During his long tenure as the West's best-known and most eloquent Palestinian spokesperson, Edward Said contributed more than any other writer to the metropolitan recognition of the Palestinian national movement. Among his many books, essays, and articles on the subject of Palestine, most of them pitched to the informed general reader, two texts stand out for their reach towards a still wider audience. The first is After the Last Sky (1999a [1986]), Said's collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr, from which this chapter's epigraph is taken. After the Last Sky was written at a particularly bleak time in Palestinian history, after the armed resistance movement had been decisively defeated in Lebanon in 1982 and before the unprecedented popular resistance of the first intifada in 1987. As a consequence, perhaps, the book occupies an odd generic niche, somewhere between coffee-table activism and illustrated prose poem, with its lyrical and sometimes discomfiting blend of autobiography, ethnography, and emotive universalization of the Palestinian experience. The second text is Said's memoir, Out of Place (2000 [1999]), written in English (though quickly published in Arabic translation) between the years of 1996 and 1998, after the crushing disappointment of the Oslo accords and during a period when Said was seriously ill with leukaemia and did not publish any other major work. While more formally and stylistically conventional than After the Last Sky - it draws on the ‘great man’ and confessional modes of memoir, as well as the classical and postcolonial Bildungsroman - Out of Place (OP) also resorts to affective representation as a response to public and private crisis. The memoir occupies a unique place in Said's oeuvre as his only full-length narrative work, and it explicitly uses non-fictional biographical form, the story of the life of the young Edward, to address the same commitments to Palestinian national identity, indigeneity, and statehood that Said explored and fought for in the rest of his work on Palestine.