Edward Said (1935 - 2003)
Obituaries
Mourid Barghouti
Aware of the nature of Edward Said's illness I have yet to be reconciled to its outcome. It is silly to think that anyone could have protected him yet I feel somehow we failed him, that we did not do enough. Perhaps this is because, to those that knew him, this ferocious critic of imperialism, this staunch warrior against oppression who cared for his friends as if they were his grandchildren, concealed somewhere deep inside a tender child. He was vulnerable, charmingly petulant, proud, insecure, curious, afraid of censure and eager for praise. There was a fragility about him, a mixture of maturity and childlike innocence that drove him towards both philosophy and music.
It is easy to say we still have his ideas, books, lectures, the records of the debates he waged around the world. But Edward Said was a writer you loved as a whole person. You loved the way his laugh filled the room, his confident walk, the easy, mellifluous voice and the sometimes merciless sarcasm from which he would not spare himself. You loved, too, the child within him.
We will read Said's works over and over again, and will commemorate his memory in the years to come. But it is hard knowing we will no longer watch him striding into battle, stripping off the varnish from insidious words and tearing the mask from the face of corruption.
I met Edward Said only a few times. But I saw how he treated his close friends: it was as though their welfare was his personal responsibility. He attended to them no matter how many other people were present or how tired he was. I would call him up in New York wanting only to reassure myself that he was "getting on" with his illness as usual — with the same courage and the same scorn. I would comfort myself with the thought of how successfully he was responding to treatment, taking refuge in the illusion that leukemia was something akin to a bad cold. But the man who devoted his life to fighting many metaphorical cancers was not to be spared in his battle against the real thing. His courage in facing both was inspiring.
Edward Said was no saint. His ideas were not above criticism or debate. What is beyond discussion, though, is that Edward Said was as great an advocate of his people as he was a champion of knowledge in the service of humanity, of the image of the intellectual, of the victims of colonialism and of the wretched of the Third World. He was a formidable and honourable adversary, even when facing those who lacked honour. Nor did he shrink from subjecting his ideas to renewed scrutiny whenever new knowledge seemed to call for revision, which, perhaps, is one of the most important marks of a sincere and dedicated thinker. Not only did he take an amazing delight in knowledge, he was one of the few who sought to discover the world through literature. He was the model of the peripatetic philosopher, indefatigable and tenacious as he raised the banner of a humanitarian aesthetic.
Because he defended an oppressed people, and a narrative the Zionist narrative is seeking to destroy, Edward Said was dubbed "the professor of terrorism" by Zionists such as Alexander Edward. Others took exception to the fact that his academic and intellectual accomplishments were mixed with a daily involvement with the Palestinian cause. They would have preferred he remain a purely "universal thinker". Apparently, a "universal thinker" is a being brought to earth through some combustion resulting from the friction between two clouds, a creature without connections to a people, a land or a history, without enemies and, hence, with no need for supporters, and whose writings are intended to be read by the nighttime stars and the winds rustling through the forests. Yet even in his native country it was not any sense of shame that made the imbeciles of the "Oslo Authority" retract their ban on his books. Rather, widespread protests deprived them from the pleasure of indulging in that ban.
Edward Said's death leaves me feeling angry though anger, like sadness, fades. What does not seem to have any end in sight, though, at least for a person of my age, is the collective Palestinian death. In this our pain corresponds to that of Said, which remained with him till his last breath. It is the death of a child, the terror of incessantly busy Israeli guns, the uprooting of olive trees by bulldozers hysterical in their vigilance over Israeli security, the dropping of a bomb from the belly of an Apache on the heads of an entire family, rooftops collapsing on rubble and sometimes on the inhabitants within. Such are the images Said carried with him, and they are things all of us will have in common as long as the world remains as he saw it when, through experience, research and the pen, he caught evil red-handed. He carried with him too the image of a world he described so well and fought so tenaciously, the world of imperialism, moving from war to war, shooting down human beings, the truth and the law, corralling all into its net. Yet there he was, in bed, advising his daughter Najla and son Wadi' to continue their work and be happy. He might have been addressing an entire generation, tendering advice that only a professor of his stature can impart.
