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Edward Said's States

In: English and Literature

Submitted By MaKamal
Words 353
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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 "hybrid" type of writing. He does this by letting the pictures take precedence in telling his story but then describes each picture by going back and forth from a history point of view, to his own recollections of his childhood. The way he describes each picture makes you feel as if you were at one time in that picture and can feel an emotional connection to it. Through each photo, we get a really sense of what it is like to be Palestinian, to have it all taken away and how they started new.

The way Said puts the story together without any time frame, is an example of why his writing style was described as a hybrid. He will start with describing a picture by telling us facts about his country and then interrupt himself, like he's actually have a conversation with the reader and tell us a memory, or how that particular photo makes him feel. By writing like this, he makes the reader able to feel comfortable enough and be able to really relate to what Said feels and thinks. It's almost as if he chose all of the photographs first, photographs that really portray his country, and write his story from there. Most stories are written the opposite way. The story

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