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Edward
Said
Is Brighton
and Hove ‘the place to be’ for you? Or are you
still searching? If so, Edward Said is your kind of person.
A Palestinian, born in 1935 in West Jerusalem (the part
which fell to Israel in 1948), a United States citizen,
"a minority [Anglican] within the Christian minority
[largely Syrian Orthodox] in an Islamic majority setting",
his mother Lebanese, his childhood home Cairo, his schooling
British and American, his adopted home New York City,
among his passions Western literature and classical music.
Could anybody be more out of place? No wonder that he
chose this very phrase for the title of his moving autobiography
Out of Place (2000).
 I
first met Said when he was interviewed by Jacqueline Rose
at the Brighton Festival in 1995. I had corresponded with
him about a colloquium at Sussex University which I wanted
him to address, but his leukaemia and a heavy programme
made this impossible. Neither then, nor later, have we
spoken for long, but I had the impression of an intense,
but caring and approachable man, someone who suffers not
only physically but also from the mental turmoil of his
people. He is tall, lean and has a shock of black and
greying hair; his face has recently taken on a pinched
look from which his dark eyes look out almost accusingly
at a world which would often prefer to ignore him. As
a prophet of our fractured times, he is to some (myself
included) a hero, but to others a target for character
assassination and even death threats.
Until the fall of the remainder of Palestine in 1967 Said
took little interest in politics. As an ambitious American
academic his Palestinian identity was his weakest card,
particularly in that fateful year with its euphoria at
Israel’s swift victory. But Said’s integrity
would no longer tolerate such a division of himself. Since
then he has maintained with ever-greater vehemence that
literature, and the position of the intellectual, cannot
be divorced from politics. "I guess what moves me
mostly is anger at injustice, an intolerance of oppression,
and some fairly unoriginal ideas about freedom and knowledge,"
he said in 1976.
Said’s most famous book Orientalism (1978), followed
up by Culture and Imperialism (1993), developed the idea
that the West has deep-rooted habits of thought about
the East (and other parts of the non-West) and that these
serve to justify international crimes. For example, Lord
Cromer, the imperial ruler of Egypt, wrote: "The
mind of the oriental, like his picturesque streets, is
eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the
most slipshod description." It was such an attitude
which enabled Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary,
to approve in 1917 a policy of settling Jews in Palestine
without considering the "desires and prejudices",
as he put it, "of the 700,000 [Palestinian] Arabs."
For Said the central question is: "Can one divide
human reality... into clearly different cultures, histories,
traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences
humanly?" His resounding negative leads him, amongst
other things, to a radical proposal for peace in his native
land. "Israel today," he writes, "is simply
not a purely Jewish state [it has one million Palestinian
citizens] and... Palestine is simply not a purely Palestinian
Arab state [400,000 Jewish Israeli settlers live there]."
He concludes that, in collaboration with like-minded Jewish
Israelis, the Palestinians should campaign for a bi-national
state in which Jews and non-Jews live together, while
retaining their distinctive identities.
The remarkable aspect of Said’s friendship with the
Jewish-Israeli musician, Daniel Barenboim, is the extent
to which the latter is not like-minded. The title of their
recently published collected dialogues, Parallels and
Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), reflects
this difference. Barenboim, champion of the peace process,
and Said, who dismisses it as "all process and no
peace", barely meet on the political stage. What
they share is a passion for music and a belief in its
power to reconcile. Barenboim’s controversial conducting
of the first Wagner performance in Israel, and their joint
creation of an Israeli-Arab youth orchestra are the subject
of taboo-breaking discussions.
Had I never encountered Edward Said, I would have become
a convert to the Palestinian cause. But his writing has
provided me with a breadth of understanding (and not only
of this conflict) which I would have struggled to achieve
on my own.
Fergal
Keane will interview Edward Said at 7.30pm on Sunday May
18, as part of the Freedom and Independence weekend of
the Brighton Festival. Tickets £10, Dome Box Office
01273 709709. (Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity
Campaign can be contacted at: BHPSC, PO Box 208, BN1 4WZ
copyright The Insight 2003
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