akwardness/alienation

As I read through this book, I felt very differently about it. I, for one, did not mind Bapsi Sidwa's writing as much as some of my classmates, an issue which angered me so much. However, when I read Edward Said's Out of Place, I said to myself this is how an autobiography should be written. There was certainly moments when he was using language that was too complex for his age. However, he made it clear that it was introspective when he referred to himself as a sixty year old man that was writing about these events.
On to the topic at hand. As the title of autobiography implies, there were several moments in this novel when he felt a disconnect from his environment. As I was reading through this novel, I felt that there were three different sources of his discontent. These would be his heritage, his family, and his educational endeavors.

At the beginning of the book, Said immediately let it be known that he had a hard time defining his own heritage. For example, he stressed the fact that he had an English first name and an Arabic last name. This left him in a bind in terms of defining himself. He found no lineage which could trace his last name towards. He also had a problem finding out which language he spoke first and which one was "his". I feel that these are very interesting critiques of his past. These are deeper seeded issues than having a conflicted identity because one was born or grew up in a nation because his parents grew up in a different environment than the former did(i.e. myself). In what I think of as a method to try and nail down his heritage, he identified Arabic as a sweet language and English as a rough language, in reference to how his mother spoke to him in those respective languages. Its interesting that he feels that there is a conflict in existence. These problems of his heritage existed with him when he went to school. When he went to Victoria College, he stated that professors there treated him badly because of his ethnical identity. This lead him to rebel, which leads me into my next section.

Edward Said was alienated in every level of education that he entered into, seemingly. For every situation that he found himself connected with his environment, there were two in which he was severely disconnected. There were two main issues with him in regards to school. One, he had issues with his concentration. This incident was highlighted when he went on a field trip and was singled out for not paying attention to the tour given to him. This incident put him in a bad light. Even more disconcerting was his reputation as a troublemaker. When he was at Victoria College, as I eluded to in the previous paragraph he responded to professors mistreating him with mischief of his own. In other words, he fought fire with fire. It all culminated in an incident which he, alone, could not be blamed for. Another professor saw him out in the hall and put two and two together. The next day, he threw him out of the classroom without any further misdeed being done by Said. It is unclear whether he had been expelled permanently since his account of that was confusing to me, but he was not allowed to go back for a while. When he was at Princeton, he said that he was out of place in terms of the school social life. He claims that the university is not the respected institution that it is today. Said was only there as a scholar and nothing else, which I guess should have suited his purposes just fine.

Lastly, the main source of his alienation seemed to be his family, namely his parents. His father seemed to be a very strict disciplinarian, who preached mental toughness, which Edward did not have. The issues which Edward had were drilled even further into his head by his dad. For example, he got criticized for a terrible soccer performance and this incident was referred to in later years by his father. His mother's issue on the other hand was vacillating between affection and discontent with Edward. For example, when he was with a girl whom he had the potential to marry, Eva, she discouraged it not by disrespecting her as would usually be done, but by disrespecting him. He saw this as possibly a way for his mom to remain close with him. This was fine except that she would often play him off as a pawn against his siblings, all of which were females.

I would like to conclude this by mentioning some of my own thoughts. I am not opposed to the possibility that this is all exaggerated. By this I don't mean that his information was not factual, but that he could have handled his problems in a different way. It seemed that he tried to look at life very pessimistically, through a half-empty glass. He knew some of the risks of his actions, most notably being a troublemaker, and carried on with them anyways. To his credit, he seemed to have identified his place in my mind even if the title of the book doesn't imply it.