out of place and the politics of autobiography

Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006. © 2006 by Duke University Press

Edward Said’s Lieux de Mémoire

Out Of Pl ace and the POl it ics Of autObiOgr aPhy

Ioana LucaThe contemporary theoretical scene on autobiography, or “life writing” (a term preferred by many of the newer critics), has been thriving in recent years, providing many different or even contradictory perspectives on this literary genre, whose definition and scope have frequently been reformulated.1 Situating myself within the framework built by such com-plex theoretical positionings and acknowledging the widespread critical concerns about the relevance of texts to political struggles, how narratives legitimize or function as accomplices of historical events, and matters of representation and representability of such events, I first focus here on the unstable and much-negotiated character of autobiography as a genre. Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999) and the heated debate that its publication caused allows me to illustrate some of the theoretical points discussed in the first part of my essay, as they represent a perfect case of the complex metamorphoses and changing parameters of autobi-ography. As Said is an exile who writes as a Palestinian and on behalf of Palestinians, I also attempt to probe into the inner mechanisms of auto-biographical-historical writing, by applying Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire to my reading of Said’s memoir and its reception. Finally, I map the implications of personal memory, recollection, and writing a personal narrative in a context such as Said’s.

The problem of defining autobiography and its relations to other kinds of self-narratives has been subject to much debate. Ever since the publication of James Olney’s important collection of theoretical and critical essays on autobiography in 1980, both the genre of autobiography and the criticism of autobiography have received unprecedented attention.

Olney suggests that what we make of the genre depends on the way we define “auto,” “bio,” and “graphy.” At the same time he notes that the style of autobiography has altered significantly through the ages; moreover, the history, the canon, and the definitions of this genre have also been inextricably linked to the history of autobiographical criticism. Discussions of the canon and genre of autobiography, I believe, also reflect changes in thinking about canons and genres in general. If earlier autobiographies and autobiographical criticism stressed the bios, the life, more recent

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autobiographies and critical studies have stressed the auto, the self.2 In so doing they have opened up the discussion of autobiographical narrating by insisting on its status as an act of creation rather than a mere transcription of the past. In other words, recent critics have been more concerned with the autobiographer’s literary representation of his or her philosophical, psychological, cultural, and, additionally, political or spiritual self, rather than the truth-value of the narrative of events in his or her life history. Such explorations situate autobiographical texts within the parameters of literary production rather than the realm of history writing.

Continuing Olney’s line of thought, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, go one step further and emphasize the shift of the debate from a concept of the “self” to one of “subjectivity.” Postcolonial and postmodern interventions have amplified, according to them, the possible modes of self-narrating and undermined canonical norms of autobiographical inscriptions. Former preoccupations of autobiography critics with the nature of this genre’s truth-value or the self’s struggle with identity have been displaced, and “a new emphasis on graphia has assumed central importance.”3 Further-more, acknowledging the complex terrain of autobiography writing and criticism in contemporary culture, the two critics foreground such terms as performativity, positionality, and heteroglossic dialogism as instruments for mapping the complex terrain of autobiography nowadays. Smith and Watson also suggest that the rhetorics of identity, location, and address are organizing new forms of critical inquiry.4

To sum up, along with David Parker, I believe that at this moment in the troubled history of the genre an in-depth “relationality has established itself as a paradigm in contemporary auto/biography studies”;5 or, to put it otherwise, that both primary texts and theoretical approaches draw upon and adapt intensively highly diverse aspects of contemporary cul-tural theory, as is the case with Said’s memoir. With regard to the relation between autobiography and the postcolonial critical discourse, Françoise Lionnet takes one step further and emphasizes the performative valences acquired by the genre: “Postcolonial autobiography, in all its myriad forms, is best defined by the transformative and visionary dimension: by the convictions that writing matters and that narrative has the power to transform the reader.” Lionnet insists on the “writer’s responsibility and his or her ability to take risks.”6

In light of all these critical and theoretical shifts and changes of focus, numerous questions on the specific case of Said’s memoir arise: What transformative dimension does Said’s memoir acquire? What risks does he take? What dimensions does autobiography have for him, taking into

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account his position as “father” of postcolonial criticism? Why and how does he appropriate the genre of life writing?

Before attempting to answer these questions, I briefly review some major critical stances on the intricate relationship between autobiography and history, and on the fiction-nonfiction debate; these will prove instru-mental as starting points for my analysis and, moreover, will make clear one of the most common frameworks within which Said’s memoir has been approached.

Autobiography characterized as memoir was the dominant form of life writing in the early history of the genre, when the focus was mainly on life. In this form, the “individual is perceived respectively, as the actor in or the witness to history.”7 Readers in the past looked to the memoir to experience history: “The autobiographer was expected to subordinate imagination to the attempt to communicate trustworthy, verifiable, subjective messages.”8 The memoirs of important players of historical events — generals, prime ministers, various statesmen — were and are eagerly read for their views on the events in which their authors participated.

