サイードが娘のナジュラさんに遺した言葉
‘Continue the struggle, continue...get over your petty personal differences with your colleagues and
write and perform and continue unceasingly. It’s in your hands.’
残された者の責任を考えてしまいます、あれから一年が過ぎ、世界はますますひどい事になって・・・

自伝を出版する危険、とでも訳せばいいのでしょうか？
アーカイブには残されていない文章だと思われるので載せておきます。

Out of time

The Hazards Of Publishing A Memoir

This piece was originally written in 1999, and published in Al Ahram , soon after the author's memoirs Out of Place were published that, he says, he had fully expected to appear only after his death.

EDWARD SAID

In the second part of Cervantes's great novel Don Quixote , which was published well after the first part had appeared in Spain, the main character is frequently surprised at how often he is recognised when he enters a house or a tavern. Having been an obscure, aged knight from dusty little La Mancha, Don Quixote cannot get over the fact that he has become a sort of celebrity just because people have read about his exploits and know something about him. Seventeenth-century Spain was not endowed with any sort of mass media, so word of mouth and reading were the main sources for diffusing printed information. Imagine Don Quixote's horror today were he to have experienced the effect of newspapers, radio and television on his private life; after having become a celebrity of sorts, he would have turned into a subject of chat-shows and gossip columns that were neither particularly sensitive to the truth nor, even more maddening, interested in consulting him about his own life. What he might have said in private, for example, would suddenly become broadcast all over for others to take issue with it, quarrel about it, get angry at him for saying it. All in all then, an unpleasant prospect.

I should like to report on what it is like to outlive my very recently published memoir, Out of Place , that I fully expected would appear only after my death. Let me explain. My early life was spent between Palestine before 1948, Cairo before the 1952 Free Officer's Revolution, and Lebanon before the civil war of 1975-90. It had always been in my mind at some point to try to set down my memories of those now lost or forgotten worlds, partly because I wanted my children to know about them, partly because I thought that life in those days was so different from today and far too little known. I speak here of everyday life among everyday people, not the lives of great leaders or prominent writers and intellectuals.

In 1989 I signed a contract for a book of memoirs with my publisher, but more or less put it aside before beginning so that I could complete work on my book Culture and Imperialism, which finally appeared in 1992. Then in mid-1990 my mother died of cancer (my father having passed away from the same disease in 1971), and about a year later I was diagnosed with leukaemia. In addition, the Madrid conference had occurred, I resigned from the Palestine National Council for health reasons, and I soon became aware that the world of my political activity between 1967 and 1991 had come to an end. A new order was emerging, leaving nearly everything in the past abandoned to memory and strewn in the dust, so to speak. Israel and the US had just won the Gulf War, among whose big losers was our very own Yasser Arafat, whose uncritical commitment to Saddam Hussein's criminal annexation of Kuwait jeopardised not only the PLO but the 350,000 Palestinians living in the Gulf who had hitherto been the main financial supporters of the ongoing Intifada.

Soon the Intifada was stopped and the secret negotiations leading to Oslo began. In the meantime I found myself slowly dragged into the obstacle course that is serious illness, first spending days and weeks undergoing tests, consulting doctors both near and far, filled with anxiety about my uncertain prognosis. By the end of 1993 my disease, which had largely been stable and did not at first require treatment, took a turn for the worse, and in the early spring of 1994 I was advised by my excellent doctor, a remarkable Indian physician with whom I have become very close friends, that I would have to start chemotherapy of a fairly strenuous sort.My doctor, Kanti Rai, is the world's leading expert on cancers of the blood and lymphatic system, but I found it an interesting irony that he practised in a Jewish hospital, I was his Palestinian patient, all the nurses that administered my chemotherapy and transfusions were Irish, and his principal assistant was a native American Indian. That improbable mixture suited my taste for the bizarre mixtures of our modern world, even though the circumstances were not of the happiest.

Chemotherapy is an unpleasant ordeal to say the least; in my case, when I began in March 1994, it was additionally apparent, and became more so as the years wore on, that none of the available chemical treatments, alone or in combination, or radiation therapy, were much help in abating the progress of my disease, which turned out to be both stubborn and nasty. During the course of protracted chemotherapy, among other things, your immune system degenerates so much that you become subject to infections at an alarming rate. In 1996 alone I had three pneumonias involving hospital stays, each of which, I later found out, came close to finishing me off. Other effects of chemotherapy are well-known and needn't be recited here. In any case I found myself slowly getting weaker, more and more anaemic, losing weight. Because each time I went there I spent half a day in the hospital for treatment, I was unable to do much in the way of ordinary reading and writing (although I don't think I ever missed my Al-Ahram Weekly deadlines). In 1996, while I was in hospital the Palestine Authority banned my books from Gaza and the West Bank. I was powerless to do anything but look on with great anger. One can't do more than read magazines and newspapers in the hospital since the nurses are constantly monitoring you, and the sheer physical impingement of other patients, plus the ghastly sights, smells and sounds you endure, make concentration impossible on anything substantial.

