A scris cartea in 1994, in timpul tratamentului pentru leucemie.

Everyone lives life in a given language?

Where did a person gain identity, formed consciousness of itself and others?

All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. P3 Though, the author was constantly feeling out of place. It took him 50 years to feel less uncomfortable with it.

He traced the primal instability back to his mother, who spoke both Arabic and English to him, although always wrote in English.

Because his father insisted, and never giving up all the time, Edward had no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement  p 12

Between my mother empowering, sunlike smile and her cold scowl, or her sustained frowning dismissiveness , I existed as a child both fortunate and hopelessly miserable, neither completely one or the other. Her strong underlying pessimism often neutralised her radiant affirmation of me. P13 

“being myself meant, not only never being quite right, but also never feeling that is, always expecting to be interrupted or corrected, to have my privacy invaded, and my unsure person sat upon, permanently out of place from the age of nine” could Edwards position be anything but out of place? p 19

Edward was constantly told that he is very clever, but he has no character. He’s lazy and naughty. P 27

Aunt Melia advised him to say “I assure you” instead of “I promise you”. P41

I would start to worry about whether I could give myself permission to be secure, and pretty soon I had lost confidence again, and old insecurities and anxieties set in. P45

Reading Hamlet, with his mother, was the affirmation of his tattoos. In her eyes, he didn’t felt devaluated anymore, was one of the great moments in his childhood. P 52

Said was trying to tease his mother into giving him approval and support, but she was moody.

Reading about the inferno of Saids childhood made me portray my parents as rather playful and free compared to his mother obsession with tasks and his fathers obsession with perfection.

Edward’s father had oral and physical strength and an overpowering confidence, which dominated the first part of his life. P 55 he could never match the manliness his father represented.

He had four sisters, and his mother said once at all her children are a great disappointment to her. P57 also she imposed a physical distance between him and his sisters at an early age. Edward felt displaced from his body. The mother provided no common emotional space, just bilateral relationships.

His father repressed and shamed him in childhood, but when he was an adult, he got encouragement support towards his desired freedom. But the physical punishment and physical reforms, which were administrated by the father, instilled a deep, generalised fear, and he spent most of his life trying to overcome it. P 66

Politeness and verbal savoir-faire are important qualities in most Arab societies p 68

Edward felt he was reproached for lack of concentration, seriousness, sense of purpose, and strength of character. But “I never learned anything from this injunctions, having thought myself to resistant by reducing them in my mind, pure sound”

At age eleven or twelve Edward was given his first watch, a tissot. P 104

He felt perfect, on changing intervals of unfulfilled time, forever, and ever. P 107

The events of 1948 – founding of Israel Jerusalem brought Edward and many other inhabitants into a state of imposed broken trajectory. P113

A certain informality kept the extended families relationships as they had always been. P 114

The subject of Palestine was the catastrophic collapse of a society and the country’s disappearance. P 116

Between his mother and his aunt, his fathers sister, was a pact that allowed, cooperation, hospitality, sharing, but not closeness. P 119

At 12 when they moved to America, he was reminded in his alien, insecure, and highly provisional identity. P 135

His father was operated for kidneys and he felt disoriented, filled with apprehension and vicarious pain, gripped by the potential of future, despair and loneliness. P138

Edward also felt he had a marginal role being reduced to silent, observation during his father recuperation. He found himself daydreaming, and being distracted, with a little that was interesting, or profitable to do. P 139

Had strong family ties with aunts and cousins still wearing a ring from an aunt, while he was writing this book in 1994. P 146

The ritualised formality of the visits Edwards mother received. P 157

“I was riven with all sorts of anxiety about failure, was insecure in my suddenly too-masculine body, sexually repressed, and above all, in steady fear of exposure and failure”. P 186

Edward was exposed at victorias College starting 14 years, to various personalities modes of speech, backgrounds, religions and nationalities

After Edward was diagnosed with leukaemia, he found himself in the middle of a letter who was writing to his mother, who had been dead for a year and a half. He had an urge to communicate with her, which overcame the factual reality of her death, which left him slightly disoriented, even embarrassed. P 215

“I’d rather be somewhere else, defined as closer to her, authorised by her, enveloped in her special, maternal love, infinitely forgiving, sacrificing, giving, because being here was not being, where I wanted to be here, being defined as a place of exile removal unwilling dislocation”. P 218

“The memory of my mother‘s tenderness during those last week in Cairo remains exceptionally strong, and was a source of solace during my first years in the United States” p220

Edwards mum was struggling in a limiting domestic household to find a means of self expression, self articulation self elaboration. He, as a beloved son, shared her facility of communication, her passion for music and words, so Edward became her instrument for self expression and celebration, as she struggles against his fathers, unbending, mostly silent, Iron Will. p222

The extraordinary homogenising power of American life, in which the same TV, clothes, ideological uniformity, in films, newspapers, comics, seems to limit the complex intercourse of daily life to an reflective minimum in which memory has no role. P 233

Although Edward became a brilliant student, and had many distinctions, and was prepared for corporate life, or whatever he wanted, he felt something was missing. He was to discover that was called “the right attitude”. P247

He felt he remained an outsider, no matter what he did

Eva was 27 and Edward was 20. They developed a slow romance. “ the embrace released all my suppressed emotion. We declared our love, and in the matter of sudden illuminated narrators, retold the story to each other of our years of distance, and unspoken longings. P 252

“my mothers maddening, insistence that because she loved me, she alone knew what I was, what I had been, and what would always remain, infuriated me” p 255

Princeton, in the 50s was entirely male, cars were forbidden, but particularly women girls. There wasn’t a single black, but a handful of Arabs, with whom Edward occasionally spends time with P 274

Later, the presence of women and minorities transformed Princeton from the provincial small-minded college into a genuine University. P 276

Edward had an intense feeling of driveness at Princeton, a lot of his unfulfilled emotional energy went into intensity. He described himself as an Arab, musician, young intellectual, solitary eccentric, dutiful, student and political, misfit P 281

About Eva: it is difficult to describe the tremendous power of her attraction, the romance of her body, which was for a time just beyond sexual reach, the overwhelming pleasure of intimacy with her, the utter unpredictability of her, wanting and rejecting me the irreducible joy of seeing her after an absence. P 282

citită in mai 2023