By Fayza Hassan Edward Said also knew another family from Egypt's Shami community well, the Dirliks, whose identity he suggests was as confused as was his own. In his memoir, Out of Place, Edward Said writes of this friendship that: "Closest to us were the Dirliks, whom we used to see in Lebanon but who now became intimates of my parents': Renée the mother, a witty, intelligent woman who was my mother's closest friend, and her husband Loris, a pharmacist by training who was an excellent rider and cook and a charming companion. Their two oldest children André roughly my age, and Claude his younger sister, we saw less of because they were in French schools and had their own circles of friends. I still recall the Dirliks with extraordinary pleasure and their visits to us as a treat, a total change from either the dour Palestinian grimness that otherwise existed around us or the silent bridge- playing pals." "Renée Dirlik, a former student of Auntie Melia's was the daughter of a Lebanese- Egyptian father and an Armenian mother; Loris was Armenian and Turkish; both were cosmopolitan--fluent in French and English, less so in Arabic--and dinners at their house or at ours, opera outings, occasional evenings at the Kursaal or Estoril restaurants, trips to Alexandria, remain among the pleasantest memories of my youth." Later, when Said came back from the United States where he was a student for the summer holidays, he met André Dirlik in Alexandria. This is how the latter, now a retired professor of military history and political science living with his wife Raja in Montreal, remembers that day, as well as other occasions on which the two young men were reunited: "One summer, Edward returned from Princeton to Cairo with his classmate, Greg Kalimanopoulos, son of the New York shipping magnate. Greg had never been to Egypt, but he knew his parents' native Greece well. To me, they both looked alike, the Anthony Perkins look, but then, closer up, Greg was more nonchalant, less rigid, very appealing to me. He had obviously been raised with a lot of money. We were in Alexandria, and Edward was leading us through his territory, very proud of showing off Egypt, and yet constantly drawing lines between himself, Greg, and the rest. Greg was hungry, and he simply walked into a grocery store, a baqqal, asked for a loaf of baladi bread, had it filled with gibna rumi (hard cheese), took a handful of green olives and a bottle of Spathis and walked out to sit on the sidewalk, watching the traffic zoom by. Very cool. He also talked about his peregrinations in Greece, 'island-hopping.' he called it." "Edward and I had been put at a disadvantage. Here was Greg, more American than either of us, and yet comfortably Greek, while both of us were still groping for some form of identity, feeding off our khawaga (foreigner) status, and reaching for that America that their movies had thrust upon us." "Later still, I visited Edward in Cambridge, Mass., in l962 where he taught Comparative Literature, and where he was certainly well on the way towards catching up with Greg the American. I never met Greg again, although I always asked about him: he was living in New York, married to a WASP, and he went about his business in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce." "But soon Edward broke out of his ' khawaga -American' straitjacket, and the next time we met it was at an AAUG (Association of Arab-American University Graduates) reunion in Washington, at which he was already mixing with Tariq Ali and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, engaging with Marxism and the question of Palestine." Nobody seemed very interested in Beginnings, his first book, but everyone was stunned by Orientalism. Where was Greg the cool Greek in all that, I wonder?"