It was then that I determined that writing about my early years 50 and even 60 years ago would be a welcome relief, as well as a discipline to prop me up, during the unpleasantness of the present. I had no notes at all, no journals, or any records to depend on; what I did have was an uncannily clear (I am not saying I was always right) picture of people, places, incidents and episodes from the past, plus about 100 photographs and some of my father's 8mm cinema films. It never occurred to me to write anything but a personal, even intimate history of my early years, which in the process turned out to be unhappy ones for reasons I explore quite frankly in my book. I discovered that I retained a great love for Cairo and Egyptians, and that my primordial connections to Palestine were important to me in ways I didn't understand at the time. I grew up apolitically, my family being quite determined to shield us from the real world, the fall of Palestine, revolutions and wars, and so forth. Having become an expatriate in the US in 1951 (I was 15 at the time), I had to work hard many years later to redevelop my attachment to the Arab world: my education ironically enough taught me more about the West than it did about my own culture and traditions, and this I later felt had to be remedied by self-education after I had become a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in 1963.I still teach there.

Writing about that distant past, therefore, was like a defence against the depredations of the present. As I wrote more I grew weaker and weaker until in May 1998 my doctor told me that we had exhausted all the known therapies, my disease was very advanced, I had lost about 15 kilos, and the prospects were not good, unless I was willing to try an experimental and disapproved treatment which he had great faith in. I should also say that early on in my disease I discovered that I was not afraid of death, and even though I was not at all religious I felt confidence in the humanity so to speak of human life, not in the supernatural nor in the divine. Without much choice, therefore, I accepted Dr Rai's challenge and undertook the treatment, which lasted for 12 horrible weeks during which I suffered more than I had ever before. But this determined me even more to finish the memoir, which I did in September 1998 just as I was at my weakest point. I wrote the last pages at the very moment I thought I was on the verge of dying.

But I didn't, of course: the treatment was successful, I won a remission (not a cure, since the disease is still there, but in an abridged form) and my book was published in September of this year. What I hadn't at all bargained for was that close friends and relatives would read it and I would be alive to hear what they had to say, even though I made it clear that I was writing out of my memory and not at all from anyone else's. So I had to bear the disappointment and in some cases anger of people whom I care about but who felt I didn't tell the story from their standpoint. It took me a while to be able to respond, "write your own memoir. This is mine and I don't pretend to being able to cover everything or to get everything right." There were helpful corrections sent in -- I had gotten a year wrong, the name of a Jewish cinema in Jerusalem mixed up with that of an Arab one, the place where we went on a picnic was faultily described, and so forth. Misspellings were corrected, some dates were fixed in the second edition. Because of the right-wing Israeli campaign to defame me, the book acquired more, not less readers, going through three printings in about a month.

Yet what I think surprised me the most was that memoirs in the Arabic tradition tend either to be political, educational, or religious, such as Al-Ghazali's Al-Munqidh min Al-Dalal. As such they are less revelatory than private, they tell stories but protect reputations and sacred institutions like parents, teachers, schools and religion. The kind of often disturbing confessions one finds, say, in Rousseau or John Stuart Mill -- to name two of the famous memoirists in the West -- is never encountered in the Arabic tradition to my knowledge. By contrast, my memoir was extremely open about matters that are usually left unspoken or undiscussed, embarrassing situations involving sexuality, conflicts between members of the family, histories of failure, disgrace and personal vulnerability. One of my favorite books, Taha Hussein's Al-Ayyam, for example, is a wonderful instance of growing up intellectually and through education. The family is treated with reverence, if not piety, and schools are places of real education. In my case, all the schools I went to were dreadful colonial establishments, I learned very little and my own career there was little short of disgraceful. My father was a well-intentioned man, but he had bizarre ideas about what a son should be, and in Out of Place I spoke about them in considerable detail.

All in all then, the portrait of my early life was full of the kind of personal detail that most people would either wish forgotten or would never reveal. Since I thought I was writing a memoir that I would not live to read or see others read, I did not have the usual inhibitions. To me it was an opportunity to leave a legacy in a way for my children, telling the intimate story of my early life, my years in the Arab world (not excluding some excruciatingly dreadful summers spent in a dreary Lebanese mountain village, Dhour Al-Shoueir, that my father insisted we should go to beginning in 1943, and which I blame for my continued antipathy to nature), and my education in the United States. I stopped my memoir in the early 1960s, just when I got my PhD from Harvard and came to New York to teach.

I know that members of my family as well as friends were upset at my revelations, and even individuals who were not close to me took the trouble to tell me that there was no need for me to have talked about some of the more peculiar things my parents did. But the more I heard, the more complaints that came my way, the more convinced I was that the objections were stated because the things I spoke about were embarrassingly true about more people than I had once supposed. Indeed, several Arab friends told me that I had in fact seemed to be reporting on their lives as well as my own. Instead of feeling defensive I now tell my detractors or critics that if they remember things differently or that I misreport an incident, the point is that this is my memoir, which is not meant to be a universal history with sources and proofs. "Write your own memoir," I encourage them, "tell your story in your own way."

Still, it is a strange feeling to be seen for once as a person and not as a symbol of Palestine or some such thing. My book was deliberately unpolitical. It contains no message, except that of a life led in a very odd set of circumstances many years ago. Inevitably while I wrote I found that what interested me the most about my youthful miseries was first of all that I survived them and, second, that because I had to be a rebel against the unjust colonial or familial authority I seemed always to be confronting, a great part of my life was about the search for liberation, for the kind of freedom most institutions, whether familial, ecclesiastical, political, or pedagogical, try to deny the individual. I don't at all know whether I succeeded in my search, but I do know that more people than I can possibly ever personally meet know that it is a difficult, but worthwhile struggle to undertake. Honesty is always better, no matter the shameful conditions or embarrassing admissions.

Copyright: Al Ahram . First published in the issue dated Dec 2-9, 1999.

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