Status Updates From Out of Place: A Memoir

“During the middle fifties, while I was at Princeton, the Times reported on the Israeli plot to blow up Cairo cinemas and libraries that had American connections, like the Metro and the USIA center, […] a plan designed to sour relations between Nasser’s new government and the Americans. This was the Lavon Affair, and it was carried out by members of the local Jewish community…” Page 199

“Unrest: temporary, short-lived, impermanent, and somehow hostile to Egypt, a place that had once been the welcoming, open, laxurious. and voluptuous paradise for foreigners who reveled in its weather, unparalleled creature comforts, and, most important, the subservience of its natives.”

“Madeleine [Ghorras] was very religious. [She] belonged to […] the Syro-Lebanese high bourgeoisie. […] I recall meeting de Zogheibs and de Chedids there, recipients of papal titles, which about a decade later, during the high Nasser years, struck me as grotesquely inappropriate[…] they spoke the heavily accented French of the Levant with its rolled r's” Pgs. 196-197

This segment on Victoria College of Cairo seems meant to remind the reader of how terrible going to an authoritarian school is as a pubescent teenager.

So, Edward, you found your freedom through tennis in Dhour, Lebanon after being a Princeton Graduate? I know how freeing it can feel to be on a tennis court. Very relatable.

It’s very clear that Said’s documentation of Arabic words, especially proper nouns from his own attempts to translate and record things that were not being intellectually exported into English. Because of that, some of what he writes is information that otherwise seems to be unrecorded now in 2026 like that the American University was former called the Syrian College.