The Hazards Of Publishing A Memoir

In the second part of Cervantes's great novel Don Quixote, which was published well after the firstpart had appeared in Spain, the main character is frequently surprised at how often he is recognised when heenters a house or a tavern. Having been an obscure, aged knight from dusty little La Mancha, Don Quixotecannot get over the fact that he has become a sort of celebrity just because people have read about hisexploits 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'shorror 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 columnsthat were neither particularly sensitive to the truth nor, even more maddening, interested in consulting himabout his own life. What he might have said in private, for example, would suddenly become broadcast all overfor others to take issue with it, quarrel about it, get angry at him for saying it. All in all then, anunpleasant 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 betweenPalestine before 1948, Cairo before the 1952 Free Officer's Revolution, and Lebanon before the civil war of1975-90. It had always been in my mind at some point to try to set down my memories of those now lost orforgotten worlds, partly because I wanted my children to know about them, partly because I thought that lifein those days was so different from today and far too little known. I speak here of everyday life amongeveryday 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 beforebeginning 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), andabout a year later I was diagnosed with leukaemia. In addition, the Madrid conference had occurred, I resignedfrom the Palestine National Council for health reasons, and I soon became aware that the world of my politicalactivity between 1967 and 1991 had come to an end. A new order was emerging, leaving nearly everything in thepast 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'scriminal annexation of Kuwait jeopardised not only the PLO but the 350,000 Palestinians living in the Gulf whohad 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 foundmyself slowly dragged into the obstacle course that is serious illness, first spending days and weeksundergoing tests, consulting doctors both near and far, filled with anxiety about my uncertain prognosis. Bythe end of 1993 my disease, which had largely been stable and did not at first require treatment, took a turnfor the worse, and in the early spring of 1994 I was advised by my excellent doctor, a remarkable Indianphysician with whom I have become very close friends, that I would have to start chemotherapy of a fairlystrenuous sort. My doctor, Kanti Rai, is the world's leading expert on cancers of the blood and lymphaticsystem, but I found it an interesting irony that he practised in a Jewish hospital, I was his Palestinianpatient, all the nurses that administered my chemotherapy and transfusions were Irish, and his principalassistant was a native American Indian. That improbable mixture suited my taste for the bizarre mixtures ofour 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 wasadditionally apparent, and became more so as the years wore on, that none of the available chemicaltreatments, alone or in combination, or radiation therapy, were much help in abating the progress of mydisease, which turned out to be both stubborn and nasty. During the course of protracted chemotherapy, amongother things, your immune system degenerates so much that you become subject to infections at an alarmingrate. In 1996 alone I had three pneumonias involving hospital stays, each of which, I later found out, cameclose to finishing me off. Other effects of chemotherapy are well-known and needn't be recited here. In anycase I found myself slowly getting weaker, more and more anaemic, losing weight. Because each time I wentthere I spent half a day in the hospital for treatment, I was unable to do much in the way of ordinary readingand writing (although I don't think I ever missed my Al-Ahram Weekly deadlines). In 1996, while I was inhospital the Palestine Authority banned my books from Gaza and the West Bank. I was powerless to do anythingbut look on with great anger. One can't do more than read magazines and newspapers in the hospital since thenurses are constantly monitoring you, and the sheer physical impingement of other patients, plus the ghastlysights, 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 welcomerelief, as well as a discipline to prop me up, during the unpleasantness of the present. I had no notes atall, no journals, or any records to depend on; what I did have was an uncannily clear (I am not saying I wasalways right) picture of people, places, incidents and episodes from the past, plus about 100 photographs andsome of my father's 8mm cinema films. It never occurred to me to write anything but a personal, even intimatehistory of my early years, which in the process turned out to be unhappy ones for reasons I explore quitefrankly in my book. I discovered that I retained a great love for Cairo and Egyptians, and that my primordialconnections 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 andwars, and so forth. Having become an expatriate in the US in 1951 (I was 15 at the time), I had to work hardmany years later to redevelop my attachment to the Arab world: my education ironically enough taught me moreabout the West than it did about my own culture and traditions, and this I later felt had to be remedied byself-education after I had become a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in1963. I still teach there.

Writing about that distant past, therefore, was like a defence against the depredations of the present. AsI wrote more I grew weaker and weaker until in May 1998 my doctor told me that we had exhausted all the knowntherapies, my disease was very advanced, I had lost about 15 kilos, and the prospects were not good, unless Iwas willing to try an experimental and disapproved treatment which he had great faith in. I should also saythat early on in my disease I discovered that I was not afraid of death, and even though I was not at allreligious I felt confidence in the humanity so to speak of human life, not in the supernatural nor in thedivine. Without much choice, therefore, I accepted Dr Rai's challenge and undertook the treatment, whichlasted for 12 horrible weeks during which I suffered more than I had ever before. But this determined me evenmore to finish the memoir, which I did in September 1998 just as I was at my weakest point. I wrote the lastpages 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 isstill there, but in an abridged form) and my book was published in September of this year. What I hadn't atall bargained for was that close friends and relatives would read it and I would be alive to hear what theyhad 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'ttell 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." Therewere helpful corrections sent in -- I had gotten a year wrong, the name of a Jewish cinema in Jerusalem mixedup 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 Israelicampaign to defame me, the book acquired more, not less readers, going through three printings in about amonth.

Yet what I think surprised me the most was that memoirs in the Arabic tradition tend either to bepolitical, educational, or religious, such as Al-Ghazali's Al-Munqidh min Al-Dalal. As such they are lessrevelatory 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 JohnStuart Mill -- to name two of the famous memoirists in the West -- is never encountered in the Arabictradition to my knowledge. By contrast, my memoir was extremely open about matters that are usually leftunspoken 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 treatedwith reverence, if not piety, and schools are places of real education. In my case, all the schools I went towere dreadful colonial establishments, I learned very little and my own career there was little short ofdisgraceful. My father was a well-intentioned man, but he had bizarre ideas about what a son should be, and inOut 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 peoplewould either wish forgotten or would never reveal. Since I thought I was writing a memoir that I would notlive to read or see others read, I did not have the usual inhibitions. To me it was an opportunity to leave alegacy in a way for my children, telling the intimate story of my early life, my years in the Arab world (notexcluding 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 tonature), and my education in the United States. I stopped my memoir in the early 1960s, just when I got my PhDfrom 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 whowere not close to me took the trouble to tell me that there was no need for me to have talked about some ofthe more peculiar things my parents did. But the more I heard, the more complaints that came my way, the moreconvinced I was that the objections were stated because the things I spoke about were embarrassingly trueabout more people than I had once supposed. Indeed, several Arab friends told me that I had in fact seemed tobe reporting on their lives as well as my own. Instead of feeling defensive I now tell my detractors orcritics that if they remember things differently or that I misreport an incident, the point is that this is mymemoir, which is not meant to be a universal history with sources and proofs. "Write your ownmemoir," 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 somesuch thing. My book was deliberately unpolitical. It contains no message, except that of a life led in a veryodd set of circumstances many years ago. Inevitably while I wrote I found that what interested me the mostabout my youthful miseries was first of all that I survived them and, second, that because I had to be a rebelagainst the unjust colonial or familial authority I seemed always to be confronting, a great part of my lifewas 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 succeededin my search, but I do know that more people than I can possibly ever personally meet know that it is adifficult, but worthwhile struggle to undertake. Honesty is always better, no matter the shameful conditionsor embarrassing admissions.

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