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Article Excerpt
This article develops a critical appreciation of the work of Edward Said. It seeks to disentangle some of the most important themes in his work in relation to the dilemmas and contradictions of his life, and to assess their political implications. KEYWORDS: Orientalism, dislocation, representation, self-determination, political intellectual.
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To celebrate the life, work, and legacy of a prominent scholar is not an unproblematic endeavor since there is great temptation in selecting only the positive, the complimentary, perhaps even the mundane at the expense of a rigorous analysis of the real contribution the scholar made to our ways of looking at the world. This can be seen in the many flattering obituaries published since Edward W. Said died on September 25, 2003, after a twelve-year battle with leukaemia. While all have rightly paid tribute to his importance as a critical thinker of global stature, (1) too many who eulogized him never recognized the importance of his ideas enough to take them seriously in their own work when he was still alive. (2)
More widely, Edward Said made many enemies in his life, some academic, some political: in the United States, where his fight for the Palestinian cause earned him vicious intellectual and character attacks, in some circles in Israel of course, but also among some Palestinians as a consequence of his disenchantment with the leadership of Yassir Arafat. By eschewing advocacy for a particular side, he effectively antagonized all those who had a stake in the blind acceptance of the idea of "sides."
Politically, Said functioned in a triple paradox: he was a US citizen criticizing US foreign policy, a Palestinian criticizing Arab leadership, an intellectual who believed in the right of Israel to exist but who condemned the dispossession of the Palestinians in this process. To some, he was simply wrong; to others he was dangerous. A few even branded him a traitor, and threats on his life were common. In other words, it would be facile but wrong to describe Said as a universally respected man.
As a result, my aim here is not simply to eulogize the work of Edward Said, however important he may have been to the development of my own work, and to that of at least some of my colleagues in Middle Eastern studies. I want to untangle some of the most important themes of his work, and the dilemmas and contradictions of his life, as a means to further our understanding of his intellectual legacy, both politically and culturally. This implies engaging with his life, his work, and also his critics.
My emphasis will be placed primarily on the political implications of Said's work, but I also hope to allude to some of the themes of his work on literature and music. To begin with however, it is fitting to discuss his roots and upbringing, and the uncommon turns that took him from Jerusalem to the US intellectual Ivy League.
An Arab Called Edward
Edward Wadie Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, but, as a result of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, he spent much of his teenage years with his family in exile in Egypt and Lebanon. From an educated, cosmopolitan family with links to the United States, he was raised with an appreciation of academic rigor, and a love for literature and music. He was, from the beginning, unusual insofar as his background and his life challenged simplistic notions of "the Arab." His family was Palestinian at a time where no notion of a Palestinian nation found acceptance. His family was wealthy, when most Palestinians in exile found themselves dispossessed financially as well as politically. He was part of a Christian minority when Palestinians were generally assumed to be Muslims. His education was Middle Eastern, British, and that of the United States in tone and in substance. He was an Arab with an English first name, Edward.
Dislocation, travel, and multiplicity are some of the main themes of his life. His father Wadie called himself William and insisted on a cold and remote Victorian style of education that he sensed to be proper because it was English. Arabic was not widely spoken in the Said household as a matter of course. Said was much closer to his mother and sisters, but he would be sent away to the United States for his education as a teenager and become isolated from his family for many years. He felt a great sense of personal and cultural loss being sent by his father to be educated abroad, but he also recognized that this separation from his family was salutary: "My search for freedom, for the self beneath or obscured by 'Edward,' could only have begun because of that rupture, so I have come to think of it as fortunate, despite the loneliness and unhappiness I experienced for so long." (3) As a result of dislocation, he would be influenced by a multiplicity of ideas and styles, all of which helped him develop an eclectic, if mostly classical, cultural taste and intellectual curiosity.
Said's first love was not literary criticism (even though this is what he is best known for), but classical music. He trained assiduously as a pianist, but felt that he lacked the necessary talent to become a professional musician, despite studying at the prestigious Julliard School. Many of his friends have argued that he under-played his musical talent to a great extent. He did perform at concerts and as an accompanist and was known to be an accomplished and sensitive musician all his life. He also worked as a music critic for the Nation for many years. Perhaps his studies pushed further into the field of English literature as a second choice. In any case, Said only stopped playing the piano once he became too ill to do so.
The sensitivity, rigor, and self-deprecation that he applied to his connection to music would come to permeate much of his academic endeavors and intellectual relationships. He acquired and retained a reputation as a brilliant but difficult man. To his enemies, he was remote, overcritical, sometimes too radical, often impossible to work with. To his friends and admirers, he was seen as demanding but generous in return, inspirational if strict in approach, and more critical of himself than anyone else. In a nutshell, he never suffered fools gladly, but remained doubtful of his own importance if forceful in his convictions.
Many of his friends described in particular how easily Said felt wounded by attacks on his work and his political activism, how sensitive he was to criticism. For them, Said never developed the kind of thick skin many academics build over time; it was his most obvious vulnerability. (4) Yet he never became interested in making arguments for their own sake, or being a cynic. His passion for the issues he wrote about and lectured on was always palpable.
His reputation as a literary theorist, begun in a reworking of the analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, (5) became formidable, as a colleague in his field testifies: "In my field of literary and cultural studies, no critic has had such a profound influence on how we think and teach today. It is now almost impossible--or at least requires impressive countereffort--to read literary writing without being alert to the presence of history, wherever the realities of empire and colonialism, however loudly or silently, impinge on a work." (6) Yet, despite his standing, he remained skeptical about academia as a career. He preferred to explore a variety of subjects besides the ones he was hired to teach and research, and he suspected that the demands of building a career would have subjected his enthusiasm to too much managerial pressure. Instead of the "venality" of a career, he developed, following Adorno, a position as an intellectual amateur who was therefore free to think, besides the canon, contrapuntally and without disciplinary boundaries. (7) That being said, his position of freedom remained a privilege afforded to few: working in the Ivy League, without much interference from administration, and probably without weekends spent marking too many first-year essays.
Notwithstanding the financial and intellectual privileges afforded to him by a life in the cosmopolitan intellectual elite, he never felt he truly belonged in the United States, or, for that matter, in any particular system. Much like many of the thinkers he admired most, people like Michel Foucault, he questioned the validity of such systems altogether. He was mostly a theorist of the particular. The closest he came to establishing a home would be with the creation of his own family, after he married Mariam Cortas, and had a son and daughter. (8)
Still, a sense of dislocation remained, and it was by learning to embrace this difference that he would manage to negotiate a fragile sense of place. Even in the last words of his memoir he would retain this fundamental ambiguity toward the dislocation of his identity. He would come to...
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