Edward Said States Summary

In the story States written by Edward Said there are many textual elements used to help describe the story and how it is a sad story. It is a different type of story with many different conflicts and ends up ending to perfection. More than 25 years Said states that the Palestinian issues have not gotten better. “We are at once too recently formed and too variously experienced to be a population of articulate exiles with a completely systematic vision and too voluble and trouble making to be simply a pathetic mass of refugees.” And he adds, “The whole point of this book is to engage this difficulty, to deny the habitually simple, even harmful representations of Palestinians, and to replace them with something more capable of capturing the complex …show more content…
Said uses history of the more important events to show this while also gaining credibility. Said writes about this issue of identity and it helps explain his writing technique and uses history that revolves around the 1967 war and the Arab oil boom “The 1967 war was followed by shorty after by the Arab oil boom. For the first time, Palestinian nationalism arose as an independent force in the Middle East. Never did our future seem more hopeful. In time, however, our appearance on the political scene stimulated, if it did not actually cause, a great many less healthy phenomena: fundamentalist Islam, Maronite nationalism, Jewish zealotry. The new consumer culture, the computerized economy, further exacerbated the startling disparities in the Arab world between rich and poor, old and new, privileged and disinherited”. (Said 578) This quotes uses an early part of history to help explain the 1967 war and the Arab oil boom which they thought was helping the Palestinians greatly but in the end it was actually hurting them. Said uses history to help the readers understand how the Palestinians great fall was happening and that they didn’t deserve for that to happen. When writing this Said again lead us towards identity and how these innocent people were losing their identity, no one wants to lose something like this. An identity is very important to …show more content…
Throughout the story you can find many different important quotes explaining argument by the people of the villages both male and female. Said uses these arguments to help propel the story and create somewhat of a biased towards the people of these villages. When reading this story he makes you feel the same as these people of Palestine. Their main argument that keeps coming up is how they are losing their Identity “He seems unsettled, poised for departure. Now what? Now where? All at once it is our transience and an impermanence that our visibility expresses, for we can be seen as figures forced to push on to another house, village or region. Just as we once were taken from our “habitat” to a new one, we can be moved again.”(Said 573) At the end of this quote I think it is a big hint that Said puts habitat into quotation marks, he does this to show the bigger part of the reason this quote is being used and the main point of this story in my eyes. People of Palestine were being forced to move and give up their hometown identities, just picture if this were you when someone would as where you are from you wouldn’t have an answer. Said uses this writing technique to engage the audience because as a reader we become concerned about the people when they are complaining that they are always required to be moving and we picture how terrible living their