Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Jean Said Makdisi born 1940 is a Palestinian writer and independent scholar, best known for her autobiographical writing.
Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family. The younger sister of Rosemarie Said Zahlan and Edward Said, she was raised in Egypt and educated in the United States and England. She married a Lebanese academic, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut in 1972, where she taught English and Humanities at the Beirut University College. They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Israeli invasion. Makdisi documented the city's decline in her first book, Beirut Fragments: a war memoir (1989):
Today, the Beiruti's eye is constantly confronted by buildings in various stages of collapse; broken glass and torn awnings; dangling and broken electric signs: that once glittered in advertising gaudiness; shabby, dirty, overcrowded streets; blocks full of refugees, their children playing in the piles of rubbish scattered here and there, monuments to the war; telephone and electric lines hanging loosely from bent poles; stray dogs and cats, diseased and slow, sniffing at the garbage on empty corners.
In Teta, mother, and me (2005) Makdisi brought alive a century of Arab life though the story of three generations of Arab women: herself, her mother, Hilda Musa Said, and her grandmother, Munira Badr Musa.
Source
Achievements and Awards
Beirut fragments: a war memoir. New York: Persea Books, 1989
Teta, mother, and me: an Arab woman's memoir. London : Saqi, 2005
(ed. with Martin Asser) My life in the PLO: the inside story of the Palestinian struggle by Shafiq al-Hout. Translated by Hader al-Hout and Laila Othman. London: Pluto Press, 2010
(ed. with Noha Bayoumi and Rafif Rida Sidawi) Arab feminisms: gender and equality in the Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013
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