Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
And yet another blow to our paper. The death of Edward Said represents an enormous loss for the Weekly. Almost since the paper first appeared Edward Said has been writing for us, on a variety of subjects, political, cultural, social and economic, though of course he was concerned most with the Palestinian issue.
The first time I met Edward Said was at a dinner party given in his honour by Hoda Guindi, at that time head of the English Department of Cairo University.
During the dinner Edward Said discussed with me my book Under Egypt's Spell which dealt with writers and travellers who had written favourably about Egypt. I was flattered that he had read the book. He was also keen to know the fate of the Gezira Preparatory School, where he had been a pupil while his family lived in Cairo, and which featured in my book if only because, during World War II, it was the venue where several poets, who contributed to the anthology Salamander, regularly met.
Since Orientalism, Said's groundbreaking work, was published in 1978 it has become one of the most quoted critical works of modern times. His formulation of "the other" has inspired vast numbers of articles, books and research papers, among them a PhD thesis at the University of Pennsylvania in comparative literature that I partially supervised. The thesis was in fact a comparative study of what the researcher, Lana Yunus, called the Café Riche Poets and the American poet William Carlos Williams. Yunus drew extensively on the concepts elucidated and expounded in Said's theoretical writings, applying them to Arab poets, especially Iraqis, who opted for a self- imposed exile during which they wrote some of the most nostalgic and nationalist poetry. Yunus also dealt with a number of Egyptian poets who, during a recent phase of our modern history, felt that they were existing on the margins of society, so profound was their alienation.
In both cases they were "the other", either in a country not their own or in their motherland. Indeed, Edward Said was himself an example of "the other". He once described himself as "a man who lived two separate lives", one as an American university professor, the other as a fierce critic of US and Israeli policies. In some ways he reminded me of such Arab academicians as Albert Hourani and Cecil Hourani. Albert Hourani was director of Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University. Like Edward Said, Hourani, whom I knew quite well, lived two lives.
During my stay in Philadelphia supervising Lana's thesis I had the pleasure of telephoning Edward Said a few times. I asked him, on behalf of the university, if he would be one of the readers of the finished research. He politely apologised. Eventually the university sent him a copy of the thesis and I wonder whether he had the time to read it.
A couple of years back our paths almost crossed. I was invited by Dahesh Museum in New York to give a talk on academic orientalist art. I had previously discussed my ideas with Edward Said during one of his visits to Cairo and he had agreed to attend my Dahesh Museum talk and even to speak. He eventually had to apologise, unable to attend for health reasons.
And now Edward Said is gone, and the Weekly is deprived of one of its mainstays. I know that the first thing many readers -- and I am one of them -- did was to look for Edward Said's article. Now, alas, that will no longer be possible.
There remains, though, the legacy of his writings, and of his work, and of his teaching. Few among his readers, and particularly among his students, are likely to forget either the man or the supremely humanitarian message that he spent a lifetime promoting. And in the end the knowledge that he will be remembered comes as solace in such a time of loss.