On the day he died, in the garden of the Philsophy Hall where Edward had his office, students and teachers at Columbia University stood in a large circle holding candles and observing a moment of silence at sunset in a collective commemoration of their late professor. Readers and admirers of Edward Said, in Palestine and the Arab world, can only say their farewells individually, from where they happen to be and each in his or her own way.
I am angry, though I was no less angry before I heard the news of Edward's death. Death is suspiciously active around us, so noisy that it still drowns out the whisper of hope, the thunder of the world and the cry of the newborn. Death has become tediously repetitive, so much so there is no longer time between one funeral and the next to grieve and contemplate the loss. The shrinking of horizons smothers hope. For a lifetime we have been running in chains, living on the brink of the edge, building new tents and digging makeshift graves, because before 40 days have passed since one person died 40 more will have fallen. There is no longer time to mourn or to pay respects to the dead, though I hasten to give pause for the absence of Edward Said before the crowds start pressing in on us, before Sharon dispatches a thousand more in the bout of ethnic cleansing that awaits us and that will receive Washington's blessing, as well as the blessings of many Arab capitals where the wonders of developing droopy eyelids whenever disaster strikes have long been known.
I am angry because Edward Said died when we most needed his voice, roaring against a new world order that has reached the heights of belligerency and the depth of barbarity. We need his voice more than ever now, when the Palestinian narrative faces an unprecedented assault and the prevailing logic has come to blame the victims and praise the murderers, when Sharon is dubbed a man of peace while our national resistance is branded terrorist.
I am angry because my powerlessness repeats itself more than is decent. Neither I, nor anyone else, was able to be a sudden tremor in the wrist that pointed the gun at the forehead of Naji Al-Ali, native son of Al-Shajara and now lying in a grave in Britain; I was unable, even for a few moments, to be a few minutes of morning drowsiness in Beirut, detaining Ghassan Kanafani, originally from Akka, from getting into his car which Mossad had rigged to explode and scatter pieces of his body over neighbouring rooftops. I am angry because I couldn't be one more hour in the life of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, from Bethlehem and now buried in Baghdad; angry because I could not be a convincing argument that might have detained Abu Salma of Haifa from his grave, or a dose of oxygen to keep Ihsan Abbas, from Ain Ghazal, among us for just a few more days before we escorted his body to its grave in Wadi Al-Sir in Amman, or that of Mu'in Bessisu to his grave in Cairo.
The list of names and of graveyards will grow larger. The names will increase so we decrease and no one knows where they will die. Edward Said's is another grave out of place, another funeral away from the homeland. When we lose a person in such a way sorrow gives way to anger. I am angry because it doesn't make sense that we have to circumnavigate the globe in order to put a flower on every grave containing a creative talent from Palestine.
* The writer is a Cairo-based Palestinian poet and author of "I saw Ramallah" (New York: Random House, 2003)
Ghada Karmi
When I heard about Edward Said's death on September 25th I was overwhelmed with an extraordinary sense of grief and personal loss. Perhaps this was not so surprising in view of the similarities between our two stories. We were both born in the same part of Jerusalem and both had to leave our native city to live in exile thereafter. We both grew up in the West, he in the USA as a teenager, I in England from a rather younger. age. Despite his American environment, he, like me was reared on English literature and remained true to it in his work and style of writing. More personally, the difficulties with his father that drove him to achieve more and more and yet left him with a sense of inadequacy echo sharply my own experience. In his memoir, Out of Place, he says, “I have no sense of cumulative achievement. Every day is for me like the beginning of a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it.” – sentiments that I know intimately. For both of us, political awaking came with the defeat of 1967 and led to a new career of active involvement in the politics of Palestine. He went on to great fame and signal achievement while my own progress was much more modest. But at the heart of his life was a persistent sense of dispossession and lack of belonging that tormented but also animated him, just as it does me. He was a cosmopolitan in the best tradition, because, as I know so well, those who lack the citizenship of their native land become citizens of the world.
