Power, Politics, and Culture by Said Edward W

Author:Said, Edward W. [Said, Edward W.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

TEN

EDWARD SAID: BETWEEN TWO CULTURES

You’ve said that your background is a series of displacements and expatriations which can’t ever be recuperated, that the sense of being between cultures is the single strongest strand running through your life. I’d like to trace some of these displacements, starting perhaps most logically with where you were born—in Jerusalem, in what was then Palestine. Did you feel between cultures even as a child?

Yes, I did. My father was from Jerusalem, but he was a rather strange, composite creature. He had lived in the United States before he was married, having come to America in 1911 or 1912 to escape the Ottoman draft. They were going to take him to fight in Bulgaria, I think. He was sixteen or seventeen at the time, so he ran away and came here, to the United States. And then, through inadvertence or wrong information, he got into the American army, which he believed was going to send troops to fight against the Ottomans. In fact, he originally joined the Canadian army, and then didn’t stay because he realized they weren’t going to send him to the Middle East to fight the Ottomans; he joined the American army and he ended up in France, where he fought and was wounded. He then became a U.S. citizen and around 1919, a year or so after the war, he went back to Palestine and shortly thereafter went into business with his cousin. In the late twenties he established a branch of their business, which was books and office equipment, in Egypt. So actually, when I was born in Jerusalem in 1935, my parents were commuting between Palestine and Egypt. I didn’t spend a huge amount of time in Palestine or, for that matter, anywhere really; we were always on the move. We would spend part of the year in Egypt, part of the year in Palestine, and the summer in Lebanon. In addition to the fact that my father had American citizenship, and I was by inheritance therefore American and Palestinian at the same time, I was living in Egypt and I wasn’t Egyptian. I, too, was this strange composite, and that is my earliest memory.

You’ve also talked about being a minority within a minority.

Both my parents were Protestants in Palestine. That really meant that they were separated from the overwhelming majority of Christians, who were of course a minority in an essentially Muslim society. Most Christians in the Middle East—or at least in the Levant—are Greek Orthodox, but my parents were the children of converts from Greek Orthodox. My father became, through his father, an Anglican—an Episcopalian—and my mother became, through her father, a Baptist. It’s one of the serendipitous things about the missionaries. When they came to Palestine and Lebanon and Jordan and Syria in the 1850s, they were tremendously unsuccessful in converting either Muslims or Jews to Christianity, which was what they came to do, and they ended up converting other Christians from the majority into these new sects.

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