The Edward Said Reader Read online

  Despite her father’s history with the United States and her husband’s citizenship, Hilda Said never assumed American citizenship. After 1948, her citizenship as a stateless Palestinian presented numerous problems for the Saids. Told that she would have to reside in the United States for two years to acquire citizenship, she refused, and only after 1956, with the help of the Lebanese ambassador to Egypt, did she obtain a Lebanese passport. Twenty years later, with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war, even this passport created problems. Having come to the United States on a visitor’s visa to receive treatment for breast cancer, she overstayed the official date, and despite the fact that she was hospitalized and comatose, the Immigration and Naturalization Service began deportation proceedings against her. The case was thrown out by an angry judge who rebuked the INS for its insensitivity.

  As was common at the time for families of means, the Saids traveled often and easily between the different countries of the region. Cairo was the place of the family business, Jerusalem the center of family and relatives, and a Lebanese mountain village, Dhour el-Shweir, was the site of annual summer vacations. In Cairo, Said received a strict and unhappy colonial education, first at the Gezira Preparatory School (GPS), where there were no Egyptian teachers. He describes the colonial atmosphere of GPS as “one of unquestioned assent framed with hateful servility by teachers and students alike.”14 The family was now living in Zamalek, a Cairo neighborhood that was at the time a “colonial outpost whose tone was set by Europeans with whom we had little or no contact: we built our own world within it.” Before 1947, the Saids were virtually alone in Cairo, joined only by Said’s maternal aunt and, later, his grand-mother.

  In 1946, Said graduated to the Cairo School for American Children (CSAC; 1946–49). This school offered a more relaxed and democratic environment than GPS did, but still here Said felt alienated from his American and English classmates, never experiencing “a pleasurable moment of camaraderie,” as he recalls in his memoir.15 In 1947 the Saids moved back to Jerusalem for the bulk of that year, and Said was enrolled in his father’s alma mater, St. George’s School. Jerusalem was a tense city by this time, but Edward had lived a largely isolated and sheltered life and had little sense of the increasing gravity of the situation around him. The Saids remained in Jerusalem until December 1947, when they returned to Cairo. By March 1948, every member of his extended family had been driven out of the city by the war, and the Saids narrowly escaped. It would be forty-five years before he would set foot in Jerusalem again.

  Back in Cairo, a twelve-year-old, somewhat bewildered Said watched “the sadness and destitution in the faces and lives of people I had formerly known as ordinary middle-class people in Palestine, but I couldn’t really comprehend the tragedy that had befallen them nor could I piece together all the different narrative fragments to understand what had really happened in Palestine.”16 Said’s aunt Nabiha, “a woman of almost superhuman energy and charity,”17 moved to Egypt after the nakba (catastrophe) and began her own dedicated campaign to alleviate the sufferings of Palestinian refugees in Egypt. Said has written often and movingly about her efforts, from which he learned to understand “the desolations of being without a country or a place to return to, of being unprotected by any national authority or institutions.”18 He also seemed to draw valuable lessons of empathy and commitment from her work. Nabiha tirelessly received destitute Palestinians who enlisted her aid, pressed every friend and acquaintance she knew to place lost refugees in their offices or schools, and traveled to the squalid slums and distributed medicines and food. For her work, she earned the title “Mother of Palestine” from many of the people she assisted.

  On the whole, however, Said continued to live a relatively cloistered life as a young teenager, and he survived his schooling through compliance to authority, with little sense of who he was except a nagging feeling of being always out of place. After finishing CSAC in 1949, he went to Victoria College in Cairo, a prestigious but cheerless colonial school where Arabic was outlawed and English mores and institutions were strenuously taught and reinforced.

  In 1951 Said was sent to the United States, where he was enrolled at Mount Hermon, a puritanical New England boarding school. It was there that Said first encountered teachers who broadened his intellectual curiosity and helped him rediscover his passion for the piano. By the end of his two years there, he had become a pianist of note, and academically he was one of the top two students in his class. Despite his successes, however, Said still felt himself an outsider in this environment, and his feelings were confirmed when he was denied any role in the graduation ceremonies. Accepted to both Princeton and Harvard, Said began at Princeton the next year.

  Oppressed by the rigid club system, Said despised the oligarchic nature of Princeton in the 1950s, though writing about it now he observes: “a new faculty, the deemphasis of the wretched clubs, and of course, the presence of women and minorities have transformed [Princeton] from the provincial, small-minded college I attended between 1953 and 1957 into a genuine university.”19 Two professors, however, did have a profound influence on Said, notably the literary critic R. P. Blackmur (whose work on close, explicatory reading would influence much of Said’s writing, particularly on literature and music), and the philosophy professor Arthur Szathmary, whose critical point of view was passed on to Said. At Princeton, Said was finally exposed to the pleasures of academic rigor as opposed to rote learning, and after graduating Phi Beta Kappa he received a scholarship for graduate study at Harvard, which he deferred for one year.

