LOOKING FOR PALESTINE
Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family
Najla Said
Riverhead Books
258 pages; $27.95
The title is misleading. I picked up the book in the hope of learning something about the family life of the great hero of my generation, Edward Said, from the pen of his daughter. However, I should have been alerted by the subtitle: "Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American family". Almost the entire work is the story of the struggle of Najla Said to come to terms with her various identities - Palestinian, Lebanese, Christian, Arab, American.
As she grew up in the United States, Ms Said was tormented by her "Arab-ness" for most of her childhood and youth. In her own eyes, she was "fat, big, hairy and weird", always conscious of "my inner ugliness" and the "weirdos" who were her parents. She was confused by the "mixed messages" in her life relating to culture, class and identity, with a deep dichotomy between the "beautiful, comforting and loving world" of her home and the outside world made up of people who were fair, blonde and beautiful.
Her visit to Lebanon in 1982 was traumatic. The civil war was synonymous with all that was "uncivilised, evil, barbaric, violent and foreign". Ms Said desperately wanted her family to support one side, the Lebanese Christians, or the other, the Palestinians, "so that everything would make sense". But this was impossible, since her family did not hate the Palestinians. She felt a complete sense of aloofness and separation from the Arabs she met, including her extended family, the divide during the visit becoming "deeper, sadder, darker and more incomprehensible". Later, her sense of self-disgust made her anorexic. A body search at a European airport, where she was pulled out of her group and was questioned, left her feeling like a "dirty, disgusting Arab".
Early in the book, Ms Said says she and her father were "soul mates", both being artistic, dramatic, needy and sensitive, and inept at mundane tasks. But, for much of her early life, she confesses, she knew nothing of his writings or his place in the world of scholarship. Perhaps her early rejection of her heritage also extended to a deliberate ignorance of her father's literary and political accomplishments. In the university, boys were attracted to her on account of her "exotic" looks, and also perhaps because she was the daughter of the iconic Edward Said. Ms Said felt even more diminished; she wanted to convey to them that "this particular apple has fallen far, far from the tree".
Two events served to change this quite dramatically: first, her father was diagnosed with cancer, and this led to her first visit to Palestine; the other was 9/11. The visit to Palestine was an emotional tour for her ill father. There, she came to see that the Palestinians living in the occupied territories were quite different from her in that "they were victims of the circumstances of their birth" in a way she could never be. This, she realised, was also true of the Jewish children since they too were trapped by the burdens of their history. Later, in New York, Ms Said understood that the Jewish community there and her own family "were both part of the Middle East" and had much in common.
The events of 9/11, traumatic as well as confusing, now finally "crowned and outed her as an Arab-American", impelling her for the first time to seek the company of other Arab-Americans; to involve herself with their activities, particularly theatre; to appreciate, with greater sympathy, her parents' unique culture; and to seek to interpret the Arab identity to other Americans. Finally, Ms Said came to feel a sense of comfort within herself. She had, she says, "fallen in love with my family and everything they stood for, even as, for the first time, I was feeling hatred and racism directed at me from fellow Americans".
In Edward Said's last days, Ms Said bonded strongly with her father. These pages depict a warm, funny and loving family, closely tied together but also respectful of space and privacy. When her father finally succumbed to cancer, she was encouraged to pay several visits to Lebanon and Palestine, always enthusiastically celebrating her identity as an Arab-American. She had let go of the idea of one identity, she explains, and, though still confused, she was now "inspired, engaged, interested, complicated and aware".
Ms Said's story is similar to that of many non-white children in the diaspora in America who go through painful experiences of exclusion and rejection. Ms Said's narrative is further complicated by her being an Arab in America during the period when US attitudes evolved from ignorance and indifference into seeing the community as demonised hate-figures. In one of the best lines of the book, Ms Said speaks for all of us when she says: "Each group of children has the memories of our parents' separate tragedies to defend and protect…." At the end of the book, Edward Said's daughter, confused, tormented, anguished and self-deprecating for much of her youth, finally discovers herself and is at peace.
