Vashna Jagarnath, Amandla Magazine
On 19 March 2003, the United States declared war on Iraq.
Six months later, on 25 September, Edward Wadie Said passed away at the age of
67 in New York City after a decade-long struggle with chronic lymphocytic
leukaemia. The loss of one of the most elegant minds of the 20th century was
all the more acutely felt given that the war with Iraq was being justified and
framed by the most crude stereotypes about Arab and Muslim people.
By 2003 the dominant representations in North America and
Western Europe about a diverse region of the world, stretching from the eastern
and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, was steeped in the same set of
prejudicial stereotypes that Said had convincingly debunked in his seminal and
most enduringly popular work, Orientalism. The less than loquacious President
George W. Bush and the assortment of various talking heads and lackeys willing
to speak for power rather than truth were relentlessly reinscribing the false
dichotomy between East and West. This division between East and West really
gained legitimacy with the first Christian invasion of the Holy Lands just
under a thousand years ago.
In fact, Bush, in one of his more articulate moments, when
he actually managed to read the teleprompter correctly, announced that his war
would not be over soon, and that 'this crusade, this war on terrorism is going
to take a while'. His reference to the Crusades cast this war, legitimated on
false premises, into a war of biblical proportions, a war of us against them –
good against evil. Progressive intellectuals mounted a real resistance to
Bush's rhetoric and, outside of the right wing media, it did not become
dominant. Said's work was a luminous resource in dark times. The true
intellectual weight and measure of the legacy of the beautiful Palestinian was
put to the test and it came out punching.
In Orientalism, Said traced the history of how Europe,
through the mobilisation of a set of both subtle and overt prejudices against
Arab and Islamic people, their religion and culture, set up negative
stereotypes about a diverse region. Europe and, increasingly at the close of
the 20th century, the United States, could justify acts of war, exploitation
and colonialism against the diverse people living in a vast geographic region
based on these orientalist narratives.
Orientalism wove together the theoretical work of both the French
radical Michel Foucault and the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Said used
their theoretical innovations to reveal how orientialism – a set of discourses
or concepts – was used to legitimate a set of prejudices about the East that
functioned to justify European and American domination and was constructed and
authorised by the powerful states of Europe and the United States.
Said developed a detailed inventory of how the dominant
currents in the West had come to view the Arab-Islamic world through a system
of discriminatory stereotypes. He further demonstrated how various aspects of
discourse from literature and art to popular culture reinforced and maintained
these bigoted views of a diverse and vast area of the world. The political
success of Said's intervention lay in the fact that he did not write
Orientalism as a stolid, jargon-filled piece that attracted only a small
audience of academic specialists, or the initiatives of a small political sect.
This was a compelling intervention into the public debate – and what an
intervention it was!
Since its publication in 1978, Orientalism has been
translated into more than 25 languages, and it continues to get translated into
new languages every year. This work, for which Said initially struggled to find
a publisher, went on to transform the fields of literature, cultural studies
and history and to reinvigorate the waning field of post-colonial studies.
Orientalism joined Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre,
published in 1961, as a canonical post-colonial text. In his afterword, written
for the 1994 edition, Said noted that the book was meant not only to lift the
veil from our eyes about the various forces that had thus far shaped the
historical discourse on Arabs and Muslims, but also to 'liberate intellectuals
from the shackles of systems of thought like Orientalism: I wanted readers to
make use of my work so that they might then produce new studies of their own
that would illuminate the historical experience of Arabs and others in a
generous and enabling mode.'
Said personified the ideal of the enagaged public
intellectual. He was a thinker and activist who always sought to engage, and to
develop work and conversations, in a manner that was both generous and
enabling. Importantly, while Said was wedded to a life of radical politics,
while always a man of the left, he was never wedded to any dogmatic political
ideology. His humanist orientation to the world meant that he stood up to
injustices, corruption and authoritarianism even when they came from within the
political alliances he made. For example, Yasser Arafat came under heavy
criticism from Said when he negated Palestinian refugees' right to return to
Palestine, and Said was an early and trenchant critic of the corruption and
degeneration of the Palestinian Authority.
Said's political work included a variety of core issues
relevant to post-colonial society but was mainly concerned with the oppression,
exile and indignity suffered by Palestinians, himself included. Although Said
lived most of his life in exile from Palestine, he always carried the trauma of
the nákba – the partition of Palestine and the expulsion of Palestinians from
their land – with him, even to the last days of his life.
Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 to an Arab-Christian family
in the then British Mandate of Palestine. From a young age, Said lived in
Palestine but went to school in Egypt. This meant that even as a child, Said
always felt 'out of place' and had 'no certain identity', as his recalled in
his memoir. However, his experience of being out of place and then later exiled
gave Said the ability to straddle a variety of social and cultural contexts. He
developed a deep and intimate understanding of people from diverse backgrounds
and it was this ability to humanise the 'other' that became the foundational
strength of Said's work.
Like Fanon, Said's humanism meant that he put the well-being
of human beings before theories and, again like Fanon, his humanism was not an
abstract concept to be invoked theoretically. It was a matter of solidarity and
of political engagement to give life to that solidarity. In Humanism and
Democratic Criticism, he remarked that humanism was, for him, 'a critical
practice' that 'informs what one does as an intellectual and school-teacher of
the humanities in today's turbulent world, which is now brimming over with war,
with belligerency, actual war and all kinds of terrorism.'
If we take Said's words seriously in this world of war,
terrorism and a variety of daily struggles against powerful and often rapacious
forces, it becomes clear that, as Akeel Bilgrami has pointed out, Said's legacy
has and will continue to be primarily political. A commitment to Said's legacy
means that we should, as intellectuals, activists and human beings, seek to
understand and unravel dominant representations of power, but all the while
attempting, like Said, to create generous and enabling contexts within which we
can flourish.
I never met Said, but his work fundamentally shaped my
intellectual and political path. These lines by another great post-colonial
theorist, Gayatri Spivak, from the pages of her unfinished memoir, capture some
of the beauty, sadness and hope that move me when I think about the spirit of
Edward Wadie Said:
... I chant that wild hymn, from the time when Hinduism was
nearly indistinguishable from animism: as the ripe fruit bursts its skin, so
immortality bursts out of death. In the love of family and friends, the
intellectual journey of students. But also, harshly, literally, pushing up the
daisies. In the face of that harsh immortality, the heart must break.
('Thinking about Edward Said: Pages from a Memoir', Critical Inquiry 31, Winter
2005, p. 525)
