Analysis of States by Edward Said

“States,” by Edward Said is an essay written by a Palestinian man with first-hand accounts of daily life in that region of the Middle-East. Said was renowned in the literary community as one of the most “distinguished literary critics and scholars...” Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said, at the age of twelve, fled with his family to Cairo during the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state. In his essay, Said begins to discuss the state of the Palestinian people. The content of his essay is an explanation and an informative look on the Palestinian people, as well their situation and their identity. In our English Composition class, we have been challenged to look past the aesthetics of “States” and look not at just

Edward Said's States is an excerpt from his book After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. It's a story about Palestine, once a country, but now spread out into a million pieces of the people that once called it home. The pieces being more of memories of a time when Palestinians could be who they are, not a scattered and forgotten people. They all face a new struggle, a struggle to find their identity. "Identity- who we are, where we come from, what we are- is difficult to maintain in exile. Most other people take their identity for granted. Not the Palestinian, who is required to show proofs of identity more or less constantly." (Page 546) Said, being Palestinian himself, tells us this story in what was called a

Any reference to conflict turns history into a reservoir of blame. In the presence of conflict, narratives differ and multiply to delegitimize the opponent and to justify one’s own action. Narratives shape social knowledge. The Israeli Palestinian conflict, both Jews and Muslims, view the importance of holding the territories through religious, ideological, and security lenses, based on belief that Palestine was given by divine providence and that the land belongs to either the Israelis or Palestinian’s ancestral home. Understanding these perspectives is required for understanding Palestinians’ and especially Israel’s strategy and role in entering the Oslo peace process. Despite

The essay States, by Edward Said, describes the trouble for Palestinians to find their identity due to the loss of their homeland. He also describes the situation of the Palestinians and the isolation that they feel through photographs that he had taken. Said has many different pictures throughout this essay and each of them play a part in supporting the main point of this essay. Said believes that, without a homeland, the Palestinians cannot have an identity and the Palestinians should not be content with being exiles forever. So the purpose of the pictures is to support and further strengthen this idea. The photographer wants the viewer to understand the struggle that the Palestinians are going through.

‘Wild Thorns’ by Sahar Khalifeh is an insightful commentary that brings to life the Palestinian struggle under the Israeli Occupation and embodies this conflict through the different perspectives brought forth by the contrasting characters. We are primarily shown this strife through the eyes of the principal character, the expatriate Usama, as well as the foil character of his cousin, Adil. Khalifeh skillfully uses literary devices such as emotive language, allusions and positive and negative connotations to highlight life under the Occupation. As the audience, these techniques help encourage us to consider the struggle more in depth, and due to the wide variety of characters, invite us to relate to them.

However, attempting to understand my identity in postmodern Palestine, I felt the disconnect between the Palestinian’s

The “Arts of the Contact Zone”, an article written by Stanford professor Mary Louise Pratt, discusses many different ideas about culture and communication by utilizing what she calls the literate arts. Pratt explains many terms that she believes are beneficial in gaining a further understanding of a literary piece. Key terms such as, contact zone, autoethnography and transculturation are introduced in her essay. She describes contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”(Pratt 487). The contact zone can be summarized as a space where two groups with different beliefs or ideas intermingle. In the essay, Pratt also describes the literate arts that come out of the contact zone. Literary arts are ways of addressing problems in the contact zone and sometimes make an attempt to resolve the issue that is happening or has happened. Two terms heavily discussed in the essay are autoethnography and transculturation. These are only two of the many literate arts that precipitate out of the contact zone. Pratt defines autoethnography as a “text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them”(Pratt 487). The culture often takes on those stereotypes in some form of literary work and presents it to the dominant culture often trying to change their views or perspectives. Autoethnography is often used as an effective method

In this novel, Anna Baltzer documents her experiences in Palestine and her personal eyewitness accounts of the Palestine-Israel conflict. She describes heartbreaking events that she witnessed, such as the kidnapping of a farmer. Baltzer also describes how Israeli soldiers consider illegal matters legal when a Jew does it since they must “protect” themselves from harmful, innocent Palestinians. Although this novel is biased, it is useful since most of it is a primary source. It includes pictures, maps, a brief history and in-depth explanations of the complicated conflict.

Throughout Edward W. Said’s essay, “States”, he discusses the past of the Palestinians and expresses the struggles that arose and still occur. Palestinian nationalism was once an independent force in the Middle East. Yet, when the Palestinian’s homeland came to an end, destruction and dispossession began. Various wars emerged leaving the Palestinians to suffer. During this time period of violence, Palestine was being destroyed. In the process, Israel began to take over. Said tries to get readers to see what people don’t see about the hardships that came with being Palestinian. He writes about the destruction of their culture, land, value, homes, and their way of living due to violence.

Said starts his essay "States" off with an attention grabber and sets the scene. He is reeling his readers in, making the reader feel sympathetic towards the lifestyle of the people outside Arab City by using words and phrases such as "meager", "surprised", "sad", and "slightly uncomfortable". He lays out the setting in a refugee camp during a disastrous time. I feel he does this in hopes of readers wanting to find out more about the Palestinian people and the lives they have led. His test is not arranged in the general arrangement of essays. Instead, Said talks about the history of the Palestinians while putting some of his own past of him and his family in. He uses pictures to help the reader grasp how times were for them, which is a feature

Edward Said (sigh-eed), author of States, was born a Palestinian in Jerusalem in 1935. He attended schools in Cairo and Massachusetts, where he learned to speak English, and he attended both Princeton and Harvard. In 1964, Said received his PhD from Harvard and he was a member of Columbia University’s English department from 1963 until his death in 2003. At the age of sixty-eight, Edward Said died of leukemia in New York. Said uses pictures in his story, States, to describe the situation.

The Palestinians had a robust social, political, and class identity within Palestine; however, after the nakbah this life was systematically dismantled and reconstituted along national, radical, and traditionalist lines, the result of which is the new Palestinian-ness to which the national movement is oriented. Of course the Palestinian people existed before the nakbah, however, their consciousness was typical of agrarian peasants, based not in a national identity, but upon kinship ties, regional networks, and limited class solidarity (Sayigh, R., 13). This identity was perpetuated through many traditions and familial conditioning, which also formed the basis of extended kinship-solidarity networks (ibid.

How can the residents of an area that has been in turmoil for the past century ever move past the unforgivable actions of the others? While Tolan does not offer a solution for the area currently known as Israel-Palestine, he is attempting to increase his audience’s understanding of the events contributing to the complex

The Israeli government has a bureaucratic process in place that oppresses Palestinians. Several different international and human rights organizations have submitted that Israel’s way of supporting the Palestinians oftentimes violates international law. Palestinians have an everyday struggle that Jews do not have to contend with, specifically due to Israel’s handling of permits, checkpoints, and zones, all of which are intended to break up Palestinian areas from each other (p. 29). As will be discussed in the following paragraphs, Israelis discriminate against Palestinians on a daily basis, grinding down their hope for peace and equal rights.

Darwish found the force of words at an early stage and composed fierce poems of resistance and love of land. Darwish's poem "Identity Card" 1964 has an exceptional hold back "write down, I am an Arab!" This reiteration frames a cry that takes shape, from one perspective, the association between the Palestinian identity and land, and then again, the Palestinian resistance against Israeli endeavors to delete the Palestinian identity in the occupied land. The Palestinian identity has dependably been at the heart of the Israel-Palestine struggle not just on the grounds that it inseparably connects Palestinians with their country but since it is additionally a method for resistance. It is a steady indication of what was detracted from the Palestinians and an image of the continuous clash with Israel for their privilege of presence.