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January 1, 2002
SYNDICATED: Between the lines
EDWARD Said introduces his collected essays, Reflections on exile, with a hymn to New York, the restless and turbulent “capital of our time”, where he has taught since 1963. Long before September 11 he sensed a tension between this absorbent city of immigrants and exiles and its “almost over powering status as a centre of global capital” for the world’s remaining superpower. Several of these 46 essays, written over 35 years, can be read as an indirect but impassioned argument against a looming new cold war that insists on a spurious “clash of civilizations”, and whose McCarthyite target at home would be US citizens of “suspect” ethnicity.
These essays, together with The Edward Said reader, are a timely consolidation of the work of arguably the most influential intellectual of our time. As a Palestinian-American, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and the most persuasive voice in the West for Palestinian self-determination, Said has had his career punctuated by ferocious controversy. Two years ago efforts were made to discredit him with specious claims that he had lied about his childhood. More recently the Freud Museum in Vienna revoked an invitation after Said was photographed in the West Bank throwing a pebble at Israel in a symbolic act. Once crudely disparaged as “Arafat’s man in New York”, he has been a vociferous critic since 1993 of Yasser Arafat and the Oslo Accords.
There is no such thing, Said maintains, as a private intellectual. He has accordingly sought to infuse his writing with “worldliness”, by which he means not jaded savior-faire but a “knowing and unafraid attitude towards exploring the world we live in”. His essay “The clash of definitions” should be read by anyone interested in the intellectual history of the present “war on terrorism” and its unstable elision into a war on Islam.
Said dismisses Samuel Huntington’s 1993 prophecy that post-cold war global politics would be dominated by the “clash of civilizations” as a “crudely articulated manual in the art of maintaining a wartime status in the minds of Americans and others”. As Said points out: “What is described as ‘Islam’ [in Europe and the US] belongs to the discourse of Orientalism, a construction fabricated to whip up feelings of hostility and antipathy against a part of the world that happens to be of strategic importance”. The simplistic ascription of “Muslim rage” to those supposedly resentful of Western modernity makes economic and political problems appear timeless and intractable.
Yet Said is even-handed in his scorn for African and Asian “Occidentalism”, which views the West as an abstract monolith hostile to non-white, non-Christian peoples. “Defining a culture is always a major and ... democratic contest”, he insists. While “the very idea of identity involves fantasy, manipulation, invention, construction,” seeing civilizations as clashing monoliths obscures their silent exchange and hybridity.
Embedded in these two volumes are autobiographical nuggets, a vein mined most concertedly in his 1999 memoir Out of place. In an interview in the Edward Said reader, he explains how that memoir arose from “my own sense of my life ebbing away”, his impulse to make sense of his life after his mother’s death and his diagnosis with leukemia in 1991. Born in 1935 in west Jerusalem to Palestinian parents (his father had American citizenship), Said lived between Palestine and Cairo before the creation of Israel in 1948 forced his family into exile.
The Edward Said reader traces the development of his writing, from his first book on Conrad through the 1978-81 trilogy on the relationship between the Arab or Islamic world and the West — Orientalism, the question of Palestine and covering Islam — to Culture and imperialism, whose most contentious chapter linked Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park to Antiguan slave plantations. He revolutionized the academy by insisting that Western culture could not be understood outside its links with empire and exposed the “invention” of the Orient, which “helped Europe define itself by being its opposite.”
While the Reader is suited to the systematic student, the essays in Reflections on exile provide the better lay introduction and are often lighter in tone and more catholic in scope. Although he has taught the Western literary canon alone, Said’s more journalistic essays range from Conrad and Nietzsche, Hemingway and Moby-Dick, to Naguib Mahfouz (“Cairo’s Balzac”) and Egyptology at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Classical music recurs, as Said, a sometime concert pianist, revels in polyphony and laments the modern isolation of music from other arts.
In welcome lapses into relative levity, Said finds in Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan an immigrant orphan, pioneer of “grunts and tree-swinging”, who vastly improved on Edgar Rice Burrough’s “relentlessly Darwinian” novels. Paying homage to the subversive role of the Egyptian Tahia Carioca, in his view the finest belly-dancer who ever lived, Said deplores the “appalling wiggling and jumping around that passes for ‘sexiness’ among Greek and American imitators”, noting that: “As in bullfighting, the essence of the classic Arab belly-dancer’s art is not how much but how little the artist moves.”
Said’s work has sometimes been misunderstood as attacking the Western canon, when what he does more often is read between its lines. As he says in the Reader, “I’ve always been interested in what gets left out.” In “The politics of knowledge” he sees off identity politics, which he regards as revelling in victimhood or “possessive exclusivism.”
“American intellectuals,” he says, “owe it to our country to fight the coarse anti-intellectualism, bullying, injustice, and provincialism that disfigure its career as the last superpower.” It is not least his work against separatism and artificial barriers, or the notion of “us versus them”, that makes Said a crucial and persuasive reader of the world. — Dawn/Guardian news service
Reflections on exile and other literary and cultural essays
By Edward W. Said
Granta
ISBN 1862074445. 632pp. £20
The Edward Said reader
Edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin
Granta
ISBN 1862074453
473pp. £12.99
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