Volume 31 no. 2

Sitting on the thatched terrace of a house made of mud brick, watching children chase birds out of the ripening wheat fields while their mothers harvest clover for sheep and water buffalo, listening to a distant clang announcing the seller of bottled gas, and enjoying the winter sunshine through the eucalyptus, I can hardly conjure the world you inhabited. Even though you spent your boyhood in Egypt, it was north, in a different part of this country. There, your school was so exclusive that being an Oriental in it carried a stigma. There, your apartment was furnished with antiques and dusted by servants. Here, children march off to school in crumpled beige uniforms and recite from dog-eared textbooks.

When I ask people here if they have heard of you - people who know a lot about growing wheat, Indian irrigation pumps, medical problems, and the sorry state of the Egyptian economy - they struggle with the name. Edward Said? Nothing comes up, though they know every television actor who will appear in the serial film being filmed now in the nearby pharaonic ruin and every political personage who pontificates on the news. And they know Palestine. Some know it directly, like the ninety-some-year-old I met the other day who was taken to Gaza to cook for the British during the Second World War. Most know it indirectly, like all the women who report to me each day how many people were killed by the Israelis in Palestine. They shake their heads, "God protect them. God give them strength."

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Edward Said, 1986. Photos: Michelle Barett.

Our friends here also know my father. Some remember his visit seven years ago. Others remember that when I was last here on a research trip, I was anxious about him. I traveled to Ramallah to see him when he came out of the hospital. I still see in various homes the posters of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that I brought as gifts, pinned up besides posters of Mecca, favorite Egyptian soccer teams, Arab pop stars, and cartoon bears. There is a gentle hesitation whenever I mention my father. A respect for the loss. It is this connection to my father and to Palestine that allows me to think about you here.