Root Seeking and Root Muddling: A Diasporic Study of Edward Said’s Out of Place

• In Event: Out of Place: Arab and Arabic Narratives Between Empires

Abstract

A celebrated diasporic scholar and a founder of postcolonial studies, Edward Said spent a lifetime interrogating Empire and one’s relation to it. His most notable work, Orientalism, paved the way for making sense of collective Othering, for Empire, in his words, came to define itself by that which was not like it. Said as an academic and his work have been the focus of extensive scholarly inquiry, particularly as a Palestinian, he is often the subject of theorizing and analysis insistent on collective understanding. Understudied, however, is his persistent alienation since birth, his personal displacement and that of his family as well as the irony of his individual non-belonging to which I turn my attention in this essay. In tracing his personal life through his memoir, it becomes clear Said’s diasporic journey and persistent alienation are a curious case of root-seeking and root-muddling. In Out of Place, his only personal writing published prior to his death by leukemia, Said chronicles family history even before birth. In looking closely at the particularities of his life as a Palestinian diasporic subject, I argue that his estrangement has been caused by numerous factors, most significantly his parents’ respective diasporas—his father to the US, his mother to Lebanon—which destined him for a life outside of an easily-identifiable home and his gendered colonial encounters with empire during his schooling. Not only were Said’s last days and decades melancholic, but his early ones, too, beginning with his accidental birth in Palestine, an attempt at comfort and a gesture of hope. Moreover, his upper-class status as well as his American citizenship as a result of his father’s prosperous immigration, paired with his patriarchal and colonial encounters, all contributed to his further alienation and internalizing of the identity of the weaker, inferior Other—an insecurity he long carried with him and even later theorized at a scale beyond his own personhood in Orientalism. Melancholic as he was, and at odds even with his half-European-half-Arab name, Said channeled his troubled energy toward making sense of the systems, binaries, and representations haunting him (and by extension, people like him) since birth. In this essay, I linger on some of Said’s most significant family documentations, tracing the emergence of his unique diasporic subjectivity and making space for the loneliness he intimately carried while living in the public eye; his story, national as it is, is also a deeply individual one that nuances our understanding of diasporic alienation amidst privilege and against constant collective identity theorizing, especially when it comes to Palestinians and Palestine.

Author

• Sara Abou Rashed, Ohio State University