ABSTRACT
As he sets the scene for a description of his school years, Edward Said opens the third chapter of his memoir with a comment on the Englishness of his education: ‘Schoolteachers were supposed to be English, I thought. Students, if they were fortunate, might also be English or, as in my case, if they were not, not’ (Said 36). Here, he reflects upon the role of his English education in Cairo in making him feel, as the title has it, Out of Place. It is an axiom of postcolonial studies that education was one means by which the imperial administration sought to cement its position of power in colonies across the world, to the detriment of local peoples’ relationship to their own cultures (Mangan; Tiffin “Institution”; Viswanathan). So much so that several of the most famous postcolonial critics, like Said, have written autobiographically about that moment by way of signalling their own experience with the ‘colonisation of the mind’ (Bhabha x; Ngũgĩ 9-16). When these authors recall their education, they reveal not only the colonial past but how they feel about it in the present-and how they want their readers to think they
feel about it. Said leaves us in no doubt about the foreignness of his education and his adult scepticism towards it:
The emphasis on the foreignness of curricula and language reappears in many accounts of colonial education. And the effects that Said describes, the teacher-instilled reverence and admiration as well as the distance between the curriculum and the students’ lived experience, are also central features in the representations of such education in end of empire autobiographies from across the world (Chung; Conway; Gladwell; Horne; James; Mittelhölzer). Whether from informal colonies like Said’s Egypt, from plantation colonies like Barbados, or from settler societies like Australia, autobiographers writing after empire respond to the same global phenomenon of decolonisation, and they seize upon their memories of education as a useful vehicle for positioning themselves in relation to the colonial society that came before decolonisation. As we will see, while using different narrative strategies, autobiographers use the stories of their school years to present their child or adult selves as critics of the imperial system, here represented by their schooling.