Perhaps it was this sense of identification that made our encounters over 24 years so meaningful and, for me, so unforgettable. I first met him in Libya in 1976. We were both the guests of Colonel Ghaddafi at a conference on Zionism and racism, which was a favourite topic then following the UN General Assembly Resolution of 1974 on Zionism. I little realised at the time that when I met this rather shy young man how eminent he would later become. The next time I saw him was in New York in 1978 when his major literary work, Orientalism, had just been published. Being no historian myself, I little appreciated the importance of the book. The storm of controversy it aroused was remarkable, and when I finally read it, I began to understand its significance for Palestinians in particular. As is well known, what he does in this book is to expose a fundamental aspect of the Western approach towards the Orient: that conventional Western literature and scholarship about the East is coloured by colonialist attitudes and regards the oriental 'other' as something less than human, an interesting object of study, rather like a zoo animal. But there is more to the book, as I will explain below.
Like all great ideas, it seemed simple and instantly familiar, as if we had all known it for ages. But it aroused hostility and admiration in equal measure. Living in Britain, I can remember the storm of vituperative commentary that appeared in literary journals and the way it polarised British historians into opposing camps. He was criticised for his allegedly simplistic analysis of Western writings on the East and of denigrating the genuine and painstaking work of many Western scholars. Many pointed to the dearth of corresponding studies the other way around. How many eastern scholars can one point to who have studied the West with such care or even at all? To my mind, there is something in these criticisms, but this was not the real point of the book. For Edward Said's real achievement is to have defined what I will call, the will to dispossess that is at the heart of this scholarship. His writings are properly situated in the politics of dispossession that have their springboard in his Palestinian origins. To understand his significance properly is to understand the recent history of Palestine. The country he was born into in 1935 was a land ruled by a British colonial administration under the Mandate granted by the UN in 1922. The environment of his childhood was colonialist and the Zionist enterprise, which had begun to flourish under British patronage at that time, was also colonialist. Although the Said family was affluent and his father a wealthy Christian businessman who afforded the young Edward a Western-style education in expensive schools, the general parameters of Arab existence were inescapably colonialist.
These influences dominated his upbringing. Even his first name is a result of them, chosen by his mother after the Prince of Wales whom she admired; evidently no Arab role model inspired her to the same extent. When the Said family left Jerusalem in 1947, they went to Cairo where he attended an English-style public school. Arabic was forbidden at home, except when speaking to the servants. As Said himself has noted, this induced a split in his sense of identity during adolescence from which he never recovered. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 led to the forcible expulsion and flight of three quarters of a million Palestinians. This physical dispossession had its parallel in his spiritual dispossession and became a basic theme in his worldview. The Palestinian refugees' right to return to the homeland they were evicted from was a central aspect of his work. Always he returned to the fundamental elements of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians: the latter's dispossession and Israel's evasion of its responsibility for their plight.
From the start of Israeli statehood, that evasion took a path of obsessive denial. In order to maintain its fiction of innocence, Israel set about eradicating all traces of the Palestinian presence in the land. Over 400 villages were demolished and new settlements sprang up in their place. The history of 'Israel' that Israeli children learn at school is distorted to exclude the Palestinian presence. An intricate mythology of Israel's origins maps a Jewish continuity from Biblical times to the present, only interrupted by phases of transient settlement by Romans, Ottomans and British. If you knew no different, it is entirely possible to believe that no Arabs had ever existed in the country but for a few wandering Bedouin tribes. By such methods, the Israelis attempted to annihilate a whole people, their history, their memory, their language and their culture.
All Palestinians feel this insult of a double dispossession, aimed at their bodies and souls, their existence as a separate people with a history denied and their resulting sufferings unacknowledged. Edward Said felt this keenly and his writings all reflect it in one way or another. Orientalism has to be understood in this way. The orientalist writers who described the Arabs dispossessed them too, though elegantly and with erudition. For, a people who are re-created through the prism of an alien scholarship influenced by alien notions of supremacy, are robbed of their true identity. And that is a sort of dispossession too.
