Said explores identity

Najla Said presented “Palestine,” her one-woman show, to an intimate audience April 11 at the Chateau Theater. The performance was the first in a series of guest-lectures that comprise the Women’s and Gender Studies Program’s focus on Palestine, with additional support from the Arabic department, etc.

Said provides a unique perspective on the Arab-American identity; she has a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father raised in Egypt and educated in the United States, while she herself was raised in privilege in New York, a self proclaimed “Upper West Side princess” who remained staunchly apolitical and whose favorite pastimes in high school included kissing Jewish boys.

Said might be better known for her famous father, Edward Said, the Columbia professor in comparative literature who vaulted into academic stardom with the publication of his book, Orientalism, and became an advocate for Palestinian rights and peace in the Middle East. Orientalism remains a college staple; you might recognize him as the guy who talked about “the Other.

Said developed the show from a journal entry she wrote soon after her father’s death from leukemia in 2003. Along with the rest of her family, he is brought to vivid life as the quintessential academic, the professor who favored three-piece suits, drove a Volvo and smoked pipes. Said recalls solidifying her friendship with her father over discussions of Jane Eyre and shopping sprees in middle school. It becomes clear that the show is both a tribute to and a declaration of independence from her father, a man who never fully understood her love of theater and, for all his brilliance, could be said to have a one-track mind — sometimes with humorous results.

“He and I had some arguments when I was in college,” Said said in a question-and-answer session following the performance. “I did this production of Othello, and Othello was cast as this African American kid. My Dad came and was like, ‘Othello was an Arab. He was a moor!’ Everything was always, ‘Where were the Arabs?’ Dad would read Jane Austen and come out of it like, ‘the colonies!’ and I would be like, ‘Mr. Darcy?’”

Still, the figure of Said’s father is almost dwarfed in the narrative by Said’s portrayal of her mother, a successful career woman in her own right, who rekindled her father’s interest in the Middle East and stood as a pillar of strength throughout her childhood.

“It’s interesting, in my first college reading a professor said that I’d done a post-modern feminist reading of my father’s work,” Said said. “I wrote the piece initially because people were always referring to me as my father’s daughter, but instead I found my mom. Mom was one of the first women to go to the American University in Lebanon, and she really instilled an assertive quality in me. She was comfortable in the Middle East being my father’s wife, but if she was not happy about something she would speak up.”

The show finds its heart as it maps out the complex terrain that makes up Said’s Arab identity. It begins the summer after her senior year of high school, on the eve of the family’s first trip to Israel, the first time her father has gone back to his early childhood home in Jerusalem, and the first time her mother has returned to Lebanon since the war. Said is unenthusiastic and anorexic, both appalled and repelled by the poverty and humiliation she discovers in Gaza – the Palestinians are her people, but they are far removed from her New York existence.

From this beginning we are catapulted from scene to scene as Said maneuvers the fine line between her dual identity as both an Arab and an American. Caught in the early bombings that marked the start of both of Lebanon’s recent wars, Said manages to retain an effusive love for Middle Eastern culture. In rapid glimpses into her family life, we see her early confusion and reticence about her Arab background fall away, until she is able to allow it to come into the spotlight following 9/11.

With a memoir in the works and the popularity of her show, Said remains grateful just to share her story — a personal glimpse into an array of complex issues often drowned in the political.

“If I’d written this as a fictional play — people always find fault with fiction,” Said said. “No one would believe this girl in a work of fiction could come out of such a family and remain apolitical, but my incongruities are a reality. This is my story, and they listen.”