Edward Said in the LRB archive |
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Edward Said in the LRB archive |
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‘All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters.’
In his 1999 piece ‘Living by the Clock’, Edward Said reflects on his childhood, the impact of his leukaemia diagnosis and the process of writing his memoir. ‘The time of the memoir,’ he writes, ‘is intimately tied to the time, phases, ups and downs, variations in my illness.’ As his health worsened, the memoir, later published as Out of Place, became ‘my way of constructing something in prose while in my physical and emotional life I grappled with the anxieties and pains of degeneration. Both tasks resolved themselves into details: to write is to get from word to word, to suffer illness is to go through the infinitesimal steps that take you from one state to another.’ Said wrote forty pieces for the LRB on subjects as various as late style, meeting Sartre, the Oslo Accords, the belly-dancer Tahia Carioca and Wagner. You can access all of Said’s writing in the LRB archive here. |
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To mark what would have been Edward Said’s 90th birthday, the London Palestine Film Festival and SOAS Centre for Palestine Studies will screen Edward Said: The Last Interview, Mike Dibb’s extended conversation with Said, covering his thoughts on mortality, classical music and his book Orientalism. |
Edward Said: The Last Interview Tuesday, 27 January SOAS, London |
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Further reading from the LRB archive: |
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‘I have never known what language I spoke first, Arabic or English, or which one was mine beyond any doubt. What I do know, however, is that the two have always been together in my life, one resonating in the other, sometimes ironically, sometimes nostalgically, or, more often, one correcting and commenting on the other. Each can seem like my absolutely first language, but neither is.’ |
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‘This is the prerogative of late style: it has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.’ |
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‘“You are invited by Les Temps modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East in Paris on 13 and 14 March this year. Please respond. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.” At first I thought the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial.’ |
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‘Our peoples are already too bound up with each other in conflict and a shared history of persecution for an American-style pow-wow to heal the wounds and open the way forward. There is still a victim and a victimiser. But there can be solidarity in struggling to end the inequities, and for Israelis in pressuring their government to end the occupation, the expropriation and the settlements. The Palestinians, after all, have very little left to give.’ |
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‘Tahia Carioca belongs, not to the easily identified culture of B-girls and fallen women, but to the world of progressive women skirting or unblocking the social lanes. She remained organically linked, however, to her country’s society, because she discovered another, far more interesting role for herself as dancer and entertainer. This was the all-but-forgotten role of almeh (literally, a learned woman), spoken of by 19th-century European visitors to the Orient such as Edward Lane and Flaubert.’ |
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‘The question isn’t so much finding the one thing about Wagner that commands all the others, but of learning somehow to discriminate, make judgments, and criticise him intelligently and, above all, imaginatively and unreductively.’ |
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