* The writer is a London-based Palestinian activist and physician
Ilan Pappe
We, who supported the Palestinian cause, have been orphaned with the untimely death of Edward Said. For Israeli Jews, like myself, he was the lighthouse that navigated us out of the darkness and confusion of growing in a Zionist state onto a safer coast of reason, morality and consciousness.
I am sorry I only met Edward in 1988, but I feel fortunate for the time we did spend together. His insights of, and inputs on, the global reality in general and the Palestine one in particular will guide us all for many years to come. But above all, we shall miss Edward's unique ability of articulating in the public sphere the evil inflicted upon the Palestinians in the past against the continued effort in the Western media of sidelining, if not altogether eliminating, the plight and tragedy of Palestine. There is no one who could easily fill his place on that stage — no one who could in few sentences associate so clearly the wrongs of the past with the tragedy of the present in the land of Palestine.
The academic and intellectual world would equally be disorientated without his original thoughts and conceptualization on the West's relationship with the world. We should be grateful, nonetheless, that so many of our colleagues went in his footsteps as he so brilliantly deconstructed the power bases and more sinister interests behind the knowledge production in West on the Orient in general and the Middle East in particular.
For those of us who knew him more personally, we have all lost a dear and genuine friend, with whom one could talk about the most abstract philosophical issues and with the same ease move to more mundane problems in life — which usually paled in comparison with his endless and brave struggle against his fateful illness.
Something of this mixture and balance was also in his books. He will be remembered, and justly so, for "Orientalism" and the works that followed shaping and contributing to the post-Colonialist and Cultural Studies. But I will also cherish the 'The Politics of Dispossession" — these short and lucid interventions, quite often immediate reactions to a recent crisis or juncture in the life of Palestine and the Palestinians, but always contextualizing the event and Said's thoughts within the much more broader view on the march of history.
Few weeks ago we had our last meaningful conversation — on the phone - in which he beseeched me, as he did others I am sure, not to give up the struggle for relocating the Palestinians' refugee issue at the heart of the public and global agenda. He stressed the need to continue the effort of changing the American public opinion on Palestine and he was very hopeful and encouraged by what he recognized as significant change in the European public opinion.
Edward probably left more than one spiritual and moral will to us. The one I am taking is the one above. In his memory and out of respect to his intellectual genius as well as to his moral courage, we should regroup our energies and reorganize our efforts to impress on the world that there will be no justice and no peace in Palestine, no stability in the Middle East and no tranquility in the US relationship with the Muslim world, without the return of Palestinian refugees to their home, the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the building of a state in Palestine that would respect human and civil rights, as did Edward all his life.
May his soul rest in peace.
* The writer is an Israeli advocate of Palestinian right and professor of history at Haifa University
Mustafa Barghouthi
It is with heartbreaking sorrow that the Palestinian National Initiative announce the tragic death of Edward Said who passed away today after eleven years fighting leukemia. At this time our thoughts and love are with his family. We wish them strength and courage and assurance that Edward will be a man forever remembered not only for his incredible achievements but for his remarkable qualities as a friend. Though words may do little at such a time to assuage the pain and grief something must be said to pay homage to a man and a life we should truly celebrate.
A man with great courage and clear conviction Edward Said was a shining light in a confused world. As a true intellectual giant, Said inspired all fields with his accomplishments. The passion which infused his intellectual abilities presented him as a man with clear visions to be greatly admired, trusted and respected.
Though his beliefs and commitments presented him with many challenges his statements and many testimonies of outrage at the hypocrisies, contradictions, and indignities so rife in the world gave him the integrity and honesty for which he was renowned.
A prolific writer Said addressed all issues of culture, colonialism, imperialism, language and literature. As a Palestinian exile much of his political writing came from personal memories yet he remained objective and grounded not only affirming the Palestinian presence but also pointing toward a future where peace is possible. Among spokespeople for the Palestinian cause surely there was none so articulate, so inspiring, so admired.
