Out of Place: A Memoir (49 page)

Now I have divined that my own inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her struggle
for
sleep. For me sleep is something to be gotten over as quickly as possible. I can only go to bed very late, but I am up literally at dawn. Like her I don’t possess the secret of
long sleep, though unlike her I have reached the point where I do not want it. For me, sleep is death, as is any diminishment in awareness. During my last treatment—a twelve-week ordeal—I was most upset by the drugs I was given to ward off fever and shaking chills, and manifestly upset by the induced somnolence, the sense of being infantilized, the helplessness that many years ago I had conceded as that of a child to my mother and, differently, to my father. I fought the medical soporifics bitterly, as if my identity depended on that resistance even to my doctor’s advice.

Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss, than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier. I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are “off” and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.

Edward W. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of seventeen books, including
Orientalism
, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award,
Culture and Imperialism, Representations of the Intellectual
, and
The Politics of Dispossession
.

Wadie Said, my father, in the American Expeditionary Force under General Pershing, France, 1917

The wedding of my parents, Wadie and Hilda, at the Baptist Church in Nazareth, December 24, 1932

My parents on their honeymoon in London, January 1933

An exterior view of the main branch of the Cairo Standard Stationery Company, established by Wadie on Malika Farida Street. Wadie is in a bow tie in the doorway, and on his right is Anna Mandel, his secretary, 1932.

Interior shot of Standard Stationery, with Wadie in a white suit, sitting at right. Standing directly behind him is Lampas, the store manager.

My mother and me, age one, in the Mena House gardens

Standing on one of the pyramids during a family outing to Giza, 1939. Front row, left to right: cousins George, Robert, me, and Albert; back row: Evelyn and Yousif

A weekend drive to the Barrages Gardens north of Cairo in the delta near the Barrages Dam, 1939, included my mother’s family, the Musas. Clockwise from bottom left: Loulou, Shukri Musa, Marwan held by Latifeh, her husband Munir, Hilda, Albert, Robert, me, and Wadie

Aunt Nabiha, with her sons Robert and Albert, Palestine, 1939

Age five, at the Maadi Sporting Club pool, 1940

With my sister Rosy in traditional Palestinian dress, Jerusalem, 1941

At seven with Rosy in Gezira Preparatory School uniforms on the Cairo apartment terrace