Najla Said, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (Riverhead Books, New York: 2013). Hardcover: ISBN: 978-1-59448-708-8: 258 pages
I tried to wrap my teenage head around the existence of such a place (Gaza) in the world, where people are trapped like caged animals in the filthiest zoo on earth, while I somehow got to prance around in suede shoes and $150 skirts and then get on a plane and go home. - Najla Said Looking for Palestine, p. 173.
It is virtually impossible for those interested in the Middle East, Israel-Palestine and Imperial-Colonial literature not to know and have read the voluminous and controversial writings of Edward Said (1936-2003).
I have often wondered what it might be like to have grown up in the household and cultural ethos of the Said family------passion and intelligence, seeker of justice and literary mandarin, educator and activists at the highest and most demanding cultural and political levels---such was the core of Edward Said’s life and writings.
The publication of Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family, by Najla Said (Edward-Mariam Said’s daughter) is a beauty of a book to read. The journey into and through Najla’s life (and the implications of such a trail trekked for her immediate and extended family) is well told and poignantly recounted in Looking for Palestine. Najla did not, unlike her parents, spend her early years in Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine. In fact, being the daughter of a distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Najla had the privilege of attending a private school, but, as she unfolds her life story, she was pulled many different directions—an American by birth and the cream of the educational establishment, she was also pulled into the vortex of the Arab world again and again (and most of the more controversial places in the Arab ethos). There were many other tugs and pulls, strains and struggles that were not easy for a young woman to process or understand---Najla graphically tells her story in a raw, vulnerable, animated and transparent manner---the fast paced tempo of the autobiography holds the reader rapt and attentive.
The unresolved inner tensions in Najla’s life, in time, brought about an illness that many live with today: anorexia nervosa—to Najla’s honest credit, she does not flinch from revealing what this condition meant for her, her family, friends and extended family. Looking for Palestine is certainly not a Walt Disney fairy tale of the perfectly assimilated American family---probe after probe goes deep and brings forth hard messages not easy to live with or through. The many trips to Lebanon are told in a telling manner that refuses to ignore the war in Lebanon and what it was like to live through—then, of course, there were the Palestinian intifadas, 9/11 and the negative attitudes and caricatures of many Americans towards Arabs in an empire that had pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli leanings---again and again, Najla felt she had to submerge her Arab identity to be accepted by peers and friends but this was most difficult given the public prominence of her father.
The many complicated experiences that Najla had to interpret and process as an Arab-American within a family that had no intention of hiding their light under a bushel led to much insecurity and fragility for the growing Najla. There were moments of affirming her Arab heritage and moments of being ashamed of it. The fact that her brother was rather precocious did mean Najla had even more difficult feelings to face and overcome. Looking for Palestine moves at a readable, informed and accessible pace, and the looking is as much about looking for the external Palestine as resting easy with the fact Najla is, in soul, part Palestinian. The autobiography is about finding a place of rest within in a physical world that is often restless and unjust, starkly divided between the powerful and the powerless. The dilemma becomes more complicated when Najla and her family lived well in the very empire that supported Israel (that led to the oppression of the Palestinians). How was a privileged Arab in the USA (which supported Israel) to confront both the USA and Israel?
There are a couple of touching and telling scenes in Looking for Palestine that are worth many a reread. There is the scene that took place in 1992 in which the Said family returned to West Jerusalem (where Edward Said briefly lived). Edward longed to see the home that he once lived in only to discover that it had been bought and was run by a right of centre Christian Zionist organization (“The International Christian Embassy”)---Najla summed up the complicated drama in a few poignant lines: “My Father clarified in his Observer article, after researching the organization, that this rather benevolent-sounding society was, in fact, a right-wing fundamentalist Christian and militantly pro-Zionist group, run by a South African Boer, no less. As we are Palestinian Christians, the irony was not lost on us” (163). The other tale so well told by Najla is the extended period of her father’s death and the final phase of his journey---touching and tender, moving and painful were the final days of Edward Said-- Najla entered this difficult period in the best way she could at the age and stage she was in 2003(pgs. 229-242).
The death of Edward Said on September 25 2003 in Long Island Jewish Hospital (yet another irony) brought an intense period of Najla’s life to an end---the book concludes with her many trips to Lebanon to find moments of healing and joy, to look for and indeed find Palestine within. In 2010, Najla Said did a nine week performance of her solo show, Palestine, and in 2013, she gave the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at The Palestine Center—her journey did and does go ever on, ever looking.
Those who are keen to know more about the more complex (how Palestinian was he, really?) Edward Said, the private and family man, Edward Said, or, more to the point of the book, the larger Issues that Najla is a portal into, do purchase and read, Looking for Palestine---it is more than worthy of many a sit down session and meditative read---much will be brought into focus and done so in a lucid and limpid way.
Ron Dart
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