Albert Stone asserts that autobiography cannot be seen only as imagi-native literature or as a document of social history: “I remain uneasy to treat autobiography chiefly as a branch of imaginative literature and thus to stress artistic creation over the equally complex processes of historical recreation, ideological argument, and psychological expression. Life is the more inclusive sign — not Literature — which deserves to be placed above the gateway to the house of autobiography.”9

Memoir as a form of witnessing to historical events continues to retain power. The autobiographers of such memoirs personalize history, they give personal accounts of events, and these become individual accounts of public events. Reading thus the dramatic developments of the auto-biographical form and the politics of identity formation, as previously mentioned, one becomes increasingly conscious of the “relational turn in life writing studies” and of the play of the autobiographical act itself,10 “in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagina-tion to serve the needs of present consciousness.”11 Autobiography in our time, as Paul John Eakin points out, “is increasingly understood as both an art of memory and an art of the imagination.”12 This understanding has important implications for the present study, because Said’s memoir, as I show, brings into play complex questions about self-representation, memory, history, and the process of signification.

In an interview with Salman Rushdie, Said was asked if it was not tiring to begin anew to explain the history of Palestine, “to go back and again

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to the same story,” every time something related to Palestine happens in U.S. media: “The interesting thing is that there seems to be nothing in the world which sustains the story unless you go on telling it; it will just drop and disappear,”13 answered the critic.

Said kept on telling the story in a variety of ways, in dozens of inter-views and several books, including his memoir. Starting with Oriental-ism, where he analyzes “the affiliation of knowledge with power,”14 Said began approaching possibilities of a better understanding of the East, the “Orient,” and consequently, in an oblique way, he tackled the problem of Palestine and his own belonging to that “lost world.”

If in The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), Peace and Its Discontents (1996) Said continues the main thesis of Orientalism by focusing on the emergence of the Palestinian nation and its present-day existence, it is his collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr, published in 1986 under the title After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, that, I think, serves best as a witness to contemporary Palestinian identity issues. What Said writes mirrors and complements the black-and-white photographs with which he is continuously engaged in a dialogue. The photographs are not the portraits of his own family (later included, how-ever, in his memoir), but rather pictures of people doing ordinary things, displaying the everyday facts of life in hard times.

Said thus had a strong long-term interest in creating the framework for Palestinian voices and history; from a certain point on in his very public career, Said wrote, he worked tirelessly and served as a spokesman (both officially and unofficially) for the Palestinian national movement, explaining Palestinian identity, history, politics, and rights to the Ameri-can audience.

Having noticed and criticized the lack of any serious effort to institu-tionalize the Palestinian story, to give it objective existence,15 he constantly insisted that the Palestinians had the right to represent themselves, and that they be entitled to narrate their own history, which, as he argued in “Permission to Narrate,” has a value and specificity of its own.

Perhaps the greatest battle Palestinians have waged as a people has been the right to a remembered presence, and with that presence, the right to possess and reclaim a collective historical reality, at least since the Zionist movement began its encroachments on the land. . . . What we never understood was the power of a narrative history to mobilize people around a common goal. In the case of Israel, the narrative’s main point was that Zionism’s goal was to restore, reestablish, repatriate, and reconnect a people with its original homeland.16


Emphasizing the importance of a Palestinian narrative, he acknowledges the impossibility of imagining a single one: “There are many kinds of Palestinian experience, which cannot be assembled into one. One would therefore have to write parallel histories of the communities in Lebanon, the occupied territories, and so on.”17

This is the background against which Out of Place may be seen as Said’s next step in encountering and responding to questions of Palestinian identity. This time he turned to his individual story, more specifically to his childhood in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Dhour el Shweir between his year of birth and his departure for the United States:

I found myself telling the story of my life against the background of World War II, the loss of Palestine and the establishment of Israel, the end of the Egyptian monarchy, the Nasser years, the 1967 War, the emergence of the Palestinian movement, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Oslo Peace Process. These are in my memoir only allusively, even though their fugitive presence can be seen here and there.

Each of the places I lived in — Jerusalem, Cairo, Lebanon, the United States — has a complicated, dense web of valences that was very much part of growing up, gaining an identity, forming my consciousness of myself and of others.18

The quest for identity, offering one’s life as a model, self-understanding, and ordering or reordering one’s life may be as many reasons for writing an autobiography. Said starts writing his memoir as a result of a medical diagnosis, leukemia, in 1991; he found it important, he says, “to leave behind a subjective account of the life I lived in the Arab world” (ix). It is a return to his childhood in Jerusalem, Lebanon, and mostly Cairo — what he calls the “lost or forgotten world” (xi) — and to the prep schools and universities that he attended when he came to the United States. It is the story of a boy who felt out of place as a Palestinian in Egypt (and Lebanon, where his family had a summer house), as a Christian in a Muslim world, and as an Arab, holding an American passport and citizenship (his father emigrated to the United States in 1911 and returned to Palestine after World War I) in a colonial world.

