"So then you kinda wanna identify with your race in a different way because you're like, 'Why am I special? Why do I look different or seem different? And why do I get to pass?' And so all of those things compounded at once, and I think that there was also no choice, 'cause from then on, I was constantly referred to as an 'Arab-American,' which I hadn't been before.Najla Said, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (Riverhead Books, New York: 2013).
And then, you know, I remember saying to my mom, 'But now everyone is going to hate me.' And she was like, 'They're not going to hate you.' And people would say, 'You don't even look Arab you're not even Muslim.' But I was also scared of Americans wanting to kill me. "I was petrified in the way that everyone was petrified - I was scared of being killed. "So, even though I knew I was Palestinian, and I knew I was Lebanese, and I knew I went to Beirut, and I knew that the TV was saying that Beirut was this crazy place were people were killing each other, and Palestinians were terrorists, I thought that if I just avoided it, it would go away." She discusses the rival narratives she encountered about the Middle East and how solidarity saved her with Jacki Lyden, host of weekends on All Things Considered. She describes this personal struggle in her new memoir, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family. Balancing the worlds of her mother's Lebanese family, her father's Palestinian heritage and her American lifestyle led to large, unsettling questions of identity and self-worth. Edward Said, who died in 2003, was a renowned professor at Columbia University and was critical to defining Palestinian independence.Īs much as her father felt grounded, Najla Said felt disoriented.
The daughter of prominent literary critic Edward Said, she spent her childhood in one of the most influential intellectual households in America.
Looking for Palestine is her first book.Īctress Najla Said is a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian, but growing up in New York City, her identity was anything but clearly defined. Actress and writer Najla Said has a one-woman off-Broadway show called Palestine.
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