Edward Said "States"

A Picture Worth a Thousand Words Edward Said, a literary scholar and critic created the book After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986) along with the assistance of photographs from Jean Mohr. From this book we look at the piece “States” where Said talks about the exile of himself and the whole Palestinian nation in 1948. Said’s main goal and purpose of this essay was to provide a solid argument for the innocence of the Palestinians and he also wants to show the world how hard it was and still is to be a Palestinian. Said wants to go beyond the negative stereotype made by the media and show their side of the story. He writes about how the event of being exiled has affected his life growing up, the history of it, and the hardships Palestinians are forced to constantly go through and also with the use of powerful photographs to help the reader get a better perspective of the message he trying to say. Like John Wideman, Edward Said also had his own unconventional writing tactics. Said was called a hybrid writer. In the essay “States” he never stuck to just one genre while writing, he used both literary and visual images to capture the reader’s attention. Said shifts through genres like an essayist, pictures, memoir, history, and argument. When it comes to the images Said places them in places that make he’s his writing all more meaningful. From the very first page in “States” we see can see the hybrid writing. At the bottom of the page is a picture of a Palestinian wedding party taken just outside of a refugee camp. The caption at the bottom of the photo reads “Tripoli, Badawi camp, May 1983” in the paragraph above Said uses both documentary and essayist writing genres to talk about the picture. He gives the reader a little background knowledge of what’s happening in the photo and where it was taken, but then Said points out the Mercedes on the left side of the picture you see his essayist writing style. The Mercedes was a rare luxury in Western countries

Cited: Said, Edward, “States.” Ways of Reading.9th ed. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 541-575. Print.