For the Palestinian National Initiative, a movement striving for democracy in Palestine itself, and co-founded by Dr. Said, the death of this unique and most prominent leader, a man of values and integrity who truly believed in freedom and justice is a great loss. The Mubardara remain determined to follow in his foot steps, and remain committed to his vision, conveying all his hopes and values not just of a free Palestine, and free Palestinians but of freedom for all, the world over.
The sense of loss felt by the death of such a great intellect, gentleman and friend is immeasurable. His eminent work of decades and all that he stood for will remain forever a monument for justice, and human rights. As a man of courage, graciousness, hope and dedication, his memory will remain forever in our hearts.
* The writer is Palestinian activist and Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative
Hanan Ashrawi
What consolation is there for the passing of a great man? He does not leave behind a great void rather a heaviness of spirit, a weight almost unbearable that mercilessly seems to crush the heart and render each breath an ordeal.
But Edward Said was not just a great scholar, a brilliant mind, a creative artist, an ardent nationalist, an advocate of justice, a free spirit, an unrelenting force for integrity, an uncompromising fighter on behalf of human dignity, and all the other sets of superlative depictions that he so aptly deserves.
Edward was amazingly human, vulnerable in his larger-than-life status to all the personal pain and doubts that beset ordinary mortals, and never too self-preoccupied to let you gain entry to his life unnoticed.
He had a spring in his step and an almost-electrical spark in his gestures as he lectured us on literary criticism on an early visit to AUB, with Edward not much older than his student audience, Beirut, late 1960's.
He had a tremor in his voice and excitement in his tone as he articulated the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, imbuing it with Palestinian authenticity and universal applicability, Algiers 1988.
He had sorrow in his heart at the passing of his friends —Iqbal Ahmad, Ibrahim Abu Lughod— and he grieved openly at their loss.
He had tears in his eyes when he told us that he had just been diagnosed with Leukemia, London 1991.
He had a ring to his laughter and a sparkle to his smile when he celebrated friendships that he never failed, nor they him —Abdel Muhsen Qattan, Shafeeq el-Hout, Hasib Sabbagh, Said Khoury, Rashid Khalidi, Daniel Barenboim, and many, many more.
He had a sharpness to his anger and moral indignation at the "indignity" of Oslo and the immorality of corruption in leadership.
He had a thunderous impatience with the obtuseness and deliberate ignorance of most Western media who insisted on reducing reality to an inane sound byte or a tepid dose of processed language.
He had a gentle identification with the oppressed and an intimidating rage against the oppressor, a warm embrace for the victim and a cold rejection of the culprit, a love for the post-apartheid South Africa and all that its struggle stood for, and a total loathing for discrimination, racism and the degradation of human life and rights.
He had the sharpest of ironic wits with which to deflate the most pompous of fools who were foolhardy enough to think that they could deceive or sustain their vacuous sense of self-importance.
He had the warmest sense of pride and love when talking about Wadi' and Najla, the children who always filled his life, and Mariam, the gentle wife whose love was never in question.
He had a raging thirst for the recognition and validation of a human narrative to vindicate the almost unbearable suffering of the Palestinian people and to render them part of an inclusive human experience.
He had the integrity and compassion to extend recognition to the horrific suffering of the Jewish people and the unspeakable pain of the holocaust, and simultaneously to demand of Israel recognition of its own culpability for the plight of the Palestinian people.
He had the courage to seek solutions and alternatives, constantly on the lookout for a younger leadership, a mentor for those with promise.
He had the good humor not to take himself too seriously, accepting the burden of his fame and public adulation with humility, and granting his name to numerous Boards of institutions including MIFTAH and PICCR.
He had the restlessness of spirit that was singular to those whose "here and now" were too vast and swift to be accommodated by mundane space and time.
He had the energy of a man aware of his mortality, squeezing life out of every second, refusing to allow the dreaded disease to frame his space and time or to form his "context."
Edward had a global/human context, a Palestinian context, a personal context. To me, he was mentor, brother, close friend. He was notes on my dissertation, phone calls on the Palestinian condition, hurried meetings in conferences or other public events around the world, and those rare relaxed visits in New York or Ramallah.
