Status Updates From Out Of Place: A Memoir

I think Said doesn’t fully address his economic class. Theres some understanding based on his father’s successful Cairo business and the many Pell who work for their family, but what did that translate to in their New York trip where they stayed in hotels and went to summer camp in Maine. How expensive was that?

Edward’s pursuit of Farid’s story is so intimate. I’ll definitely remember the sorrow.

The last words Edward Said’s father ever said to him, while dying, were; “I’m worried about what those Zionists will do to you. Be careful.” That is heartbreaking.

The several repetitions of paragraph structured like, ‘this family member was doing some normal Job like working at the Jerusalem YMCA in 1947’ and then finishing the paragraph with ‘they were never able to return to their home,’ after the 1948 Nakba was powerful. The sudden break in the text followed by six pages of photos of life (the stationary store, vacations, school, etc) forced me to feel the sorrow.

“By some devilish irony I find myself with an intransigent, treacherous leukemia, which ostrichlike I try to banish from my mind entirely, attempting […] to live in my system of time, working, sensing lateness and deadlines and that feeling of insufficient accomplishment I learned fifty years ago […] I secretly wonder to myself whether the system of duties and deadlines may now save me” Edward, I cry for you.

“At the core of each subject [within my American school textbooks] there seemed to be a family […] there was always a Sis, Mom, and Dad, plus assorted family and household members, including a large black woman housekeeper with an extremely exaggerated expression of either sadness or delight on her face.” SO THE YANKEES PULLED UP AND INTRODUCED RACIST MAMI DEPICTIONS TO ARAB KIDS AFTER WWII?! DUDE!!!!!

The major change [in post WWII Cairo] was the replacement of British institutions and individuals by the victorious Americans, the old Empire giving way to the new…” (pg. 82) I’m nearly trembling while reading this. This is exactly the findings I discovered in Post WWII Lebanon within my own independent research. Having one of my conclusions on Lebanon to be a potential Pan-Arab trend is mind boggling.

“The artificial quality of what we were, a family determined to make itself into a mock little European group despite the Egyptian and Arab surroundings […]” (pg. 75)

I enjoyed the descriptions of Edward reactions as an adult to the Kodak film photos than the descriptions of the actual photos.

First, Flesh, then Raja the Gullible, and now this? Why are all these books coming to me now with questions of boyhood sexualization? Weird coincidence.

At first, I wished that the segment on body shame would move on faster, but now I understand that this is a big part of identity. It does feel relatable.