Abstract :
I chose to read Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place expecting to find an alternative history of Palestine from one of the most ferocious fighters for the Palestinian cause. I did not find much of Palestine, but I did read an intimate narrative of an Arab boy’s coming of age. Said’s focus on his family was a deliberate opening up of the structure of the Arab household, as he attests in the preface to the Arabic translation of the book. This gesture resonated deeply with my own feminist political position on existing family structures as oppressive units that attempt to control and undermine women’s roles in society. Said’s focus on his gendered identity in Out of Place nuanced my understanding of the hegemonic structure of the institutions of patriarchy, and I came to see that patriarchy could be equally dislocating to its male subjects as it is for women. In this paper, I will limit my analysis of Said’s attack on patriarchy by discussing his representation of his mother. Through such an examination of the character of Hilda, I attempt to delineate Said’s ambivalent relationship towards feminist politics. Such ambivalence is well documented by many feminist readers of Said, such as Gayatri Spivak (1982), Leela Gandhi (1998), and Susan Fraiman (1995), among others. This memoir marks the only serious and detailed examination of gender issues by Said in his entire oeuvre; it thus provides the reader with an opportunity to analyze in detail Said’s position vis-à-vis feminism. His representation of his mother reveals the deep paradoxes and troubled relationship that Said has primarily with her but also with feminism. In the following reading, I aim to argue that although Said inches close to an understanding of the otherness of his mother in the household, this closeness fails to translate into political alliance with her against patriarchal authority