The attempt to leave something behind, complemented by the feel-ing he “had something to understand about a peculiar past,”19 is also an attempt to reconcile himself with the unsettling sense “of many identi-ties — mostly in conflict with each other” (5) and to “open himself to the deeply disorganized state of my real history . . . and then to try to construct them in order” (6). Memory proves crucial and instrumental in such an

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endeavor: “My memory proved crucial to my being able to function at all during periods of debilitating sickness, treatment and anxiety” (ix); “my memory — unaided by anything except concentrated reflection on and archaeological prying into a very distant and essentially irrecoverable past — seemed hospitable and generous to my often importunate forays” (216). Said turns to memory because memory can be seen as the precon-dition and the mechanism of both identity and history. Beneath all the propositions and declarations of narrative and history stands the glue of identity, “the primary fastening, which is memory.” Thus behind narrative identity lie micromechanisms of memory. And from these grow the roots, trunks, branches, and flowers of our personal and social histories, as Paul Ricoeur would put it.20

The story of a “foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistak-able Arabic family name Said” (3) unfolds peacefully. It starts with the portrait of his family, its genealogy, and complicated web of relatives — maternal and paternal grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins who will be with us throughout the book. The beginning is thus a collection of portraits of family members interspersed with accounts of Said’s first perceptions of them. It narrates episodes and situations of Said’s early life, bringing before our eyes the little boy playing Robinson or Tarzan, watching Ali Baba, Aladdin, or Sinbad movies, reading Shakespeare with his mother, and listening to the Opera Nights. It continues with the unruly schoolboy, Said’s concerns about his body at puberty, the girls whom he fell in love with, and the boring summer holidays. The narrator probes into the incon-gruities so painful to him as a child, especially the mixture of cultures and languages that made him yearn not to be confusingly plural. As a boy, he wished he could have been “all-Arab, or all-European and American, or all-Orthodox Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian” (5).

The search for understanding his identity is inextricably linked with the historical moment in which he lived and the changing realities of the world around him. In “Between Worlds” Said calls Out of Place a story “worthy of rescue,”21 given that the three places where he grew up no lon-ger exist as they were. To re-create his story is in some sense to re-create those places, and the book abounds in topologies and description of places; it maps all his departures and travels, juggling such names as Talbiyah, Zamalek, Haifa, Katamon, Cairo, Ramallah, or Dhour el Shweir. It offers detailed accounts and impressions of everyday life, acquaintances, and incidents. The portraits of Said’s neighbors or friends also echo themes, images, feelings, details, and nuances that document the intricacies of that “Levantine” world. In describing friends of the family, of mixed Lebanese, Egyptian, Armenian, and Turkish origin, Said writes:

[Said] probes into

the incongruities

so painful to

him as a child,

especially the

mixture of

cultures and

languages

that made him

yearn not to

be confusingly

plural.


But like us they were marked for extinction in the worldly Cairo environment that was already beginning to be undermined. We were all Shawam, amphibious Levantine creatures whose essential lostness was momentarily stayed by a kind of forgetfulness, a kind of daydream, that included elaborate catered dinner parties, outings to fashionable restaurants, the opera, ballet, and concerts. By the end of the forties we were no longer just Shawam but khawagat, the designated and respectful title for foreigners which, as used by Muslim Egyptians, has always carried a tinge of hostility. Despite the fact that I spoke — and I thought looked — like a native Egyptian, something seemed to give me away. I resented the implication that I was somehow a foreigner, even though deep down I knew that to them I was, despite being an Arab. (195)

Memoirs by academics usually do not cause an angry public stir, as was the case with Said’s memoir. The personal circumstances of its writing (Said’s leukemia), stated directly, also play a major part in the debate triggered by the book. For Said, his book necessarily means going back and attempting to rescue from oblivion times and places that had all but disappeared. “It’s like an inverse of my illness,” he said in an interview. “It’s like a mirror, but from which all the actual images have been effaced. There is nothing in the book about it. And I found that very salutary, hav-ing something like that to go back.”22

Writing one’s life story, as therapy, as healing, as an act of remember-ing (the past) but also of forgetting (the present), might stand as a possible interpretation of Said’s memoir. However, none of the early critics and reviewers of the book focused on the psychological valences of this memoir, which Said himself probably intended. Almost no review tackled the “self” part of the “self-life-writing” of his autobiography.23 Without exception, the book was initially analyzed either in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or in relation to Said’s commitment to the Palestinian cause, as its main representative and spokesman in the United States.

Justus Reid Weiner launched one of the first and most ferocious attacks; titled “My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” it was published in Commentary, “a bastion of uncompromising Zionism,”24 as its opponents call it. This review is mainly an attempt to undermine Said’s credibility as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause by questioning his very Palestinian identity and arguing that he constantly overstated his and his family’s connections to Palestine. Weiner accused Said of embroidering his story to make himself more Palestinian than he is, and more of a victim of the Nakba, the fall of Palestine in 1948 when Israel was created and Palestinians driven out, than he ever was:

What are we to make of that, in his own case, the plain, direct, and honest truth is so radically at odds with the parable of Palestinian identity he has

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been at such pains to construct over the decades? For, to say it the last time, he himself grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward Said’s birth and had become the owner of a thriving business. . . . Whatever we do finally make of all this, there can be no denying that the parable itself is a lie, an artful lie; a skillful lie; above all a very useful and by now widely accepted lie — but a lie. . . . he continues the process of silently “spinning” this lie, a process now auspiciously launched in Out of Place.25

