Edward Said
nda...@aol.com
September 19, 1998
A Palestinian Literary Critic Confronts Time
By JANNY SCOTT
NEW YORK -- Several years ago, Edward W. Said began writing a memoir mostly
about his childhood in Palestine in the years before Israeli independence in
1948, before his family fled to Egypt, before he landed at Columbia
University, before he became one of the most influential literary and
cultural critics in the world.
Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Edward W. Said, professor of English and comparative literature, in his office
at Columbia. A prolific author, he is a champion of Arab causes.
Several months ago, something struck Said about his timing: The writing of
the memoir, which he is currently finishing, had coincided exactly with his
treatment for leukemia, which was diagnosed after a routine cholesterol test
in 1991 and which is likely one day to end his life.
The start of chemotherapy in 1994 had been a point of no return, an
acknowledgment that Said was entering what he calls a final phase. The start
of the memoir was the opposite, a going back, an effort to rescue from
oblivion a time and places that had all but disappeared.
So they fell into a rhythm, the writing and the illness, each in counterpoint
to the other. For the first six months of last year, Said was too sick to
teach. He had various viruses, and then pneumonia. The leukemia worsened.
Unable to work, he wrote.
"It's like the inverse of my illness," he said in an interview recently.
"It's like a mirror, but from which all the actual images have been effaced.
There is nothing in the book about it. And I found that very salutary, having
something like that to go back to."
Said, 62, is a man of many dimensions. He is one of the most important
literary critics alive, a professor of English and comparative literature at
Columbia, the author of 15 books, a music critic, a scholar of opera, a
pianist, a father of two grown children and arguably the most eloquent
spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the West.
He has been a major force in recreating the field of literary studies over
the past two decades. His work helped give form to entire new scholarly
areas, like postcolonial theory. His 1978 book, "Orientalism," revolutionized
the study of the Middle East and has been argued over bitterly for years.
At the same time, Said has done as much as anyone to raise the profile of the
Palestinian cause in American intellectual life. He writes frequently on the
subject. He was a member of the Palestinian National Council until 1991 and
recently made a film about the Palestinians for the BBC.
He is a relentless critic of Israeli policy on the Palestinians; of U.S.
foreign policy in the Middle East, and, in the last few years, of Yasser
Arafat and of the Oslo accords, calling the peace agreement between Israel
and the Palestine Liberation Organization "an instrument of Palestinian
surrender."
In the eyes of admirers, Said is brilliant, charismatic, passionate, funny,
erudite, engaged. For some, he is also a personal model, managing to combine a
rigorous intellectual life and impassioned political engagement.
To those who dislike him, he is polemical, extremist, conspiratorial,
irresponsible, anti-American. They say he attributes political motives to
everyone but himself. Detractors have called him a Nazi, a "professor of
terror," Arafat's apologist. In 1985 his office was set on fire.
"He has a very unconventional brain," said Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli
pianist and conductor, who has known Said since 1992 and considers him one of
his closest friends. "I think he has great intellectual courage."
One afternoon this summer, Said was in his office at Columbia for the first
time in weeks. He had been spending his days commuting to Long Island to be
hooked up to an intravenous tube as part of a clinical trial of an
experimental treatment for patients like him for whom chemotherapy failed.
Three afternoons a week, he found himself "a Palestinian patient in a Jewish
hospital being taken care of by an Indian doctor and Irish nurses," as he put
it, pumped full of antidotes to the therapy's side-effects like soaring fever
and uncontrollable shaking while fighting the urge to nod off.
On a day off from treatment, his face looked drawn. Beneath the broad
shoulders of a dark blue sport coat, his frame seemed to disappear. His arms
had grown so thin he could barely hold a tennis racket. In the BBC film,
which he wrote and narrated, pneumonia had weakened his voice.
Yet Said rises at 5 a.m. to work in the Riverside Drive apartment where he
lives with his wife, Mariam Cortas Said. He travels frequently and has
multiple books scheduled for publication next year: a collection of lectures
on opera; his political columns, published twice monthly in the Arabic
newspaper Al Hayat, and his memoir, titled, with some resonance, "Not Quite
Right."
"I've decided that it's possible to live with a sword of Damocles hanging
over you," he said, when asked how long he might live (he prefers not to
know). "You can, by an act of will, not think about it. That was, I think,
the major victory that I won. I don't think about death."
Said was born in Jerusalem and spent the first 12 years of his life there, the
eldest child and only son of a successful Palestinian Christian businessman.
The family moved to Cairo, Egypt, in late 1947, five months before war broke
out between Palestinian Arabs and Jews over plans to partition Palestine.
His education was Anglocentric, as he has put it, mostly in elite colonial
schools. He also spent several years in a boarding school in Massachusetts. He
graduated from Princeton in 1957 and got his Ph.D. in English literature from
Harvard in 1964. Columbia hired him in 1963 as an instructor in English, and
then promoted him rapidly.
For years he lived in a state of some isolation from his own language and
background. That changed with the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. In the aftermath
of the Arab defeat he found himself drawn into the Palestinian resistance
movement. Over the next few years, he has said, he began for the first time
to think and write as both American and Arab.
It was a statement by Golda Meir in 1969 -- "There are no Palestinians" --
that set Said and others "the slightly preposterous challenge of disproving
her," he said earlier this year in a lecture at the New York Public Library
that was printed in The London Review of Books.
"Inevitably, this led me to reconsider the notions of writing and language,"
he recalled. "What concerned me now was how a subject was constituted, how a
language could be formed -- writing as a construction of realities that
served one or another purpose instrumentally."
Remembering a revelation that would shape much of his work, he said, "This
was the world of power and representations, a world that came into being as a
series of decisions made by writers, politicians, philosophers to adumbrate
one reality and at the same time efface others."