He was the Edward taking time off to have a home-cooked meal, sitting with the family around the table on the veranda overlooking the western hills of Ramallah, nibbling at food and conversation in a relaxed almost sleepy manner, shedding the intensity of his greatness for the luxury of being "at home" with friends.
Edward may have been "out of place" as his personal narrative encapsulated this unique form of Palestinian displacement, but he has always been "in place" for those of us who dared to take his genius and friendship for granted.
In addition to the unbearable burden of his death, we have to bear the knowledge that we had never been prepared to accept it.
For a man who has been described as "the conscience of Palestine," his ultimate absence requires the greater affirmation of all that he had represented, both in the consciousness of a nation and in the hearts of those who loved him.
* The writer is member of the Palestinian Legislative Council & the Secretary General of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue & Democracy (MIFTAH).
Daniel Barenboim
Perhaps the first thing one remembers about Edward Said was his breadth of interest. He was not only at home in music, literature, philosophy, or the understanding of politics, but also he was one of those rare people who saw the connections and the parallels between different disciplines, because he had an unusual understanding of the human spirit, and of the human being, and he recognized that parallels and paradoxes are not contradictions.
He saw in music not just a combination of sounds, but he understood the fact that every musical masterpiece is, as it were, a conception of the world. And the difficulty lies in the fact that this conception of the world cannot be described in words-because were it possible to describe it in words, the music would be unnecessary. But he recognized that the fact that it is indescribable doesn't mean that is has no meaning.
This very curious mind, of course, allowed him privileged glimpses into the subconscious of people, of creators. And added to that he had a very unrestrained courage of utterance, and this is what earned him the admiration, the jealousy, and the enmity of so many people.
Many Israelis and Jews did not want to tolerate his criticism, not just of the present Israeli government, but of a certain mentality that he identified in Israeli thoughts and deeds-namely the lack of empathy with the fact that the very same war of independence of Israel in 1948, which brought about the acquisition of a new identity for the Jewish part of the population, was not just a military defeat, but also a psychological catastrophe for the non-Jewish population of Palestine. And therefore he was critical of the inability of Israeli leaders to make the necessary symbolic gestures that have to precede any political solution. The Arabs, on the other hand, were and are still unable to accept his sensitivity toward Jewish history, limiting themselves to repeat their innocence as far as the suffering of Jewish people is concerned.
It was precisely this ability of his to see not only the different aspects of any thought or process, but their inevitable consequences as well-and also the combination of human, psychological, and historical, as the case may be, "pre-history" of such thoughts and
processes. He was one of those rare people who was permanently aware of the fact that information is only the very first step toward understanding. And he always looked for the "beyond" in the idea, the "unseen" by the eye, the "unheard" by the ear.
It was a combination of all these qualities which led him to found together with me the West-Eastern Divan, which provides a forum for young Israeli and Arab musicians to learn together music and all its ramifications.
The Palestinians have lost one of the most eloquent defenders of their aspirations. The Israelis have lost an adversary-but a fair and humane one. And I have lost a soul mate.
* The writer is conductor, pianist and director of the Deutsche Staatsoper, Berlin
George Naggiar
“I urge everyone to join in and not leave the field of values, definitions, and cultures uncontested.”— From the Final Essay of Edward Said
Edward Said's life and labor is a story of transcendence of the cultural and spatial barriers that so often thoughtlessly divide humanity. Born in Jerusalem, the capital of the three great monotheistic faiths and a city that he once called "a seamless amalgam of cultures and religions engaged, like members of the same family, on the same plot of land in which all has become entwined with all," he would live most of his late life and finally leave us in New York City, the capital of the modern world and where men and women from every corner of the earth converge to form a modern amalgam of peoples unlike anything ever known before. There could have been no more fitting places for the beginning and end of the life's journey of Edward Said.
