Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family
Playwright Said was raised in Manhattan’s Upper West Side as the Palestinian Lebanese American Christian daughter of parents who raised her as a secular humanist. Her father was the world-famous intellectual Edward Said. Idyllic, sun-soaked, early-childhood trips to 1970s Beirut, full of family and love, only slowly betrayed a simmering turmoil therein, and Said spends most of her life understanding and recalibrating her perceptions of her ancestral homelands versus those seen through the lens trained on the Middle East by the world at large. While Najla grows up a prep-school kid in the 1980s and 1990s, she digests narrow views of the Arab character, turns them inward in painful ways, and struggles to understand the complicated patchwork of her identity. Although those with stakes in any of Said’s backgrounds will have a more pointed interest in her explorations, most readers will relate to her ultimately universal discussion of growing up other. Said’s memoir is both a dear tribute to her father’s work and proof that acceptance of one’s roots—the hurdle to success and success itself—is most always hard earned. --Annie Bostrom