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 atdthab,” she would say, “I don’t want the torture of it.” Years later I was to have four wasting 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 into her brain, and for the last six weeks she slept all the time. Waiting by her bed for her to awaken, with my sister Grace, 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 be gotten 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 induced somnolence, 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 even to my doctor’s advice.
Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss, than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming 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 significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are “off” and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally 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 one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward W. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of seventeen books, including Orientalism, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Culture and Imperialism, Representations of the Intellectual, and The Politics of Dispossession.
Wadie Said, my father, in the American Expeditionary Force under General Pershing, France, 1917
The wedding of my parents, Wadie and Hilda, at the Baptist Church in Nazareth, December 24, 1932
My parents on their honeymoon in London, January 1933
An exterior view of the main branch of the Cairo Standard Stationery Company, established by Wadie on Malika Farida Street. Wadie is in a bow tie in the doorway, and on his right is Anna Mandel, his secretary, 1932.
Interior shot of Standard Stationery, with Wadie in a white suit, sitting at right. Standing directly behind him is Lampas, the store manager.
My mother and me, age one, in the Mena House gardens
Standing on one of the pyramids during a family outing to Giza, 1939. Front row, left to right: cousins George, Robert, me, and Albert; back row: Evelyn and Yousif
A weekend drive to the Barrages Gardens north of Cairo in the delta near the Barrages Dam, 1939, included my mother’s family, the Musas. Clockwise from bottom left: Loulou, Shukri Musa, Marwan held by Latifeh, her husband Munir, Hilda, Albert, Robert, me, and Wadie
Aunt Nabiha, with her sons Robert and Albert, Palestine, 1939
Age five, at the Maadi Sporting Club pool, 1940
With my sister Rosy in traditional Palestinian dress, Jerusalem, 1941
At seven with Rosy in Gezira Preparatory School uniforms on the Cairo apartment terrace
A family shot of Saids and Mansours, my father’s second cousins, photographed for the last time before everyone dispersed, Mansour House, circa 1946–47
Family portrait in Jerusalem, circa 1946–47. Left to right: Jean, Rosy, me at eleven, Joyce, and baby Grace
With my father on the beach at Alexandria, 1936
Aunt Melia in her customary hat, Cairo, late 1930s
Displaying early conducting skills on the terrace of the Cairo apartment on Aziz Osman Street
A report card from Keith Bullen, the bilious poet and principal of GPS
On the swing at in al Nas, a park and cafe near Dhour el Shweir, circa 1945–46. Left to right: Rosy, Jean (on swing), Ensaf (the nanny), and me
Outside St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem at cousin George Said’s wedding, April 14, 1947. Front row, left to right: Albert, me, and Robert; back row: Uncle Asaad (Al), cousin Yousif, and Wadie. Al was run over by a truck and died two weeks later.
The wedding of Alif Musa, my mother’s older brother, in Haifa, 1945. My maternal grandmother, Munira, wearing a turban, is directly behind her son, the groom.
With fellow cabin mates and counselor Jim Murray at Camp Maranacook, Maine, 1948. I’m on the left in the back row.
Dr. Farid Haddad and Ada at their wedding, c. 1949, Cairo. Haddad was killed in prison in 1959.
In a Kitchener House photo, 1950, at Victoria College, which I attended for tenth and eleventh grades. I’m sixth from the left in the second row; Keith Gatley, the housemaster, sits front row center.
A 1951 report card from Victoria College stating “excellent knowledge and command of English,” signed by Mr. Griffiths, the headmaster who expelled me for two weeks in February of that year
In front of Howard Johnson’s in Jamaica, New York, March 1951
With my father at graduation from Mount Hermon, June 1953
On the post-graduation trip in New England, with my father and cousins Charlie (far left) and Abie (far right), my father’s nephews with whom I stayed in Jackson Heights during several Christmases
A family portrait for my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Cairo, December 1957. Front row: Joyce, Hilda, Wadie, and Grace; back row: me, Rosy, and Jean
At the keyboard accompanying Afif Bulos at a song recital in Paine Hall, Harvard, 1959
A summer during graduate school at Harvard: at the Acropolis, Athens, 1960
A 1980 view of the summer house rented from 1946 to 1969 in Dhour el Schweir. The rocket hole made during the Lebanese Civil War went through the master bedroom.
Out of Place: A Memoir Page 38
