Eloquent defender
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Edward W. Said, persistent advocate of justice for the dispossessed Palestinians, was an intellectual who went beyond the private and the academic to the `public sphere'. Throughout his life, he stood up against the ongoing propaganda of misrepresentation carried out by the imperialist powers in their production of stereotypes of third world countries. On a more personal level, his capacity for friendship was remarkable, says SHELLEY WALIA, in a tribute.
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Edward W. said ... transcended national differences.
SAID died while pursuing his lifelong passions — writing and fighting for peace in the West Asia and playing Beethoven on the piano in his spare time. He died as he had lived, with panache and daring, a sturdy and persuasive defender of his countrymen and their rights. He was a man of exceptional spirit and accomplishment both as a critic and a musicologist. He will be missed for his emancipatory voice and the Nietzchean temperament of skepticism that always fell back on morals and aesthetics to offer a critique of power. Ramzy Baroud, the editor-in-chief of the Palestine Chronicle, movingly wrote on the news of his death, "As I finished reading the message conveying the poignant news, I was relieved that I had already thanked him, on behalf of my father, my mother, my grandparents and my children and the rest of the five million refugees awaiting their return to Palestine: `Thank you professor. You stood courageously for us, while many denied that our pain was even legitimate, or that it deserved to be eased'."
Edward Said was one of the most imaginative, and original, cultural and literary critics of our time and a leading authority on the Israel-Palestine challenge. He was born and raised in Jerusalem, Palestine, and educated after the first few years in Egypt and the United States and appointed finally as the University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, the highest honour bestowed on a faculty member at the University of Columbia. In 2001, he received the Lannan Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was an intellectual who went beyond the private and the academic to the "public sphere", and to the sphere of the citizen rather than that of the narrow specialist. His teaching and research undermined existing hegemonies provoking a collective will for transformation, thus making his teaching or writing as political inside the university as real politics are outside. In the continuous dialogue that he held with his students and readers, he established standards and set up a forum around which ideas gathered on the rewriting of history, over the role of the intellectual, on the power/knowledge debate and on politics, particularly his defense of the Palestinian issue.
Said bridged the gap between politics and aesthetics, between social ideas and literary values, resisting the split between the theorist and the public critic which has led to a divide in culture where literary studies have become bogged down with poststructuralist theory, eccentric scholarship, opaque jargon, and politically motivated cultural studies, compelling the common reader to a position of irrelevance. He always took popular resistance as central to his response to culture, history, social change, the problem of terrorism, of nationalism and of contemporary Palestinian poetry.
Raising problems of how a strong sense of literature itself can be reconciled with an equally strong sense of the place of literature in the course of history, Said interrogated the academics on if a meaningful criticism was still possible or whether the professionalisation of criticism had turned it into an academic discipline and a scholastic technique. His responsibility as a critic became important for his efforts in not simply taking criticism out of the academic enclaves of literary theory and philosophy but also in enabling the public to have access to a criticism that attempts to reassert the values of reason, truth, aesthetics and politics with a view to moving out of the politics of theory into the politics of activist, social and political concern.
Professional academic scholarship, he maintained, is invariably withdrawn, apolitical and private, while the absorption of intellectual life by the universities marks the decline, if not the obliteration, of the intellectual in a commodified and bureaucratised society.
Though Said's books were banned in West Asia, he defiantly wrote and spoke against the move.
I have no hesitation in clubbing him with writers such as Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, Maurice, Gide, and Malraux who were, in effect, the intelligentsia that had superseded the professoriate because of their "free-ranging work, their credo of freedom and their discourse". All through his life, Said believed that the "modern intellectual has to be cosmopolitan but always adversarial, living an isolated, yet socially engaging life, always in opposition to the establishment but with the sole purpose of trying to affect the body politic in one way or another to make sure that injustice is at least recorded".
