ABSTRACT
He was born in an occupied country and journeyed into exile with his parents when very young. The rest of his life was marked by displacements and abandonments of various sorts and the eventual embrace of a new land and language. French was his second language and English became his third. That his first was Arabic marks one of the few dissimilarities from Conrad’s case, a figure Edward Said felt compelled to write about from early on. But among the many similarities between the two, a major difference also appears as one reads Said’s recent memoir, Out of Place, which tells of the complex displacements of a colonial boyhood in land and language and identity. Said is aware of the constructedness of identity, especially under such real pressures as colonialism, and he reveals in his memoir the ways in which cultural and personal identity were bewilderingly thrust upon him, coming to understand that those who claimed him as “one of us” were outsiders themselves. The Mirror of the Sea could very well have told the same story as Said’s, about perceived otherness and out-of-placeness; for both, identity would be an irrevocably complicated matter, and neither could ever “go home.” However, while an end-of-the-century Edward Said can be very clear about his own crises of cultural identity-colonial encounters as an Arab in English-dominated Egypt, the only American in his English scout troop, the outsider to his Palestinian relatives, the Palestinian in Lebanon who spoke a wrongly inflected Arabic-as he is in Out of PlaceConrad, writing almost a century earlier, felt compelled to announce his allegiance to his adopted country unequivocably, and as one of us.
