Free Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said Page B

prevented from pronouncing it as much as I wanted by Auntie Melia, who said I should vary its idiotic insincerity and monotony by saying “I assure you” instead.
    For some infraction in class when I was eight I was sent out of the room by one of the women teachers (there weren’t any males) who never used physical punishment except for a few polite taps of a ruler on our knuckles. The teacher left me outside the door, then summoned Mrs. Bullen, who with a dour expression on her face jostled me along to a staircase leading up from the main hall. “Come along now Edward. You’ve got to see Mr. Bullen upstairs!” She went up ahead of me. At the top of the stairs she stopped, placed her hand on my left shoulder, and steered me toward a closed door. “Wait here,” she said, and then entered. A moment later she was back, signaling for me to go in; she then closed the door behind me, and I was, for the first and last time in my life, in the presence of Mr. Bullen.
    I was instantly frightened of this large, red-faced, sandy-haired and silent Englishman who beckoned me toward him. Not a word passed between us as I approached him slowly where he stood near the window. I remember a blue vest and a white shirt, suede shoes, and a long flexible bamboo stick, something between a riding crop and a cane. Iwas apprehensive, but I was also aware that having reached this nadir of awfulness I must not break down or cry. He pulled me forward by the back of my neck, which he then forced down away from him so that I was half bent over. With his other hand he raised the stick and whacked me three times on the behind; there was a whistle as the stick cut the air, followed by a muffled pop as it hit me. The pain I felt was less than the anger that flushed through me with every one of Bullen’s silently administered strokes. Who was this ugly brute to beat me so humiliatingly? And why did I allow myself to be so powerless, so “weak”—the word was beginning to acquire considerable resonance in my life—as to let him assault me with such impunity?
    That five-minute experience was my sole encounter with Bullen; I knew neither his first name nor anything else about him except that he embodied my first public experience of an impersonal “discipline.” When the incident was brought to my parents’ notice by one of the teachers, my father said to me, “You see, you see how naughty you’re becoming. When will you learn?” and there was not in their tone the slightest objection to the indecency of the punishment. Father: “We pay a lot of money for you to go to the finest schools; why do you waste the opportunity so?” as if overlooking how he had in fact paid the Bullens to treat me in this way. Mother: “Edward, why do you always get yourself into trouble like that?”
    So I became delinquent, the “Edward” of punishable offenses, laziness, loitering, who was regularly expected to be caught in some specific unlicensed act and punished by being given detentions or, as I grew older, a violent slap by a teacher. GPS gave me my first experience of an organized system set up as a colonial business by the British. The atmosphere was one of unquestioning assent framed with hateful servility by teachers and students alike. The school was not interesting as a place of learning but it gave me my first extended contact with colonial authority in the sheer Englishness of its teachers and many of its students. I had no sustained contact with the English children outside the school; an invisible cordon kept them hidden in another world that was closed to me. I was perfectly aware of how their names were just
right
, and their clothes and accents and associations were totally different from my own. I cannot recall ever hearing any of them refer to “home,” but I associated the idea of it with them, and in the deepest sense “home” was something I was excluded from. Although I didn’tlike the English as teachers or moral examples, their