Summary of Edward W. Said's Out of Place

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 I have never known what language I spoke first, Arabic or English, or which one was really mine beyond any doubt. I have always spoken Arabic and English together, and they have always been connected in my life.

#2 My mother, who was Palestinian, spoke English fluently. She had a classical Arabic accent, but she spoke English like a Shami, which is the collective noun used by Egyptians to describe both an Arabic speaker who is not Egyptian and someone who is from Greater Syria.

#3 I could not absorb all the details of the royal family, and I could not understand why my mother was not a straight English mummy. I had two alternatives: I could adopt my father’s assertive tone and say I was an American citizen, or I could try to construct my real history and origins into order.

#4 My father, Said Wadie Ibrahim, was born in Jerusalem in 1906. He never spoke much about his childhood there, except that he was famous for dribbling a ball from one end of the field to the other, and then scoring. He eventually left Palestine to avoid conscription into the Ottoman army.