  That year was spent mostly in Cairo, and it proved a difficult time for his father’s business as Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt embarked on his campaign of “Arab socialism.” Eventually the family business was sold to the Nasser government, and the family, squeezed by their resident alien status in Nasser’s Egypt, packed and moved to Lebanon. Said returned to the United States to spend the next five years at Harvard, working on a dissertation on Joseph Conrad under the supervision of Harry Levin and Monroe Engel, and, when in Cairo, continuing to study piano under Ignace Tiegerman. During his Harvard years, Said’s political life remained dormant as he immersed himself in being a graduate student of literature. In 1959 a family friend of the Saids, Farid Haddad, “a profoundly political man”20 and a medical doctor in Cairo who had worked closely with Said’s aunt Nabiha, was jailed, beaten, and killed by the Egyptian security forces for his dedicated activity in the Egyptian Communist Party. Said was—and continues to be—deeply affected by the murder: “Farid’s life and death have been an underground motif in my life for four decades now, not all of them periods of awareness or of active political struggle.”21 He would later dedicate The Question of Palestine to Farid Haddad (and to the Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein). After completing his dissertation, in 1963, Said accepted a position as an instructor at Columbia University and has lived in New York ever since. His prodigious intellectual life was about to begin.

  Said’s first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), was a fastidious, methodical investigation of the interplay between Conrad’s fiction and his correspondence. If it reveals anything about Said and his predicament, it does so in purely abstract and existential terms centered on the condition of Conrad’s alienation. As a young literary scholar teaching at Columbia University in the 1960s—where he was surrounded by figures like Lionel Trilling and F.W. Dupee—Said had placed himself in an environment that presented few reminders of his past and his identity. In 1967 all that would change.

  The Arab-Israeli war shattered and dashed Palestinian hopes of returning home. Within seven days in 1967 Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and went on to occupy the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. As Said recalled in Out of Place, the 1967 war “seemed to embody the dislocation that subsumed all the other losses, the disappeared worlds of my youth, the unpolitical years of my education, the assumption of disengaged teaching at Columbia . . . I was no longer
the same person after 1967; the shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started.”22 It was out of the experience of 1967, as a Palestinian living in the United States, that Said conceived the central theme of Orientalism. “The Arab Portrayed,” which he wrote in 1968 at the behest of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, attacked the way Arabs were portrayed in the media as only sheikhs or terrorists. For the first time, Said expressed an interest in the politics of cultural representation; he wrote: “If the Arab occupies space enough for attention it is a negative value. He is seen as a disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence, or . . . as a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. Palestine was imagined as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom, its inhabitants inconsequential nomads possessing no stable claim to the land and therefore no cultural permanence.”23

  The war also made Said reconnect with friends and relatives in the Palestinian political community in Amman and Beirut. “I began to feel that what happened in the Arab World concerned me personally and could no longer be accepted with a passive political disengagement,” he wrote.24 In 1969 he met with Kamal Nasser, a distant relative and poet who served as a Palestinian official spokesperson until an Israeli hit squad assassinated him in Beirut in 1973. Said began meeting diplomats from the United Nations in New York as his circle of associates expanded. He had been planning a book on Jonathan Swift, but his attention shifted to another idea that formed the basis for his second book, Beginnings. “ Beginnings was really a project of reaction to a crisis which caused me to rethink what I was doing, and try to make more connections in my life between things that had been either suppressed, or denied, or hidden,” Said recalled. “It was the product of the 1967 War.”

  For Said, Beginnings was an attempt to work through the conditions of his political awakening in literary terms. In the high modernist novels of Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann, he saw that beginnings were crucial to understanding how certain individuals (or narrators) negotiated authority, the power of tradition, the constraints and dictates of convention, and above all, the limits of narrative form. As Hayden White observed, Beginnings was a political allegory,25 an almost introspective work that abstractly engaged the problem of how to begin to grasp the relationship between the past and the circumstances and exigencies of the present.

  The eighteenth-century Italian philologist Giambiatisa Vico gave Beginnings its political and philosophical coherence. Vico’s importance remained for Said almost as unshakably symbolic as Conrad’s. In Beginnings, Said called Vico “a prototypical modern thinker” who “perceives beginning as an activity requiring the writer to maintain an unstraying obligation to practical reality and sympathetic imagination in equally strong parts.”26 Vico represented a method of situating and unfolding the literary work of art in all its worldly, secular relations. Furthermore, he challenged the specialization and sequestering of knowledge. “Vico’s New Science,” Said wrote, “is everywhere a reminder that scholars hide, overlook, or mistreat the gross physical evidences of human activity, including their own.”27

