CONTEXTUALIZING THE CONCEPT OF EXILE AND THE OTHER: THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN EDWARD W. SAID'S OUT OF PLACE

Abstract

The autobiographical work, Out of Place, sheds light on the identity crisis by presenting sections from the author's life. The East and West conflict experienced by Edward W. Said is a crisis of cultural identity caused by the problem of not belonging as being ‘the other’. The fundamental differences in the perspective of the two communities on life determine the extent of this conflict. This identity crisis of being ‘the other’, which has deepened the sense of rootlessness and uncertainty in cultural memory, prompted Edward W. Said to write his autobiography. Said, in his work, successfully presented the crisis of identity and the sense of (un)belonging that he aroused because of both the effect of the displacement he experienced due to the conditions of the period and the effect of living in Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt as an Arab-Christian American citizen with a British name and living in America as an Arab since his childhood. The subject of this study is the identity crisis that Edward W. Said experienced as a result of his birth in Arab lands as a child of a Christian family and then leaving his country and immigrating to the West due to the political conditions of the period and so that of his becoming ‘the other’ in wherever he stayed. It is the main purpose of this study to determine whether Said's exile life and his identity problem as being ‘the other’ influenced the author's personality and work; if any, what kind of effect it has. The author's identity problem of being the other and his perspective against this problem will be examined by doing context analysis with direct quotations from the work. Furthermore, in this study, autobiographical work of Said, who is stuck between the “clash of civilizations” and seeking an answer to the question "who am I?”, named Out of Place (Yersiz Yurtsuz) will be analyzed by using the positivist method focusing on the concept of immigration, exile and othering. In this method, it is aimed to explore the relationship between life and work of the writer, considering that the literary work is a product created depending on the life story of the author himself.