An attempt to discredit Said as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause is plainly intended to discredit the cause as a whole. This is how Said retorted to Weiner’s arguments in the Egyptian journal Al-Ahram: If they can prove that the leading Palestine intellectual is a liar, what does this say about the rest of Palestinians? “It is part of the Palestinian fate,” Said wrote, “always to be required to prove one’s existence and history.”26 As a result, three different Web sites, CounterPunch, Salon Books, and The Guardian, launched a debate about the debate, and for a long while there was a constant outpouring of articles related to this point.27

However, this exchange covers only one of the major attempts to discredit Said in regard to his memoir. In a New Statesman article titled “Israel v. Palestine: Which Side Is the Left On?” Geoffrey Wheatcroft apparently dismisses Weiner’s argument while commenting that Said “has a light attitude to fact.” Wheatcroft discards Weiner’s attack only to reinforce it from a different perspective, namely, by stressing Said’s Euro-pean and Eurocentric background both in his professional and private life, then concludes, in a casual and ironic tone: “The accidents of his birth are irrelevant to the real truth, that Edward Said is a man of the West, and to the larger truth that the world we live in today has been made by Europe. Do I need to add, for the better or worse?”28

The British novelist Timothy Mo, in The Spectator, with an irreverent tone (“[Said’s] memoir is a new and tragically perhaps final departure for him — he is dying of leukemia”), accuses Said of inconsistency and even hypocrisy: “Said’s stance on his dual cultural heritage is inconsistent to the point of hypocrisy. . . . he takes the enlightened decencies of the host country for granted while he cheers on benighted from a safe distance.”

Adding a personal note, “as someone as doubly mixed and triply displaced as the professor,” Mo continues, “I don’t buy the: ‘Please feel sorry for me, but aren’t I an interesting human being?’ premise that underlies the whole book.”29

In SAIS Review, a fellow Jerusalem-born scholar, Meron Benvenisti, treads the same line of inquiry. He views Said’s memoir in a political con-text, summarizing the debate so far:


Questions about his integrity raised for political reasons by right wing Jewish detractors [Weiner’s article] . . . have been angrily rejected as false by his Israeli left-wing supporters who — regardless of the truth — viewed them as a personal affront. Said’s life and therefore his memoir is perceived in a political context. . . . Although Out of Place is intended to tell the reader about Said’s family, his personal emotions and his internal landscape, it is the political — not the personal — aspect, which readers and reviewers seek or read into this book.30

Benvenisti’s interest, however, is “also political” — as he himself readily admits — and he accuses Said of selective blindness and childhood myopia for not acknowledging the Jewish presence in the Jerusalem of his child-hood: “He clearly has no recollection of the one hundred thousand Jews who inhabited the area surrounding tiny Talbiyah.”

If so far, in the reviews mentioned, Said’s memoir was one way or another denied authenticity and truth-value and accused of “non-repre-sentability,” now, with Benvenisti, it is viewed as emblematic for all those who left Palestine:

White members of well established Jewish families took their places in Yishun’s military forces. . . . their Arab contemporaries left town before the war or during its early months. . . . in this respect the Said family is not unique.

. . . [his] parents had taken him to the safety of Cairo six months earlier. . . . When Said’s father had given up on Palestine as a place, my father was wounded. (218, emphasis mine)

Once again Said’s writing is reduced to the status of rhetoric, even though the perspective is changed. Benvenisti continues:

For all his bold rhetoric and admirable activism after 1967 Said still seems unable to assign to the Palestinians any responsibility for the event of 1948. . . . he cannot muster the courage to openly admit the cowardice and betrayal of the Palestinian leadership and elites including his own family during 1948. (218 – 19, emphasis mine)

Benvenisti then refers to the lack of Palestinian unity versus the Israeli one: “The arrogant disregard toward the primitive and ignorant lower classes was a decisive factor in the defeat of Palestine in 1948” (218). After all this, the memoir can be easily reduced to a “portrait of privi-leged family and a pampered youth in the midst of great suffering and great destruction” (220).

In his “Exile’s Return,” published in the New York Review of Books, Amos Elon analyzes Palestine-Israeli history, its conflicts, and Said’s

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involvement in the PLO, the peace process, and the Oslo agreements, then proceeds to a detailed presentation of the memoir as such and in the end discards Weiner’s accusations. This new, less-passionate direction is con-tinued by Alon Confino’s complex article published in Israel Studies, titled “Remembering Talbiyah: On Edward Said’s Out of Place”: this is truly the first review that goes beyond taking sides in the Middle East conflict and making class-struggle judgments in reading Said’s memoir. Confino reads the book in the context of Said’s critical work (he relates it to the role of the intellectual, the significance of exile, voices of power, etc.), and within a larger context, that is, the Palestinian-Israeli national narratives:

Both narratives possess a notion of exile and dispossession — for Israelis, a 2000-year history of Diaspora that ended with the foundation of Israel, for the Palestinians, a history of rootedness in Palestine that ended in dispossession with the same foundation of Israel. But both narratives also insist on a national home with a definite idea of place and ownership. These two national narratives talk past each other, ignoring the other’s history and suffering. Said’s self-representation also includes a sense of exile and a sense of home. He contributes, however, by providing a sense of the Other, as when he recently wrote that “there can be no possible reconciliation [between Jews and Palestinians], no possible solution unless these two communities confront their experience [of the Holocaust and the 1948 dispossession] in the light of the other.”

