Out of Place was published by Knopf in 1999, four years before Said’s death from leukemia in 2003. The memoir was written during his illness, and it carries the urgency of a man recording a world that is disappearing — not just his own life but the entire culture of the Arab Christian bourgeoisie in which he was raised, a culture that the catastrophes of 1948 and the subsequent decades of conflict have largely destroyed.
Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 to a Palestinian Christian family. His father, Wadie Said, was a successful businessman who held American citizenship (he had served in the US Army in World War I) and divided his time between Jerusalem, Cairo, and the Lebanese mountains. The young Edward grew up in a polyglot, cosmopolitan world — Arabic at home, English at school, French in social situations — that was comfortable, privileged, and profoundly unstable. The establishment of Israel in 1948 destroyed the Palestinian world his family had inhabited, and the family relocated permanently to Cairo, where Edward attended British and American schools before being sent to the United States for boarding school at fifteen.
The memoir’s title captures the central experience: Said felt out of place everywhere. In Palestine, he was the son of an American citizen. In Cairo, he was a Palestinian. In England and America, he was an Arab. At his boarding school in Massachusetts (Mount Hermon), he was the exotic foreigner. At Princeton and Harvard, where he was educated, he was the colonial subject in the metropolis. This permanent displacement, Said argues, was not merely biographical misfortune but the defining condition of the twentieth century, shared by millions of exiles, refugees, and migrants who live between cultures without belonging to any.
The writing is beautiful — more personal and less theoretical than Said’s academic work, with the sensory richness of a Proustian memoir. The Cairo chapters are particularly vivid: the Garden City apartment, the Anglo-Egyptian cinema, the Gezira Sporting Club, the piano lessons and Arabic tutors, the elaborate family dynamics of a household dominated by a powerful mother whose love was expressed through criticism and control.
Collecting Out of Place
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Signed copies: $100–$300
- Later editions: $5–$15