Jean Said Makdisi

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.[2] She married a Lebanese academic, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut 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 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.[4]

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.

Her son is the literary critic Saree Makdisi.

• 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