Perhaps it needs a cosmopolitan intellectual, with a sense of exile and of roots, who lives far from the eye of the storm to state this fundamental truth.31

Confino points to the core of the debate and the whole anger it produced by concluding that through his memoir “Said has written a testimony more eloquent than all his political writing; the personal is often more powerful than the purely political” (196).

This heated debate and controversy recalls similar reactions of various Chinese American scholars to Maxine Hong Kingston’s book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. Some Chinese American crit-ics questioned its autobiographical status, its authenticity, and its represen-tativeness.32 The fundamental objection concerned its generic status, more specifically its being billed as autobiography rather than fiction. However, while Kingston has never claimed truth-value, Said pointed out both in his memoir and in his rebuttal to Weiner that he was telling the truth.33 “There [in Out of Place] I scrupulously record the facts of my early life spent between Jerusalem, Cairo and Dhour Al-Shweir (Lebanon), making clear that, being the member of a privileged class, I was spared the worst ravages of the Nakba.”34 In the same article he goes on to correct many of


Weiner’s “mistakes of fact” and even suggests possible sources of further inquiry (e.g., his professor in Canada, his oldest cousin, the children of the pastor, etc.).

What does this whole controversy tell us? Why was this book more controversial than any other by Said?35 What are the implications of explicit autobiographical writing in Said’s case? More precisely, what are these implications when taking into account his status as an exile, as the most representative spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the United States, and as a highly influential and well-established critic in American academia?

Several issues are at stake here, all intertwined along the axes cre-ated by such complicated and uneasy relationships as those built between autobiography and history, history and memory, exile and identity. The problematic relationship between autobiography and history, as mentioned above, may provide the first key to understanding the nature of such a debate.

Said re-creates vivid, personal pictures of his childhood experiences in places that have now disappeared, politically and culturally. Exile auto-biographers inevitably have a sense that they are witnesses to history; one cannot fail noticing the way Said, too, presents himself as a “witness” to history (the various histories he lived through and regimes he lived under in Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon), as well as his impulse to testify to his experience and show the rest of the world what happened to him and his homeland.

I believe that one way to understand the reviews discussed above in connection to Said’s memoir may be discovered within the complex frame-work built around the heated and highly controversial relationship between autobiographical writing and history. As previously discussed, Albert Stone, the autobiographical critic, considers that autobiographies can provide discreet glimpses to historical events, but as historical documents they are problematic. They must be understood as “overdetermined” expressions of the autobiographer’s autonomy, but they nevertheless bring into focus the historical, social, and cultural environment in which the author lived.36 For the historian, such writings provide important informa-tion and authentic subjective responses to historical events, but additional documentary sources are needed to verify activities and facts. Autobiog-raphies as windows to history are thus still valid but problematic. They become “individual versions of history,”37 and as channels to history they are important in a variety of contexts for both critics and historians.

In the conundrums of Palestine’s past, the relevance of autobiograph-ical writing lends itself to multiple interpretations and significations. Assembling an experiential history can function as countermemory, as a

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means to renarrativize the past and break the silences and fill in the gaps of official history. In the face of no official narrative, or erased/distorted narrative, the individual narrative and memory become the source of and representation of history.

The investment of memory with the function of preserving collective identity over time is quite common. Anthony Smith even stated: “One might almost say: no memory, no identity; no identity, no nation.”38 This relationship between personal memory, collective identity, and national identity appears to play an essential role in the way critics received Said’s memoir. Below, I discuss the French historian Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire; reading Out of Place from Nora’s point of view might prove instrumental for a better interpreting and understanding of the heated reception, outlined above, that Said’s memoir triggered.

According to Pierre Nora, “memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name.” Nora differentiates between what he calls history and “real memory.” Continually in process, “open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting vulnerable to manipulation and appropria-tion, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived,” real memory functions as “a bond tying us to the eternal present.” Memory surrounding the rememberer, memory in process, memory as a con-tinually renegotiated ground of social interaction, this “real memory” is, according to him, social and unviolated. History, on the other hand, is an artificial form of remembering, composed of “sifted and sorted histori-cal traces . . . of mediation, of distance”; it is “the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.” The means by which “our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past,” history is a representation of the past, while memory is the perpetually actual phenomenon.39

Because of the “acceleration of history,” which confronts us with the brutal realization of the difference between real memory and history, Nora introduces the concept of lieux de mémoire. Sites of memory, according to him, “originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies . . . because such activities no longer occur naturally.”40 To keep the traces of memory, we must create sites of memory — museums, festivals, anniversaries, or memoirs. We need lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory. The truth of lieux de mémoire, Nora continues, is that “without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away. . . . if history did not besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it, there would be no lieux de


The book works

as a sum of lieux

de mémoire,

because in the

Palestinian case

there are no

longer milieux

de mémoire, real

environments

of memory.

mémoire” (12). An important dimension of Nora’s sites of memory, which sheds light on understanding the angry stir Said’s book caused, is that such sites are “bastions” upon which “we buttress our identities,” but, according to Nora, “if the defeated were not threatened, there would be no need to build them” (12). Nora’s work constitutes thus a key theoretical intervention on the contemporary relationship between nation, identity, and memory. From the perspective of Palestinian history, I would say that Said’s memoir itself becomes a lieu de mémoire, a site where “memory crystallizes and secrets itself,” which functions as traces of such “envi-ronments of memory” in a society cut off from its past and even original location (7).

