Jean Said Makdisi

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

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. She married a Lebanese academic of Palestinian origin, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut, Lebanon, 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 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.

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

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