Unpopular Stand for an Academic
The first product of that thinking was "The Arab Portrayed," an essay Said
published in 1968. The subject, the manipulation of the image of the Arab in
journalism and in some scholarship, was an unusual and hardly fashionable one
for a young academic at a major U.S. university to take up.
In that article can be found the seeds of "Orientalism," published 10 years
later, in which Said examined the ways in which the power, scholarship and
imagination of the 200-year-old Orientalist tradition in Europe and the United
States had viewed the Middle East, Arabs and Islam.
The Orient, Said argued, was "almost a European invention." It had helped
define the West "as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience."
Orientalism was not only a style of thought but also the "corporate
institution" for dealing with such regions as the Near, Middle and Far East."
"Dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it,
describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it," Said wrote. "In
short, Orientalism was a Western style for dominating, restructuring and
having authority over the Orient."
He was not the first scholar to attack Orientalism, but he had a certain
authority. He was a prominent critic at a respected university, in touch with
new currents in European thinking, like the work of Michel Foucault, the
French philosopher, on the relationship between knowledge and power.
The time also happened to be ripe. "Orientalism" appeared at a moment of
growing attention by scholars to the history of groups like women and the
oppressed, a time when many people seemed to have become as interested in
questions of representation as in the reality itself.
There was a restiveness, too, in the field of Middle East Studies. Philip
Khoury, a historian of the modern Middle East at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, says the book surfaced amid a growing feeling that "some of
the grand paradigms of interpretation were no longer holding."
The war over "Orientalism" raged for years. In one particularly acrimonious
battle, Bernard Lewis of Princeton University, the most prominent living
Orientalist whom Said had scorched, retaliated in a lengthy exchange in The
New York Review of Books in 1982.
Thrust and Parry on Scholarship
He accused Said of falsifying and rearranging history to support his thesis,
omitting entire countries, scholars and writers. He said Said had displayed "a
disquieting lack of knowledge of what scholars do," as well as "astonishing
blind spots" and gaps in his knowledge of Arabic and Islam.
Said countered, charging Lewis with distorting the truth and criticizing the
book with little more than "a banal description of a barony violated by a
crude trespasser." He called Lewis "a passionate political partisan" against
Arab causes, a criticism Lewis angrily rejected.
"Mr. Said seems to be unable to conceive that there may be intellectual
disagreements which are not political in origin or purpose," Lewis fired
back, "and that these disagreements may be discussed in anything other than
emotional and violent language."
Nearly a dozen books by Said have followed, including "The Question of
Palestine," his case history of the struggle between Palestinian Arabs and
the Zionist movement, and "Covering Islam," a critique of how the media and
experts shape Western views of Muslims, Islam and the rest of the world.
His book "Culture and Imperialism," in which he examined among other things
the way the work of novelists like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens not only
reflected but also bolstered 19th-century European imperialism, once again
provoked a high-profile contretemps with another respected scholar.
"The central undercurrent of his work is that some of us are, in virtue of
our historic position, condemned to travesty others," the late Ernest
Gellner, a social anthropologist and philosopher at Cambridge University,
wrote in The Times Literary Supplement in 1993. In fact, some colonialists
"got it right" and some anti-colonialists got it wrong, Gellner argued; truth
is not linked to political virtue.
By many measures, Said's view has prevailed.
Twenty years after its publication, "Orientalism" has been translated into 26
languages. It is required reading in many fields. When the Middle Eastern
Studies Association of North America organized a plenary session on the book's
impact for its upcoming annual meeting, it put no Orientalists on the panel.
By making the case that one cannot understand modern Western history, culture
and politics without giving a central place to the history of imperialism and
colonialism, Said is said to have indelibly marked fields ranging from English
and history to anthropology and cultural studies.
"He's had as much impact as any scholar in the humanities in the recent
decades on American and Western scholarship more broadly," said Timothy
Mitchell, a professor of politics and Middle Eastern studies and director of
the Kervorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University.
Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle East history at the University of
Chicago, said, "He has done this in spite of the fact that one of the central
things he stands for is viewed with suspicion and deep anxiety and
apprehension by an important segment of the intellectual community -- the
idea of Palestinian self-determination and what that implies for Israel and
Zionism."
And his impact on that question?
"Realistically speaking, none," said Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani historian and
close friend of Said. "The refugees are still refugees. Israel is still
expanding. Palestinians are still losing land. And, in fact, the PLO has
thrown in the towel."
And how does that leave him feeling? Said was asked.
"Well, disappointed," he said. "But I feel a sort of renewed intransigence. In
a certain way, I feel it becomes more important to harp on these questions."
These days, Said finds himself drawn to two topics, both of which seem
poignantly linked to the moment in which he finds himself in his life. One is
a book on so-called late style, in which he is focusing not on those artists
whose work becomes increasingly harmonious as they age, but on those whose
late work is "full of unresolved dissonances," people who "go out with more
complexity and more energy than they came in."
The other is what he calls "the ideology of remembering." While he worries
about the effects of his treatment on his own memory, he has become fascinated
by what entire cultures choose to remember and to forget. He is preparing a
series of lectures on amnesia and memory in American culture.
Not long ago, in one of his political columns, he argued that there can be no
basis for coexistence between Palestinians and Israeli Jews until two things
happen: Arabs acknowledge and respect the fact of the Holocaust and Jews do
the same for the dispossession of the Palestinians since 1948.
"I got the most hostile mail I've ever gotten," all from Arabs, Said recalled.
"That's impossible for people to understand -- that there are irreconcilables
and that it's the job of the intellectual to show that they can be
irreconcilable, but they exist, unreconciled, next to each other."
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