Worlds in counterpoints: exílio e memória em Edward Said

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the dialogue between two texts written by Edward Said: the article Reflections on exile, published in 1984 in the British magazine Granta, and his memoirs, written between 1994 and 1999, which were entitled with the expression Out of place. If, in his memoirs, Said states repeatedly that the feeling of displacement accompanied him for all his life, due to having been born in Jerusalem and raised in Egypt where he received Western education; in Reflections on exile, Said points out in experience of exile the possibility of overlapping worlds, as the contrapuntal concept alludes to, in musical theory, conferring on the displaced subject, separated from his homeland, the juxtaposition of different cultural perspectives, something capable of reducing essentialisms and expanding the “originality of vision”. This article will also seek to analyze Edward Said's memories as a place of speech and, in this sense, as a narrative that, when shedding light on the colonial experiences lived by him since childhood, establishes strong links with his own intellectual work.