Najla Said

I bought this book after I heard Najla Said speak at the Boston Book Festival. I admired her courage as a very anxious person to stand up for an, in the USA, unpopular cause. Despite the fact that her father was a leader in the Palestinian movement, Najla Said manages to write a very personal account to how a youth of Christian Lebanese and Palestinian descent feels in American society. Said's confusion and suffering was compounded by her mental health issues: anorexia and anxiety. This makes her story more realistic. It makes very clear what being a misunderstood minority can do to a human being. We should never loose sight of this, when we voice strong political opinions.

I saw some reviews, where Said's well to do background was attacked, and where she was called a "whiner". I do not agree. Anybody living in the shadow of a famous relative is forced to assert their own identity more that those who do not have famous relative. The outside world tends to think that they have the exact same opinions and talents as your famous relatives, which is a narrow minded way of viewing a person. Najla Said wisely stays away from the scientific/ political approach her father took. Even though she talks about her father a lot in her book, she never attempts to promote his work. She is her own person.

I would love to see Najla Said's play "Palestine"… (mehr)

An intimate, endearing, and ultimately disappointing memoir. This is the story of a privileged girl who felt excluded for not feeling white enough and jewish enough. Her catharsis is not based on renouncing or moving beyond privilege, or whiteness or jewishness, but by finding her own way to assert her right to these things. This book is a declaration - not of belonging to Palestine or to humanity, but of belonging to the Upper West Side.

Her father found his identity by embracing the exilic and the humanistic, and located himself "geographically" within the abstract hope of "the university." Najla, on the other hand, sought and found her identity as an Arab Jew in Manhattan. In response to feelings of being lost and being "othered," she grounds herself among *specific* others, successful others - not among otherness in general and not, as in her father's tradition, moving through and beyond it entirely. Instead of embracing a process or a positionality, she takes a firm position. She does so with this book. It works her way out of her father's shadow by staking a claim to fame - as proxy for success. This is sad. Sadder still, is that she does so on the tautological basis of being famous itself- by exploiting her father's shadow.

Yet there is hope. The author is only midway through her life. A final version of her memoirs might still have a different ending.… (mehr)