Jean Said Makdisi (Arabic: جين سعيد مقدسي) (born 1940) is a Palestinian writer and independent scholar, best known for her autobiographical writing.[1]

Life

Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem, British Mandate Palestine, 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.[2] She married a Lebanese academic of Palestinian origin, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut, Lebanon, in 1972,[1] where she taught English and Humanities at the Beirut University College.[3] They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Lebanon War. 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.[4]

She is the mother of the literary critic Saree Makdisi and historian Ussama Makdisi.[5]

Works

  • 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

References

  1. 1 2 Fister, Barbara (1995). "Makdisi, Jean Said". Third World Women's Literatures: A Dictionary and Guide to Materials in English. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 193. ISBN 978-0-313-28988-0.
  2. ↑ Makdisi, Jean Said 1940–, Contemporary Authors, encyclopedia.com. Accessed February 11, 2020.
  3. ↑ Jean Said Makdisi, The Knowledge Workshop, alwarsha.org.
  4. ↑ Beirut Fragments, excerpted in Jean Said Makdisi, Book Mark : Living in Beirut: ‘A Tightrope Over an Abyss of Panic’, Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1990.
  5. ↑ IMEU. "Saree Makdisi: Professor and Commentator | IMEU". imeu.org. Retrieved November 29, 2023.


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