THE GOOD OLD DAYS
Edward Said – growth of an intellectual
by Sayeed Ahmad
A boy was born in Jerusalem among four sisters, to a well-known Christian business family, in November 1935. His father’s name was Wadi Ibrahirn who was a great admirer of America and had a keen desire to be citizen of that country. He had joined the US Army and served during World War I. Edward Said was born when his father was 40 years old and his mother Hilda was 20. His early education was in Jerusalem and Egypt, but his father sent him to America’s Mount Hermon College before he completed high school. There he took time to adjust, always remembering his happy days at Victoria College in Cairo.
Edward’s mother was the greatest influence in the first twenty-five years of his life, his closest and most intimate companion. His deep interest in music and language as well as in the aesthetics of appearance, style and form, besides his potential for grief and happiness came from his mother. One of impressionable theatrical experiences came when in 1944 his mother announced that John Gieldgud was coining to Cairo to perform Hamlet at the Opera H use. She had four or six sessions reading the play to Edward, emphasising the moral principles in the story such as ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ as a reminder how risky it was for him to be given money to use. When Edward saw the play at Opera House he was jolted out of his seat with Gielgud’s grand performance. When an Anglo-American classmate Tony Howard invited him to meet Gieldgud to his house he was dumbstruck. When Gieldgud shook his hand he felt he was being greeted by a god from Mount Olympus.
Edward Said as a young boy did not have a strong constitution. His feet arches were too high and he had to visit a paediatrician, he had stomach pains, and a nervous shudder, while he developed trachoma in his eyes for a while. In 1949, at the age of fourteen he went to see ‘Arms and The Man’ by Shaw at American University of Cairo’s Ewart Hall where he realised he was unable to see anything on the stage, till his friend Mostapha Hamdollah loaned him his glasses. He wore glasses after this for several years.
The Post-war Cairo brought major changes in the British institutions by the victorious Americans who changed the syllabus of the Cairo School for American children allowing the teaching of spoken Arabic for all children. His pretty Arabic teacher describing the adventures at a just opened amusement park in Gezira placed emphasis on the pronunciation of an airplane ride named ‘Saida’, after the newly formed Egyptian company. She repeated again and again the lurking Arab sounding quality in his name, which he had tried to scale down to the pronunciation ‘Sigheed’ to suit the western intonation. She emphatically looked him in the eye and said ‘you couldn’t have been on the best of rides if you haven’t tried Saida. Saida is the ride. Saida’s just great’. In other words she said ‘Stop pretending that you are Sigheed. You are Said as in Saida’. Edward got the point.
Edward’s serious interest in music continued throughout his years at the Cairo School for American Children (CSAC) and he attended many concerts along with his mother. He used to listen to records of all the great European Masters behind closed doors of his room. It was Beethoven who affected him the most. One of his greatest experiences in Cairo was in 1950-51 when he heard Clemans Krauss and Wilhelm Furtwangler with The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics. On the fifteenth birthday in 1950 Edward’s parents presented him with Perry Schools ‘Oxford Companion of Music’.
At the behest of his father, Edward left Cairo in 1951 for what he felt was his banishment from his home and country. The circumstances in Cairo after the British left had placed his father in a precarious business situation. His father’s health had also deteriorated and treatment in America was surely better, His mother however had not been given citizenship and she remained a ‘non-person’ for many many years. For her to get a passport she would have to reside in America which she refused to do. She was stricken with breast cancer in 1983 and operated upon in Beirut, where she had obtained a Lebanese passport in place of her Egyptian one.
She used to stay at a Condimonium which she purchased in 1987, staying on a visitor’s visa. On the running out period of one of these visas she lost consciousness in March 1990. Edward’s sister Grace had to attend deportation hearings till the case was ultimately thrown out by the irate judge who scolded the Immigration and Naturalisation lawyer for trying to deport a comatose woman in her seventies.
Edward’s entry to New York did not register any excitement when he reached in July 1948, as both his mother and he started a long journey with cancer which would end their lives in the New World.
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