In between, Said's journey would take him from Palestine to Egypt to the United States and around the world. At home nowhere and everywhere at once, Said described his condition as one of exile, perpetually without a home, or out of place, to use the title of his brilliant memoir. Nowhere more, however, than in his exile, was Said the symbol of his people, whose dispossession his life reflected and for whom he so eloquently advocated in works like The Question of Palestine, After the Last Sky, The Politics of Dispossession and Peace and Its Discontents.
Through these writings and others, Said introduced the Palestinian people and narrative to an American and international audience as Zionism's all-too-often unrecognized victims. In so doing, he was widely known as one of the Palestinian people's most passionate advocates for peace, reconciliation and coexistence with Israeli Jews on the basis of justice and equality.
From that vision, he would never waver, even when it was most unpopular to do so. During the Oslo "Peace Process," he was a tireless and persistent critic, famously calling the Accords themselves a "surrender" by the Palestinian leadership and predicting with tragic foresight that they would delay, not advance, the day of Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation. Throughout the process, he called for the resignation of President Arafat and the emergence of a genuine grassroots domestic and international movement for Palestinian rights, which he understood would ensure progress towards a meaningful Palestinian-Israeli peace. Nevertheless, for his honesty and unwillingness to be blinded to Palestinian economic, political and human realities by the veneer of a distorting language and images of peace, he earned the derision of even many in his own community for supposedly "opposing peace" or "being unrealistic."
But with the predictable conclusion of the Oslo process in a storm of violence causing mutual Palestinian-Israeli suffering, which now, at best, will only further postpone the process of Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation, new movements emerged within Palestine and internationally that were based on precisely the discourse and strategy that Said had advocated all along. In Palestine, a Palestinian National Initiative, of which he was a central part, had been born and posed a new alternative to the failed strategy of endless negotiations based on unequal power. It was a truly grassroots effort that respected democracy, treated the needs of the Palestinian people and spoke in language of genuine peace and reconciliation with Israel. Throughout the world, including in the United States, the struggle of the Palestinian people had become, to use his words, "a byword for emancipation and enlightenment." In solidarity with them, divestment campaigns had been launched, boycotts of Israeli goods had been initiated and people from around the world had gone to Palestine to stand with the Palestinians in the moments of their greatest vulnerability.
Moreover, Said would directly participate, not only through his writings, lectures and speeches, but also by founding with his friend, fellow musician and world-renowned composer, Daniel Barenboim, a joint West-Eastern Divan, which "provides a forum for young Israeli and Arab musicians to learn together music and all its ramifications," as Barenboim put it. For their efforts, in the summer of 2002, they together earned the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, Spain's highest peace prize.
In fitting homage to him, at his final convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the leading Arab-American organization, Said came full circle, receiving a roaring standing ovation for a speech in which he, among other things, lambasted the Palestinian Authority for its failure to recognize the basic dignity, not to say moral beauty of the very cause that its mandate was ostensibly to advance. In the turn of the course of history, in his restoration of meaning to the language of peace through earning Spain's peace prize, in the inspiring and humane vision of his speech, in his physical position on the podium and in the applause of the audience for him, it was clear that Said had at last become what he had always been the true symbol and leader of his people.
But it is a testament to the universality of his thought and his range as a scholar and human being that Said was not limited in his writings and advocacy to the one struggle with which he was personally and nationally affiliated. Indeed, his great influence and reputation was based in large part on his other work, particularly on his reinterpretation and re-presentation of histories of formerly colonized peoples of the world, work which was foundational in the fields of both Post-Colonial Studies and Critical Race Theory.
In his seminal work, Orientalism, Said critically explored European but primarily French and British representations of "the Orient." In examining these representations, Said exposed that "Western" "knowledge" of the Orient was less an accurate description of the peoples and culture of that place (if such generalities could themselves be meaningfully understood, which they could not) than both a preface to and later reinforcement of Western imperial rule over the Orient.
In Culture and Imperialism, his sequel to Orientalism, Said would extend his analysis to "India, the subcontinent generally, a lot of Africa, Caribbean, Australia, parts of the world where there was a major Western investment, whether through empire or direct colonialism or some combination of both, as in the case of India." In so doing, he would dis- (or, more properly, un-) cover the often hidden power that lied within the culture of European and indeed any imperialism, and celebrate the resistance of formerly colonized peoples to its rule.
