Teta, Mother, and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women - Hardcover

Makdisi, Jean Said

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393061566 ISBN 13: 9780393061567

Publisher: W. W. Norton, 2006

Synopsis

Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem and studied in Cairo and the United States. She is the author of Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Beirut.

About this title

About the Author

A brilliant personal and cultural history spanning 125 years in the life of an Arab Christian family.

Jean Said Makdisi explores her own life and those of her mother and grandmother (Teta) as they create and sustain their families through the astonishing events of the twentieth century in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Against the backdrop of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Arab nationalism, the founding of Israel, the Suez crisis, the Arab-Israeli wars, and civil war in Beirut, Makdisi reveals the extraordinary courage of ordinary women.

With a loving eye and acute intelligence, Makdisi provides a woman's view of culture as it is actually lived: a grandmother's Bible reading at night; a mother's memories of camaraderie at school; an aunt's charitable activities on behalf of Palestinian refugees; a little girl's duty to gather her brother's tennis balls. Throughout, Makdisi leads us to question assumptions about what is "modern" and what "traditional," Eastern and Western, "repressed" and "liberated."

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this beautifully written memoir, Makdisi (author of Beirut Fragments; sister of the late Edward Said) explores the lives of three generations of Palestinian women, deftly illuminating a tumultuous century of modern Middle Eastern history, while raising important questions about the efficacy of ideology, the process of social development and the role of memory. Opening with the author's birth during WWII—"my birth occurred at a particularly unromantic time: the anxiety of the war and the events in Palestine and Egypt weighed heavily on my parents"—the volume grows ever more engaging as Makdisi moves into the distant past of her grandmother Munira Badr Musa (or Teta) and her mother, Hilda Musa Said. Makdisi moves easily between dispassionate historical report and deeply felt emotion, mining first-person accounts where available and offering extensive research to fill in the gaps. Touching on one calamitous event after the other, from the devastating post-WWI famine in the Levant through the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and up to the Lebanese civil war—and explaining how the lives of women shaped and were shaped by each—Makdisi demonstrates how discussions of tradition and modernity generally miss the mark. "The word tradition is used," she says, "much more than it is explained," and women's specific histories, as they were actually lived generation by generation, are rarely taken into account. Valuable in its insights, sophisticated in its execution, this book deserves to be widely read. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0393061566
• ISBN 13: 9780393061567
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384