Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said

her really being more than an exquisitely maternal, protective, and reassuring person. Far from feeling that she had tampered with her obligations to her son, I felt that these readings confirmed the deepness of our connection to each other; for years I kept in my mind the higher than usual pitch of her voice, the unagitated poise of her manner, the soothing, altogether conclusively patient outline of her presence as goods to be held on to at all costs, but rarer and rarer as my delinquencies increased in number and her destructive and certainly dislocating capacities threatened me more.
    When I did see the play at the Opera House I was jolted out of my seat by Gielgud’s declaiming, “Angels and ministers of grace defendus,” and the sense it conveyed of being a miraculous confirmation of what I had read privately with Mother. The trembling resonance of his voice, the darkened, windy stage, the distantly shining figure of the ghost, all seemed to have brought to life the Fuseli drawing that I had long studied, and it raised my sensuous apprehension to a pitch I do not think I have ever again experienced at quite that intensity. But I was also disheartened by the physical incongruencies between myself and the men, whose green and crimson tights set off fully rounded, perfectly shaped legs, which seemed to mock my spindly, shapeless legs, my awkward carriage, my unskilled movements. Everything about Gielgud and the blond man who played Laertes communicated an ease and confidence of being—they were English heroes, after all—that reduced me to inferior status, curtailing my capacities for enjoying the play. A few days later, when an Anglo-American classmate called Tony Howard invited me to meet Gielgud at his house, it was all I could do to manage a feeble, silent handshake. Gielgud was in a gray suit, but said nothing; he pressed my small hand with an Olympian half-smile.
    It must have been the memory of those long-ago
Hamlet
afternoons in Cairo that made my mother, during the last two or three years of her life, enthusiastic once again about our going to the theater together. The most memorable time was when—her cancer afflictions already pronounced—she arrived in London from Beirut on her way to the United States to consult a specialist; I met her at the airport and brought her to Brown’s Hotel for the one night she had to spend there. With barely two hours to get ready and have an early supper she nevertheless said an unhesitating yes to my suggestion that we see Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Dalton as Anthony and Cleopatra at the Haymarket Theatre. An understated, unopulent production, the long play positively transfixed her in a way that surprised me; after years of Lebanese war and Israeli invasion she had become distracted, often querulous, worried about her health and what she should do with herself. All of this, however, went into abeyance as we watched and heard Shakespeare’s lines—“Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss in our brows bent”—as if spoken in the accents of wartime Cairo, back in our little cocoon, the two of us very quiet and concentrated, sharing the language and communion despite the disparity in our ages and the fact that we were nevertheless mother and son, for the very last time. Eight months later she began her final descent into the disease that killed her,her mind ravaged by metastases that before striking her completely silent for the two months before she died caused her to speak fearsomely of plots around her, then to utter what was the last lucidly intimate thing she ever said to me, “My poor little child,” pronounced with such sad resignation, a mother taking final leave of her son.
    When I was growing up I always wished that she might have been the one to watch me play football or tennis, or that she alone could have talked to my teachers, relieved of her duties as my father’s partner in the joint program for my reform and betterment. After she died, and I no