A true intellectual must repudiate the passive, unreflexive role scripted for him by those who fabricate culture. He reprimanded university-based intellectuals for a progressive withdrawal from the general issues of public concern and responsibility, and for turning over to an increasing collusion with institutionalised and professional structures of specialisations that leave no scope for radical engagement within society. For him it was imperative to deacademise critical and literary theory, rejecting its disciplining into courses, methodologies and conferences which are utterly cut off from the political reality that they purport to address.
Said examined in Gramscian terms "the historical process" behind the deradicalisation of intellectuals in the present century, highlighting the absorption of intellectual life by the centres of learning where he is, in the words of Bruce Robins, "shut out or sold out". As cancer took hold, Said drew increasingly on his reserve energies, mixing with it the old practical approach that had marked so much of his enthusiasm for life.
Edward Said's work shows how robustly he combined academics with a vocation to act in the world with the purpose of bringing people together and always standing up for justice and freedom of thought. Transcending national differences, he and his close friend Israeli Daniel Barenboim, jointly supported the Arab-Israeli orchestra that first performed at Weimar in 1999 and a few weeks ago played in Morocco. This only showed his humanity and concern for peace in his homeland. Throughout his life he stood up against the ongoing propaganda of misrepresentation carried out by the imperialist powers in their production of stereotypes of third world countries and looked into the future as a visionary of a utopian world free from exploitation and domination, a world in which one would enjoy "anti-systematic" identities through jettisoning essentialist ideas. This, paradoxically, might appear to be a generalisation of the privileged position that Said himself enjoys, but it unquestionably is something that each daring and angry individual "for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticised and pointedly taken to task" must strive for.
Though Said's books were outlawed in West Asia and even in Gaza and West Bank, he defiantly wrote and spoke against such a ban and hoped that it would at least spark off a productive debate about his attack on Arafat's leadership and the terrorist attacks that he had engineered. More recently, Said's full-bodied critique of the American Middle East "road map", which he considered "fraudulent", bore witness to what he saw as the true onslaught on Palestine. Said often argued that "he has always pointed out that Arafat was not the President, but, in effect, the Israeli enforcer of the military occupation by other means". Arafat's coming to Gaza in July 1994 had, in Said's opinion, worsened the effects of the 29-year-old occupation.
In the wake of Yasser Arafat imposing a ban on Said's books, he suggested that the best way of removing terrorism was by removing its causes.
Lashing out at Zionism both inside and outside the United States, he burnt with the resentment of injustice and an overpowering vision of an independent, and more prosperous, future. Said had, for a very long time, suggested a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians and had strongly criticised the Oslo Accord, which he felt was a complete sell-out by Arafat. Raising his voice against intolerance, ignorance and oppression of the wicked Israeli occupation, Said also questioned the political and linguistic competence of the Palestinian representative at many negotiations and the tactless withdrawal of experts, thus allowing damaging concessions to Israel. By his detractors he was wrongly accused of being an anti-Semite for his castigation of Israel, but his writings and his conviction saw how the Palestinian refugees around the world held him in high esteem.
If I was to sum up Said's character, I could hardly do better than to say that he was a fine person who did not deviate in his own interest from what he saw to be the right course and therefore, never "out of place". And as a man of intelligence he chose the right course after serious deliberation, writing "contrapuntal" histories against the grain of exclusive canons and originary centres. I had the opportunity of being with him on a few occasions when I saw that his capacity for friendship was remarkable, and not only in his university, but wherever he went he met many who will miss his wit and scholarship.
In his latest interview on "Hard Talk" (BBC World Service Television), I saw no hint of melancholy or self-pity, though his eyes looked sunken. He looked as spirited as ever and I felt he would go on for many years. Had he not once told Robert Fisk, the forthright journalist, "I'm not going to die because so many people want me dead"?
Shelley Walia is a professor in the Department of English, Punjab University, Chandigarh. He was a Rothermere Fellow at Oxford.
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