October 5, 2003

Professor Edward Said, who the world knew as one of the greatest intellectuals of modern times, died on September 25. Last year, Emmanuel Hamon filmed Said’s narrative of his life’s journey from a child to a man, from Palestine to Cairo to New York for French Television TV5. Aquila Ismail writes about the Palestinian thinker, author and activist as he emerges in “Selves and others”

RARELY have I seen such a spell-binding narrative. Almost an hour passes by and you feel it has gone by in the wink of an eye. In the film, Said looked emaciated as his illness had taken its toll. “My illness takes up fifty to sixty per cent of my time... but I never ask how much time I have left... I never discuss the future... it never enters into the calculation... the most important thing is now... to get the most out of the day...”

Said lived in New York and the film had him sitting in his office, his apartment and going down the noisy streets of New York. For him this city was the ideal place for a dispossessed person, “there is a quality of impermanence here. This city is perfect for me to live in this country where there is so much emphasis, false emphasis, an ideological emphasis on belonging, rootedness, nationhood and community... all these are antithetical to what I feel.”

Said inherited an American citizenship from his father and came here at the age of fourteen in August 1951. “We were Palestinians, and Christians... I was always slightly outside the mainstream... and had multiple identities which I had to negotiate.” But he admits that having multiple identities and histories and languages can be a source of discovery.

In the film he explains that the idea behind his book Orientalism was to seek out the origins and give coherence to descriptions of the orient that began to appear in Europe, in the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, that were different from those appearing before. Orientalism, according to him, is really the manufacture of “the other” and “the other” is of great convenience to oneself and is mainly done for the purpose of domination. Knowledge and domination in the imperial context almost always go together. He also argues that the representations of the orient insinuate themselves into the minds of the Indians and the Arabs and the Persians that is to say that they become part of this system by acquiescing in it. It is only, when the empire becomes a business and a going concern, that the system of orientalism is in place.

Said argues that the designations of East and West, Orient and Occident, typify nationalities, if they are taken to the degree that they have been. In that context, orientalism is really the profound study of ‘the other’. If one studied the circumstances in which this kind of knowledge grew and how it was associated with the empire then the real question arose, ‘Can one maintain that kind of knowledge and at the same time maintain humanism?’ Said feels that there is something profoundly anti-humanist about the alienation of the other. He was until the end trying to define the relation between humanism and knowledge. He sees knowledge not as a frozen entity, equivalent to rows of books sitting quietly with a threatening formidable presence, but rather as something constantly in motion, constantly being added to, dynamic, where you and the other are always in dialogue based on comprehension of common ideas about humanity, about human history, human ambition and, above all, human freedom.

Here is Said pointing out that all human differences are historical, not genetic or metaphysical. Therefore, to assign certain values to a large collectivity of people is something about which he is very doubtful. He asserts that it is a much more complex thing than saying East versus West because if one deconstructs these values that are for instance assigned to the West — human freedom, compassion, dignity — one finds them to be common to everyone. To describe them as Western values is basically demagoguery. The West also displays belligerency and aggression.

These are historical differences which have been manufactured for purposes of domination over resources, such as oil, or out of geopolitical strategies to determine the control of specific geographical areas.

In the film, Said also talks about his interest in how cultures feed across dividing lines, which to him really are lines of co-existence and counterpoint. This is a term he borrowed from music and the film has him playing the piano as background score. The music is rich even though Said refers to himself as a failed musician.

At one stage, Said makes a very insightful observation about history, which he terms as the ‘contest over history’. Who owns history? Who is to say this is mine and this is not... who decides what is to be suppressed and what is to be revealed. How do certain things get effaced from memory, what is the official past, what is not. These are questions that we really need to ask of our society.

In 1967, the defining year for the Arab-Israeli conflict, Said was a young assistant professor in Columbia University. He says that this was the perfect moment for him to deny who he was. Everywhere the Americans were with the Israelis, identifying with Israel’s victories. So not only was he on the losing side but on the discredited side. The narrative built around the conflict, and one which the American media reinforced in the popular mind, was that the Jews were democratic, pioneering, plucky and white like ‘us’, whereas the Arabs were violent, fanatical and so on. So here was an Arab made to at once feel guilty, trying to prove his innocence.

But it was after the 1967 war that Said really began to be involved in Palestine. Here was a potentially colonial situation and in his opinion the main players in the Arab-Israeli conflict were the Palestinians and the Israelis and that is what attached him to the cause. There was tremendous injustice to simply dispossess and remove and cleanse ethnically a people. But he insists that the core of the issue is the Palestinian people and the Israeli people. Also in both cases there is an important extension of both people making up the diaspora which make the Israeli Palestinian conflict different from say the conflict in South Africa which was essentially about the people living there.

The diaspora played an important role in the Middle East situation. In the case of Israel, the Jewish diaspora served as a source of immigration to the Jewish state as well as a source of support. Now the refugee population of Palestine has been a key element because this is where the Palestinian movement began. The PLO consisted of expatriate Palestinians. When Arafat took over the leadership of the PLO in 1968 he had spent most of his life in Kuwait. Said joined the Palestine National Council in 1977.

Said points out that Israeli history for the Palestinians is generally only the history of oppression of the Palestinians, and a narrative has been constructed around this in the popular mind that Israel destroyed their lives. It is still very difficult for an Arab to accept the idea that most Israelis, as a people, come from a history of oppression, genocide and persecution. On the other side it is the same. Most Israelis consider the Palestinians inferior, black people, niggers and wogs. So 1948 which is the Nakba i.e. dispossession for the Palestinians, is the year of independence for the Israelis. But if one asks , “Independence from whom?” they say they got a state of their own. “But at what cost?” At the price of the destruction of Palestinian society. With all this, Said says it is rather difficult to introduce another kind of dynamics.

Said finds the narrative intellectually and politically more complicated than that. There are many ways in which Palestinian and Jewish histories intersect and depend on one another. In Palestine, one could not have survived the terrible days of the second intifada without the commitment of the men and women who ran the hospitals, the health services and the schools. With this Said means that in Palestine there is an infrastructure of civil society which Sharon has been unable to destroy; and it is this element which will provide the leadership for the next phase of the struggle. It is principally a cultural and political leadership rather than a military leadership which is the only hope.

The armed struggle model of Fatah and the PLO which played a very important role for a long time is now gone. The same is true for Israel. The army which was the core of Israeli society has brought discredit to the state. It is now involved in war crimes and in the abuse of civilians and the leadership of the future cannot be drawn from there.

Said says that a major part of his work as a Palestinian intellectual is to keep the question of Palestine alive which means going against the prevailing policy in America and elsewhere. But it is the role of the intellectual to keep asking questions, to disturb people, to stir up reflection and provoke controversy and thought. Finally the role of the intellectual is never to justify power. Always to be critical of power, always to challenge power whether it is the power of the strong or the weak.

But this does not mean that the role of the intellectual is to preach. Rather it is to provide alternative models and also resources of hope that it is not in one’s destiny to be prisoners of war, or be refugees, or commandos or even an army of occupation. There are choices and the intellectual has to be able to point these out. He has to be engaged and affiliated. He has to continue writing, speaking organizing and become part of a social movement while the movement itself would in turn need criticism and opposition.

An ‘intellectual in opposition’, a musician, a literature professor, a critic, writer, totally engaged even when his body was so decimated, Said became a legend and a hero in his lifetime. The film has it all. It’s a memento to be treasured and looked at again and again to clear up what living should really be about, especially now that Said is no more.