Edward Said - Early Life

Early Life

Edward Wadie Saïd was born on 1 November 1935, to the businessman Wadir Saïd, and his wife, Mariam Saïd (née Cortas), in the Jerusalem city of the British Mandate of Palestine. Edward’s father, Wadir Saïd, was Palestinian man who soldiered in the U.S. Army component of the Allied Expeditionary Force, commanded by General Pershing, in the First World War (1914–18); the father’s military service granted U.S. citizenship to him and his family. Post–War, in 1919, Wadir Saïd, moved to Cairo and established a business, in partnership with a cousin. Like her husband, Edward’s mother, Mariam Saïd was an Arab Christian, born in Nazareth, a small town in Palestine. Culturally, although Mr and Mrs Saïd practiced the Jerusalemite variety of Greek Orthodox Christianity, their intellectual son, Edward Wadie, proved agnostic. Their other child, the daughter Rosemarie Saïd Zahlan (1937–2006), became an historian and a writer.

At school

Autobiographically, Edward Saïd described a boy’s life lived “between worlds” — in Cairo (Egypt) and in Jerusalem (Palestine) — until he was a young man of twelve years. In 1947, Edward Saïd attended the Anglican St. George's School, Jerusalem, about which boyhood experience he said:

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like “Saïd”, connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport, and no certain identity, at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.

The school days of Edward Saïd further included Victoria College, Alexandria (VC), where one classmate was Michel Shaloub (later the actor Omar Sharif) whom he remembered as a sadistic and physically abusive Head Boy; other classmates included King Hussein of Jordan, and Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Saudi Arabian boys whose academic careers progressed to their becoming ministers, prime ministers, and leading businessmen of and in their respective countries. In that colonial time, the VC school educated select Arab and Levantine lads to become the Anglicized ruling-class, who, in due course, were to rule their respective countries, upon British decolonization and withdrawal to the Britannia Motherland; Victoria College was the last school Saïd attended before being sent to the U.S.:

The moment one became a student at VC, one was given the student handbook, a series of regulations governing every aspect of school life — the kind of uniform we were to wear, what equipment was needed for sports, the dates of school holidays, bus schedules, and so on. But the school’s first rule, emblazoned on the opening page of the handbook, read: “English is the language of the school; students caught speaking any other language will be punished.” Yet, there were no native speakers of English among the students. Whereas the masters were all British, we were a motley crew of Arabs of various kinds, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Turks, each of whom had a native language that the school had explicitly outlawed. Yet all, or nearly all, of us spoke Arabic — many spoke Arabic and French — and so we were able to take refuge in a common language, in defiance of what we perceived as an unjust colonial stricture.

Despite his acute intelligence and academic superiority, Edward Saïd proved a troublesome student, and was expelled from Victoria College in 1951, and consequently transported from Egypt to the eastern United States, and deposited to Northfield Mount Hermon School, Massachusetts, a socially élite, college-prep boarding-school where he endured a miserable year of feeling out of place; nonetheless, he excelled academically, and achieved the rank of either first (valedectorian) or second (salutatarian) in a class of one hundred sixty students. In retrospect, Saïd said that having been sent away to a place so far from the Middle East was a parental decision much influenced by “the prospects of deracinated people, like us, being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible”. The realities of a peripatetic life — of interwoven cultures, of feeling out of place, and of being far from home — so affected the schoolboy Edward Saïd, that the adult themes of dissonance continually arose in the academic, political, and intellectual works he produced as a man. In the event, Edward Wadie Saïd matured into an intellectual, polyglot young man, fluent in the English, French, and Arabic languages, who earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University (1957), then a Master of Arts degree (1960), and then a Doctor of Philosophy degree (1964), in English Literature, from Harvard University.