  Said took Vico’s New Science to heart. By the early 1970s, he became increasingly more active and engaged as a public intellectual. He began writing for a wider audience in English, Arabic, and French. He wrote op-eds on Palestine for The New York Times, Newsweek, and Le Monde diplomatique. His reputation as an engaged Palestinian intellectual was beginning to emerge. In an editorial for The New York Times, Said declared, “the Jews are not a chosen people, but Jews and Arabs together, one as oppressor and the other as oppressed, have chosen each other for a struggle whose roots seem to go deeper with each year, and whose future seems less thinkable and resolvable each year. Neither people can develop without the other there, harassing, taunting, fighting. . . . Each is the other.”28 In 1975 he testified before the U.S. Congressional Subcommittee on International Relations: “Imagine to yourselves,” he told the committee chaired by Representative Lee Hamilton, “that by some malicious irony you found yourselves declared foreigners in your own country. This is the essence of the Palestinian’s fate during the twentieth century.”29

  In 1976, two years prior to the publication of Orientalism, Said won Columbia University’s Lionel Trilling Award for Beginnings, and a year later he was promoted to Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Said’s presence and visibility in the United States was seen as indispensable to the Palestine National Council (PNC). In 1977 Said, along with his friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, was elected to the PNC as an independent, choosing not to ally himself with any of the member parties. Over the fourteen years that he was a member, Said attended fewer than six PNC meetings, and he took orders from nobody, according to Shafiq al-Hout, a long-time friend and member of the executive council of the PLO. According to Said, his membership in the PNC was largely “an act of solidarity,” allowing him to assert his Palestinian identity to act politically on behalf of Palestinian self-determination.30

  On sabbatical leave at Stanford University from 1975 to 1976, Said returned to the question he raised in “The Arab Portrayed” and completed Orientalism. If Beginnings dealt with questions of authority and power in terms of literary debates about language and narrative, Orientalism engaged the themes of knowledge and power in much more explicit ways. It examined an array of nineteenth-century French and British novelists, poets, politicians, philologists, historians, travelers, and imperial administrators. Together, their writings made up a discipline (Orientalism) by which European culture produced and managed the “Orient.” Their writings expressed “a will . . . not only to understand what [was] non-European, but also to control and manipulate what was manifestly different.”31 They formed a medium that constituted power and through which power was exercised.

  The contemporary Orientalist guild and its defenders responded fiercely to Said’s polemic. Leon Wieseltier wrote that Orientalism issued “little more than abject canards of Arab propaganda.”32 In a riposte published in The New York Review of Books, Bernard Lewis accused Said of “poisoning” the field of “Oriental” studies. Calling Said “reckless,” “arbitrary,” “insouciant,” and “outrageous,” Lewis recounted how Said, along with other Arab, Muslim, and Marxist critics, had “polluted” the word “Orientalism.” Said, Lewis argued, had attempted to denigrate the work of well-intentioned, disinterested Orientalists; he had politicized an innocent scholarship.33 Yet the shrill protests from Said’s critics revealed less about Said’s work than about the critics’ own hypocrisy. Veiled in language of “scholarship” and “objectivity,” their indignation was, as Talal Asad put it, “an indication of the Orientalist attitudes that Said himself had described.”34 Said pointed out that Lewis had merely “delivered ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism.”35

  By the late 1970s, Said’s work was beginning to gain acceptance and acclaim from a wider public. In 1979 Orientalism was runner-up in the “Criticism” category for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Said wrote a number of articles for Time magazine and several more op-eds for The New York Times that year in which he popularized many of the themes that he had discussed in Orientalism and related them to the Palestinian question. In 1979 he published his book The Question of Palestine, departing from traditional literary scholarship and into a more political, cultural, and historical investigation of Palestinian dispossession. If Orientalism defined the theories of imperialism at the level of representation, The Question of Palestine delved into the brute practices of the various colonialisms that the Palestinians have endured. American publishers found The Question of Palestine too provocative to publish. Beacon Press and Pantheon rejected the manuscript. Furthermore, many Palestinians took issue with Said’s support for a two-state solution. When a Beirut publisher offered to bring the book out in Arabic, it asked Said to remove his criticism of Syria and Saudi Arabia. Said refused, and although the book was publis
hed in Israel, it still has not appeared in Arabic.

  In 1979 Times Books published The Question of Palestine, and the next year Vintage Books brought out the paperback of this major work. Said suggested in The Question of Palestine that the political impasse between Zionism and the Palestinians was historically and culturally grounded in an unwillingness on the part of Zionism to recognize the realities and experiences of the Palestinians. “An iron circle of inhumanity” circumscribed them both. Although most Palestinians “fully realize that Israeli Jewish people . . . are a concrete reality,” Said argued, Israel’s repudiation of the existence of Palestinians prevented a resolution of the conflict. Said thus supported a two-state solution, a position that openly opposed PLO politics, although many in the PLO also realized this option was a greater possibility than liberating historical Palestine. Indeed, by 1980 Israel directly controlled large portions of the West Bank and Gaza, enforcing and justifying its military authority on colonial grounds—a dubious extension of the 1936 Emergency Regulation Act that the British had adopted to suppress Arab labor strikes. Zionism’s vision thus rested on England’s colonial legacy. Said wrote: “In joining the general Western enthusiasm for overseas territorial acquisition, Zionism never spoke of itself unambiguously as a Jewish liberation movement, but rather as a Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient.”36