Profile published in Al-Ahram Weekly, 1994Edward Said: Optimism of the will
Last month saw the publication of two new books by Edward Said. This week he was awarded the UNESCO Picasso Medal. The next two months will see the publication of yet two more boos. He is a prolific writer, publishing on a vast range of topics, writing on cultural studies and literary criticism, on politics and his abiding passion, music, on Egyptian belly-dancer Tahiya Carioca and on Jean Genet. Today, as always, it is business as usual
I first met Edward Said ten years ago when he was the key-note speaker at a conference on "Europe and its Others", which as a graduate student at the host university I was roped in to help organise. At that time Edward Said was already a celebrity, Orientalism had become a text book., a fixture on university reading lists. It seemed natural that his name should occur first to the organisers of the conference and that they should work hard to ensure his participation. Said's attendance was tantamount to ensuring the success of the conference.
Asked to suggest, a second Arab speaker, I came up with the name Anwar Abdel-Malek, who was then the research director of the Centre National de Recherché Scientifique in France. Many did not appear to recognise the name, and it was only when I pointed out that in Orientalism Edward Said acknowledges an intellectual debt to Abdel-Malek that my suggestion was taken seriously.
Ten years ago my feelings were ambivalent. I was proud of Edward Said's achievement, naturally, but at the same time I was angry that a brilliant scholar like Abdel-Malek would be unknown, until acknowledged by Said. Who was Edward Said, in any case? At that time, like a great many other Arabs, I was confused about his identity. Could be really be one of us?
When he turned up for the conference at Essex University in the summer of 1984, I was standing outside the main hall minutes before the opening session with Anwar Abdel-Malek. I saw him approach, greeting Anwar Abdel-Malek in perfect Egyptian dialect Having heard Edward Said on various TV shows, articulate English and Western looks, I was convinced that if he spoke Arabic at all it would be basic, and heavily accented, half English, half Palestinian perhaps. I remember being so taken aback by his unexpected Egyptianness that I hardly spoke. I stood listening to the intimate and warm conversation between him and Abdel-Malek, interpersed with laughter and cursing words. When Said left I burst out with the question that had been perplexing me: "How come he sounds as Egyptian as you and me?" Abdel-Malek then told me that Said lived in Egypt as a child.
In the lecture hall I listened to Said, secure in his persona, overpoweringly articulate and, yes, a Westerner (in the best sense of word). Full of admiration as I was of the substance of the lecture he gave and the manner in which he delivered that lecture, the question lurked in my mind: "What is he really?" It was not until sometime later, thanks to his writings and life, that I began to appreciate that being firmly rooted in one culture only is not always an advantage, and that a mixed background and identity can be empowering, and certainly much more interesting if you can make the best of two worlds.
But there was also a political dimension to my ambivalence towards Edward Said. For Egyptians like myself, involved in the Palestine solidarity movement, growing up under Nasser, turning later to the radical politics of the late '60s and early '70s, Said was viewed with suspicion. His advocacy of the settlement of the Palestinian question based on two states was in opposition to our own position, which insisted on a single secular state for Arabs and Jews. And when Sadat, following the peace with Israel, hostile to the PLO and its leader Arafat, mentioned Said's name as the decent Palestinian who should be instrumental in negotiating a settlement I expect my feelings were the same as many Arabs -- later, I learned, the same as Said's. What, an Arab-American professor of literature at Columbia University instead of Arafat...the idea was absurd.
But important lessons are learned over a lengthy period of time. Two decades on Arafat, the freedom fighter of the armed struggle of the '70s, shook hands with Rabin and accepted a limited self-rule. The sombre voice in the background, reminding Arabs that the Palestinian struggle is about freedom and equality, not about the establishment of a self-rule enclave under Israeli hegemony, was that of the "moderate", Edward Said.
Despite the defeat of early hopes invested in the PLO and its chairman. Said remains as engaged as ever in the Palestinian question, voicing opposition to an agreement which he characterises as "an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles." The agreement though is but one source of discontent. Said is also seriously ill. "I have a chronic disease, leukemia," he is quoted as saying in The Sword and the Pen, a book of interviews with Said that will soon appear in the US. "It has its bad moments... I try not to think about the future too much... I have got a lot to say and write, I feel, and I just want to go on doing that."
Said is engaged in a battle against the banal certainties of life: he is angry about such banalities, but does not allow that anger to pollute his life. Rather, it has become a driving force in a battle whose rallying cry is Gramsci's insistence on the "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." And in that battle Said's main weapon remains his ability to narrate and provide alternative narratives and histories.
His passion for narration and brilliance as a narrator can be understood once we realise the central role he ascribes to narratives in shaping and changing a given reality. This is made clear in the introduction to his magnum opus, Culture and Imperialism:
"The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism... Most important, the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilised people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperialism: in the process many Europeans and Americans were also stirred by these stories and their protagonists, and they too fought for new narratives of equality and human community".
Edward Said is a Jerusalem-born Palestinian. His commitment to give voice to a counterpoint narrative/narratives grows from this, from the fact of being part of a people whose narratives have been subjected to a systematic process of suppression and blockage by their oppressors, who have at their disposal a powerful and effective propaganda machine. His latest book. The Politics of Dispossession - The struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994, which appeared last month, is a brilliant compendium and testimony to Edward Said's struggle to counterpoint this machine, and includes many of h is lectures and articles on the Palestinian question since 1969.
But nor is Said simply a Palestinian, denied access to his birth-place and dispossessed of his family property in Jerusalem. He is a Palestinian with American nationality, who grew up in Egypt and Lebanon before going to the US to continue his education.
Said continues to live in New York. His vantage point is that of the exile, a key term in understanding Said, who belongs to "two worlds without being completely of either one or the other." Yet rather than see his state of exile as something sad it becomes an empowering element: "Belonging to both sides of the imperial divide enables you to understand them more easily."
As a consequence Said's readings and narratives are neither simple nor monolithic. Contrapuntal is a term of which he is fond. And when he speaks about a contrapuntal reading of cultural documents, what he means is taking stock of the different voices informing any culture/cultures. "All cultures," he believes, "are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic."
With the exception of a very few references scattered through the huge body of his writings. Said has not yet provided his own narrative in the form of memoirs. This project, or at least part of it, has now found its way on his crowded agenda.
"The main task for me now," he says, "is those memoirs, which are really not an autobiography or memoir in the Taha Hussein sense of a nice narrative, but .... I decided after long reflection ... a series of autobiographical musings around several themes that seem to dominate my life until 1967 (pre-political I call it though I did have some political involvement, thanks to Palestine, from my earliest days). The idea is to keep it personal informative and frank, though I am not sure how this will be received in the Arab world".
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 24 Sept. - 1 Oct. 2003 (Issue No. 657)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/657/edsaid3.htm