This very approach may account for the double edge of Said’s memoir, which made the reviews of the book become reactions to his early life: the book works as a sum of lieux de mémoire, because in the Palestinian case there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory. “If history did not besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrat-ing and petrifying it, there would be no lieux de mémoire”; such is the way in which Nora further explains his term, and this sounds truer than ever in the Palestinian case. The very existence of Palestine and consequently its memory have constantly been under the siege of recent history — history as a means of organizing and reconstructing the past, itself a very problematic and incomplete one. “Indeed, it is this very push and pull that produces lieux de mémoire — moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned” (12). Said’s representation of Palestine, his family background, and his early life revealed in the memoir fit perfectly with Nora’s definition of sites of memory. The episodes that Said depicts and the places and people that he describes are all moments of history turned away from the movement of history and then returned, through personal recollection, to the pages of his memoir, thus becoming a Palestinian “site of memory” so much feared and criticized by his opponents.

Just as Nora provides a catalog of “places of memory,” which, he argues, now form the basis of French social memory, Said’s memoir viewed as a lieu de mémoire enables the same shift about Palestinian social memory and consequently Palestinian identity. Out of Place can be interpreted as achieving the connection (a highly problematic and problematized one, in Said’s case) between individual and national identity via personal memory and recollection. By this move Palestinian identity can form itself through “places of memory” rather than through a concept of national identity understood in relation to the history of a “politically determined group of citizens” that, in Said’s view, was no longer possible, given the specific context.

Said’s homeland, forever lost, survives only in traces and memories.

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What Said the autobiographer, a Janus-faced exiled and translated person, offers us in this book are traces of a living past that at the same time mark its destruction.41 The people, places, and moments that he gives voice to are perfect illustrations of Nora’s lieux de mémoire, “no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.”42 Just like Nora’s lieux de mémoire, Out of Place is “a mixed hybrid . . . bound intimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Mobius strip of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable and the mobile.”43

Said’s book is an act of witnessing and a site of memory because it evokes and tries to re-create the life that existed; it itself turns into a site where subsequent generations can find a lost origin, where they can learn about the time and place that they will never see. Out of Place thus also belongs to the tradition of memory books born from the impulse to write a testament for future generations. “Another purpose in doing it was that I wanted my children to have something to look at,” acknowledges Said in an interview with Scott Sherman.44 Said’s book constitutes an unprec-edented, truly popular labor to record in writing as much as possible about a destroyed world. Out of Place becomes an agent of memory, as Said is someone who gives narrative shape to the surviving fragments of an irretrievable past. Seen in this context, the photographs (the stationery of his father, group photos with family and friends) are both icons and indexical traces: as traces they record both life and death, preserve and create memory, and build a site of commemoration and rememoration.45

Interpreted as a “site of memory,” the book commemorates and monumen-talizes these Palestinian traces to perpetuate a lost tradition and maintain a collective identity.

A mixture, as already noted, of life and death and of the temporal and the eternal, a major purpose of lieux de mémoire, as well as of Said’s book, is “to stop time, to inhibit forgetting, to fix a state of things, to immortalize death, and to materialize the immaterial”;46 however, it is also clear that the sites of memory “thrive only because of their capacity for change, their ability to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforeseeable connections.”47 This capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications, is another key feature of lieux de mémoire that applies to Said’s book, as I show in the next section.

The relations between memory and history, as already pointed out in Nora’s approach, are exceptionally vexed especially in their implications for aesthetic, ethical, and political issues. The problem of memory as such has become a constant preoccupation of historians and critical theorists


alike. What aspects of the past should be remembered and how should they be remembered? A significant part of Said’s book is an act of indi-vidual remembering and evocation of collective memory and collective experience. The use of memory, remembering, and evocation can and should be subject to examination: “Whenever remembering is evoked we should be asking ourselves: by whom, where and in which context, against what?”48 By writing his memoir and turning to his early years in the Palestinian Jerusalem, Said created a Palestinian site of memory and continued his effort dedicated to a Palestinian narrative on a more personal tone. His story can be shared and remembered and forms a national memory and tradition. Accordingly, his authority to spin such a story and its very authenticity were challenged for many reasons, such as his class status, his family’s special situation, his early departure to the United States, and so on.

Criticism of his autobiography becomes political in just this way. Because of its generic claims to truth, the genre of autobiography offered Said the opportunity to promote himself as a representative subject, that is, as subject who stands for others; but it also threatened him with unsympa-thetic scrutiny. As Said knows well, public and private life are interwoven in such a way that both legitimation and discrediting are always possible. Within the volatility generated by representativeness, the private becomes ambivalent as it transforms into public discourse.

Concerned with remembering and the interpenetration of the private and the public, Sidonie Smith notes: “The I as an enunciatory site is a point of convergence of autobiographical politics and the politics of memory.”49 Of these, memory is crucial because, like experience, it is both what one possesses by virtue of living and what can be constituted as evidence only by submitting it to various tests and protocols of presentation. As evidence, memory is only as authoritative as the person who is remembering, and only to a degree permitted in particular contexts. There is, then, a poli-tics of memory in the sense that a politics of persons and their actions is operating, as Michel Foucault theorized, in a field of power.