In both works and beyond, Said understood and taught that despite the dehumanization of and violence against the "Other" contained in colonialism and other forms of willful division, human history was an intertwined fabric, separated not by geographic, ethnic, national or religious barriers, but by deliberate delusions of the will to power. It was this will and the structures of power and fawning intellectuals that are the predictable result of its employment that his critical posture was almost instinctively directed against, as he himself once put. In its place, he sought to build a world of what his intellectual hero, the great German critic, Theodor Adorno, once called non-dominative difference. The critical study of history, society and culture that would bring that condition into reality was, for Said, the task of the intellectual.
And that task, he fulfilled. In his various works, Said unified the disparate experiences of a seemingly separate and unconnected humanity, both by showing that no encounter between peoples, even of the most odious form, left the other side unaffected, and by raising in our minds the universality of so much of the human experience. It is a tribute to him that, even as he praised and so eloquently defended the virtues of the humanism, his own insights contributed enormously to its depth. Would that we had made those insights our own.
But instead, today, we stand at the edge of a great valley that separates humanity (particularly "Americans" and the "Arab/Islamic peoples" of the world), cruelly dividing us into ethnic, racial and religious categories whose basis is neither history nor reason, but which, as Said taught us, obdurately betrays both. This gulf is not a natural or inevitable one, but one too often constructed for us by pusillanimous politicians and a media untrained in the art of critical practice. And its intent and related effects are to promote and thereby allow our consciences to accept an unacceptable violence of human against human and the enormous suffering that is its handmaiden that no just God or morality could countenance, much less sanction.
It falls to us, disciples of the humane vision that Edward Said helped to construct, to deconstruct the false barriers that prevent its realization, to imagine a world in their absence and to, in the words of his fittingly final exhortation to us, join in the contest of values, definitions and cultures so as to bring that world to fruition. And when we do, we will have torn down the symbolic and, yes, in Palestine, physical walls that so inhumanely separate us from each other, elevated the universal rights of all human beings to freedom and equality and built the greatest possible monument to the life and labor of Edward Said, whose beautiful mind helped us dream what, alas, his eyes could not see.
* The writer is president of the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights
Samir Amin
I salute in the person of Edward Said the exemplary combatant of the Palestinian cause. Exiled in the United States Said has found the words necessary to shake the preconceived ideas manufactured by a media serving exclusively those in power.
He succeeded in raising awareness to the fact that the criminal project of global military control engineered by those in command would necessarily have to entail their support to the equally criminal project of Zionist expansionism.
I salute the subtle intelligence that allowed Said to debunk the Eurocentric projects hidden in the folds of Western scientific and fictional literature, which inform the dominant discourse on Orientalism.
I finally salute the man who, struck by a terminal disease which inflicted on him the cruelest torment, has always remained for those who knew him, the best and most dedicated of friends.
Anouar Abdel-Malek
Music, liberation and peace. Could it be that the legacy of Edward Said, our noble companion, resides in this shine.
His work, I am sure, will be best interpreted by his numerous disciples. As for myself, I would like to draw attention to his capacity as it were to instigate convergence:
Between the pursuit of novel paths to understand some major problems in the field of human sciences (from mostly Western sources available to him) and his persistent commitment to the liberation of Palestine, his fatherland;
Between science and aesthetics, mainly the cultural sciences and music;
His moving advocacy of justice for his people crucified, coupled with a no less persistent pursuit of peace with fraternal souls standing on 'the other side of the river'.
Few have been able to bring together the radical denounciation of cultural hegemonism with a deeply felt commitment to universalism.
A vision of future-to-be, or a utopia? Either way his final act, that riveting joint symphonic concert with Daniel Barenboim reached for hearts and minds in deeply moving terms.
May the lord receive him in His peace after years of suffering. May his vision come true.
* The writer is Egyptian social scientist and author of ground-breaking body of work on social dialectics.
