this relationship developed the more important it became to me, the more also my memory—unaided by anything except concentrated reflection on and archaeological prying into a very distant and essentially irrecoverable past—seemed hospitable and generous to my often importunate forays. Despite the travail of disease and the restrictions imposed on me by my having left the places of my youth, I can say with the poet: “nor in this bower, / This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d / Much that has soothed me.” There had been a time when I could not bear to think about my past, especially Cairo and Jerusalem, which for two sets of different reasons were no longer accessible. The latter had been replaced by Israel, the former, by one of those cruel coincidences, was closed to me for legal reasons. Unable to visit Egypt for the fifteen years between 1960 and 1975, I rationed early memories of my life there (considerably chopped up, full of atmospherics that conveyed a sense of warmth and comfort by contrast with the harsh alienation I felt in my New York life) as a way of falling asleep, an activity that has grown more difficult with time, time that has also dissolved the aura of happiness around my early life and let it emerge as a more complicated and difficult period. To grasp it, I realized, I would have to be sharply alert, awake, avoiding dreamy somnolence. I’ve thought in fact that the memoir in some fundamental way is all about sleeplessness, all about the silence of wakefulness and, in my case, the need for conscious recollection and articulation as a substitute for sleep. Not just for sleep but for holidays and relaxation, all that passes for middle- and upper-class “leisure,” on which, about ten years ago, I unconsciously turned my back. As one of the main responses to my illness I found in the memoir a new kind of challenge: not just a new kind of wakefulness but a project about as far from my professional and political life as it was possible for me to go.

  The underlying motifs for me have been, on the one hand, the emergence of a second self buried for a very long time beneath a surface of often expertly acquired and wielded social characteristics belonging to the self my parents tried to construct, the “Edward” I speak of intermittently, and, on the other, an understanding of the way an extraordinary number of departures have unsettled my life from its earliest beginnings. To me, nothing more painful and paradoxically sought after characterizes my life than the many displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environments that have kept me in motion all these years. Twelve years ago I wrote in After the Last Sky that when I travel I always take too much with me, and that even a trip downtown requires the packing of a briefcase stocked with items disproportionately larger in size and number than the actual period of the trip. Analyzing that, I concluded that I had a secret but ineradicable fear of not returning. What I’ve since discovered is that despite this fear I fabricate occasions for departure, thus giving rise to the fear voluntarily. The two seem absolutely necessary to my rhythm of life and have intensified dramatically during the period of my illness. I say to myself: if you don’t take this trip, don’t prove your mobility and indulge your fear of being lost, don’t override the normal rhythms of domestic life now, you certainly will not be able to do so in the near future. I also experience the anxious moodiness of travel (la mélancholie des paquebots, as Flaubert calls it; bahnhofstimmung in German), along with envy for those who stay behind, whom I see on my return, their faces unshadowed by dislocation or what seems to be enforced mobility, happy with their families, draped in a comfortable suit and raincoat, there for all to see. Something about the invisibility of the departed, being missing and perhaps missed, in addition to the intense, repetitive and predictable sense of banishment that takes you away from all you know and can take comfort in, makes you feel the need to leave out of some prior, but self-created logic, and a sense of rapture. In all cases, though, the great fear is that departure is the state of being abandoned, even though it is you who leave.

  During the last few months of my mother’s life she would tell me plaintively and frequently about the misery of trying to fall asleep. She was in Washington, I in New York, we would speak constantly, see each other about once a month. Her cancer was spreading, I knew. She refused to have chemotherapy: “Ma biddee at’adthab,” she would say: “I don’t want the torture of it.” Years later I was to have four years of it with no success, but she never buckled, never gave in even to her doctor’s importunings, never had chemotherapy. But she could not sleep at night. Sedatives, sleeping pills, soothing drinks, the counsel of friends and relatives, reading, praying: none, she said, did any good. “Help me to sleep, Edward,” she once said to me with a piteous trembling in her voice that I can still hear as I write. But then the disease spread to her brain, and for the last six weeks she slept all the time. Sitting by her bed with my sister Grace, waiting for her to awaken, was, for me, the most anguished and paradoxical of my experiences with her.

  Now I have divined that my own inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her struggle for sleep. For me sleep is something to get 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. During my last treatment—a twelve-week ordeal—I was most upset by the drugs I was given to ward off fever and shaking chills, and manifestly upset by the sense of being infantilized, the helplessness that many years ago I had conceded as that of a child to my mother and, differently, to my father. I fought the medical soporifics bitterly, as if my identity depended on that resistance.

  Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state, to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as the early-morning shedding of the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss, reacquainting myself with what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier. I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much si
gnificance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, are borne along during the waking hours, and at their best they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They may be not quite right, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, against each other, contraptually yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism, too, is something I particularly want to hold onto. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned to prefer being not quite right, out of place.

  from Out of Place

  PART IV

  Spoken Words

  17

  An Interview with Edward W. Said New York, July–August 1999

  You once wrote that “a beginning methodologically unites a practical need with a theory, an intention with a method.” Having completed your memoir, Out of Place, in which you write about the need to leave behind a “subjective account” of your youth in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and the United States, you chose to focus on a period of your life before the 1967 war. What is the intention behind your beginning?