Said embarked on putting together his memoir after having written a great deal and after his authority and voice in the American academia and American public sphere at large had long been institutionalized and respected, as the impressive number of volumes dedicated to him and celebrating his work, along with interviews and talk shows, clearly show. In this particular framework, the Palestine of the title of his book The Question of Palestine, even then indirectly set under question, is now fully a “place.”

In her review of Said’s memoir, Diane Stevenson makes the connection between the book, the debate it caused, and American consumer society.

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In a consumer society, she notes, “history is being sold by personality, by the personal credibility of the witness. We are to trust the teller, not the tale. And so individual memories have become the stuff of our version of history.” Further on she writes: “His memoir has the integrity of a per-sonal story; it isn’t something to be turned into instant history. It enters into history, but through the dialectic between the part and the whole, the personal and the public, not a short circuit from one to the other. It’s the private story of a public intellectual.”50

Said’s memoir has taken us along the complex and problematic con-nections between autobiography and history, personal memory, national identity, exile and literary criticism. Writing his memoir, he writes his identity, rewrites his earlier work, creates a Palestinian site of memory, and finally turns Palestine from a trope into a full-fledged topos.

As we could notice, for Said his autobiography had a thoroughly exis-tential and profoundly human dimension. It had an existential dimension for him as an individual in a moment of personal crisis, as well as for him as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause, a cause in crisis. His memoir works two ways, just like a Derridean pharmakon. Given the reactions of the press, it certainly works as poison; given that he fulfills his mission to narrate, it does function as remedy, healing. Healing at the individual level, the writing of the memoir gave him “something to look forward to . . . a purpose”: it was a reverse of his illness, “whereas with other sorts of work that I did — essays, lectures, teaching, journalism — I was going across the illness. . . . with this memoir I was borne along” (216). Also, healing worked in the sense of commemorating and being able to leave an account of those remote times and places, facing loss and forgetting.

In this essay I have attempted to stake out a terrain that calls for stak-ing, yet paradoxically refuses it and in general evades any definite boundar-ies or frames. Said’s autobiography goes beyond the old model of literary genre with more or less clear boundaries and contours, stubbornly resisting any possible fixity; in his case, autobiography avoids the two directions in which it was analyzed in previous periods, namely, history and fiction/nonfiction, inhabiting, I hold, a third space of continuous becoming, the space of the Deleuzian “AND.” Said’s memoir becomes a minefieldlike mobile territory of constant clashes and negotiations, as I have attempted to demonstrate with the analysis of the reviews of the book.

Out of Place is composed of difference, multiplicity, and contingency; as such, it can be a dangerous, uncomfortable location for both reader and writer, as all his reviews clearly show. It marks points of crisis, spaces where conflicting values, ideas, and beliefs converge only to diverge anew along lines that construct even wider splits and conflicts. As a Palestinian


lieu de mémoire, his book surprises us by its capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of its ramifications. Seen as such, Said’s memoir opens up in-between spaces where new forms of art, experience, and political action emerge.

Notes

For practical reasons, in this essay terms such as autobiography, memoir, self-narrative, and life writing will be used interchangeably.

1. The fall issue of Biography, a journal dedicated to life writing, contains an annual annotated bibliography; for the last four years, the bibliographies have been almost ninety pages long and contained around eight hundred entries, covering single-author books, edited issues and volumes, articles in scholarly journals, and dissertations. The editor, Craig Howes, notes in the 2004 issue that “we expect the numbers of publications, and the numbers of authors who see life writing as one of their specialty areas only to increase” (Biography 27, no. 4 [2004]: v). For differing perspectives on this genre, see Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Thomas Couser, Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Paul de Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” MLN 94 (1979): 919 – 30; James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Paul John Eakin, Fic-tions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self Invention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Albert Stone, Autobiographi-cal Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of American Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

2. James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” in Olney, Auto-biography, 20 – 21.

3. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 129 – 37.4. Ibid., 143 – 47.5. David Parker, “Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Auto/biography in the

(Anti-)Global Age,” Biography 28, no. 1 (2005): v.6. Françoise Lionnet, “Of Mangoes and Maroons,” in De/Colonizing the Sub-

ject, The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 322.

7. Eakin, Touching the World, 142.8. Albert Stone, “Modern American Autobiography: Text and Transactions,”

in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 100.

9. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts, 19.10. Parker, “Inhabiting Multiple Worlds,” vi.11. Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography, 5 – 6.12. Ibid., 6.

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13. Salman Rushdie, “On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said,” in Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Penguin, 1991), 178.

14. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 24.15. Said talks about this in several articles and interviews, including “Inven-

tion, Memory, and Place,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 175 – 93; “Permis-sion to Narrate,” London Review of Books, 16 February 1984, 13 – 17; and “On a Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said,” in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 166 – 87.

16. Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” 184.17. Rushdie, “On Palestinian Identity,” 179.18. Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage Books, 1999),

xi, xii. Hereafter cited in the text.19. Jacqueline Rose, “Edward Said Talks to Jacqueline Rose,” in Edward Said

and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Paul A. Bové (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 15.

20. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

21. Edward Said, “Between Worlds,” London Review of Books, 7 May 1998, reprinted in Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 568.

22. Janny Scott, “A Palestinian Literary Critic Confronts Time,” New York Times, 19 September 1998.

23. Justus Reid Weiner, “ ‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” Commentary, September 1999, 23 – 31; Weiner, “Justus Reid Weiner Writes,” Commentary, January 2000, 9 – 16; Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Israel v Palestine: Which Side Is the Left On?” New Statesman, 18 October 1999, 32 – 33; Timothy Mo, “Alpha or Gamma for Behaviour,” Spectator, 18 – 25 December 1999, 66 – 68; Meron Benvenisti, “Blank Spaces: Talbiyah and Rehavia,” SAIS Review 20 (2000): 215 – 20; Amos Elon, “Exile’s Return,” New York Review of Books, 18 November 1999, 12 – 15; Scott Sherman, “Edward Said: A Contested History,” Publishers Weekly, 6 September 1999, 74 – 75; David Pryce-Jones, “Corruption of the Best,” National Review, 9 August 1999, 45 – 46; Christopher Hitchens, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” Nation, 4 October 1999, 9; Edward Grossman, “Speaking for Himself,” American Spectator, December 1999 – January 2000, 38 – 43; Ian Buruma, “Misplaced Person,” New York Times, 3 October 1999. Articles such as Mustapha Marrouchi, “Exile Runes,” College Literature (2001): 88 – 127; William V. Spanos, “Edward Said’s Mount Hermon and Mine: A Forwarding Remembrance,” bound-ary 2 28 (2001): 157 – 89; Andrew N. Rubin, “Techniques of Trouble: Edward Said and the Dialectics of Cultural Philology,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (2003): 861 – 76; or Amahl Bishara, “House and Homeland: Examining Senti-ments about and Claims to Jerusalem and Its Houses,” Social Text, no. 75 (2003): 141 – 62, are not subject to my inquiry: they were published a few years after the publication of Said’s memoir and are not properly reviews but rather complex and nuanced approaches to Said’s memoir.

24. Wheatcroft, “Israel v Palestine.”25. Weiner, “My Beautiful Old House,” 23 – 31.26. Edward Said, “Defamation, Zionist-Style,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 26

August – 1 September 1999, weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/444/op2.htm.


27. CounterPunch, 1 September 1999, “Commentary ‘Scholar’ Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on Said,” www.counterpunch.org/said1/html. See also www.salon.com/books/log/1999/08/26/said and Julien Borger, “Friends Rally to Repulse Attack on Edward Said,” Guardian, 23 August 1999, www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/o,2763,203150,00.html.

28. Wheatcroft, “Israel v. Palestine,” 32 – 33.29. Mo, “Alpha or Gamma for Behaviour,” 66 – 68.30. Benvenisti, “Blank Spaces,” 215.31. Alon Confino, “Remembering Talbiyah: On Edward Said’s Out Of Place,”

Israel Studies 5 (2000): 194 – 95.32. Frank Chin, “The Most Popular Book in China,” Quilt 4 (1984): 6 – 12;

Chin, “This Is Not an Autobiography,” Genre 18, no. 2 (1985): 109 – 30; Ben-jamin Tong, “Critic of Admirer Sees Dumb Racist,” San Francisco Journal, 11 May 1977, 6; Kathryn Fong, “To Maxine Hong Kingston: A Letter,” Bulletin for Concerned Asian Scholars 9, no. 4 (1977): 67 – 69.

33. Said emphasizes the truth-value of his memoir even in later articles and interviews such as “Edward Said Confronts His Future, His Past, and His Critics’ Accusations,” Atlantic Monthly, 22 September 1999, www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba990922.htm; or Said, “The Hazards of Publishing a Memoir,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 2 – 8 December 1999, weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/458/op2.htm.

34. Said, “Defamation, Zionist-Style.”35. Said’s work has often been attacked and criticized; Aijaz Ahmad and

many others top the list of his most virulent critics.36. Stone, “Modern American Autobiography,” 95 – 119.37. Ibid., 97.38. Anthony D. Smith, “Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest

Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 2 (1996): 383. See also Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 83 – 86.

39. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 8.

40. Ibid., 12.41. Susan Suleiman’s analysis of Holocaust memoirs, “Monuments in a For-

eign Tongue: On Reading Holocaust Memoirs by Immigrants,” discusses the dialectic of rememoration and commemoration. See Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 397 – 418.

42. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12.43. Ibid., 19.44. Sherman, “Edward Said,” 74.45. I am indebted to Hirsch’s extremely interesting essay on photography’s

capacity to invoke absence as well as presence. See Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” devoted to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, in Suleiman, Exile and Creativity, 418 – 47.

46. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 19.47. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts

and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 8.

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48. Peter Burke, “History as Social Memory,” in Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 100.

49. Sidonie Smith, “Memory, Narrative, and the Discourses of Identity in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven,” in Postcolonialism and Autobiography, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1998), 41.

50. Diane Stevenson, “Memory and History,” Yale Review 88 (2000): 145.

out of place and the politics of autobiography

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