A Farewell To Edward Said

Ghada Karmi     Al-Hayat     2003/10/2

After the initial shock of hearing about Edward Said's death on September 25^th hit me, I found myself wondering about two things: first, if the Zionist will now be celebrating the demise of one of their most successful, articulate and effective enemies. The Israelis do not seriously fear Palestinian military resistance or so-called Palestinian terrorism, or the threats of militants. The battle they fear the most is the one for hearts and minds, the public relations contest in which they have usually been the victors and the Arabs the incompetent losers. Edward Said reversed that perception in the most important of arenas for Israel and its supporters: the USA and the West. To quote Menachem Begin's words in 1948 when he was leader of the Irgun terror gang in Palestine after the massacre of Deir Yassin had succeeded in driving out thousands of Arabs, "(the massacre) was worth more to us than half a dozen battalions in the war against the Palestinian Arabs". Likewise, Edward Said was more effective than a dozen armies in the fight against the Zionists. The effect on millions of people of his speeches, writings, ideas and sheer personal charisma has been stupendous and its full effects are still to be assessed in the years to come.  

Second, I wondered where he would be buried. I say this because the Israelis, who persecute the Palestinians in life, also do so in death. Edward Said's dearest wish might well have been to be buried in his native Jerusalem. But his chance of that happening will be as small as that of my paternal uncle, the eminent nationalist poet, Abu Salma, who died in 1980. He passionately wanted that his last resting place should be a plot of earth in his native land. But, as with all such requests from Palestinians, Israel refused and he was buried in Damascus, his adopted city after the 'Nakba' of 1948. Israel, which found a grave on the Mount of Olives to bury the Jewish Check crook, Robert Maxwell, will say it has no place for these sons of Palestine to lie in their native land.

But more than anything else, I was overwhelmed with an extraordinary sense of grief and personal loss. Perhaps this was not so surprising in view of the similarities between our two stories. We were both born in the same part of Jerusalem and both had to leave our native city to live in exile thereafter. We both grew up in the West, he in the USA as a teenager, I in England from a rather younger age. Despite his American environment, he, like me was reared on English literature and remained true to it in his work and style of writing. More personally, the difficulties with his father that drove him to achieve more and more and yet left him with a sense of inadequacy echo sharply my own experience. In his memoir, Out of Place, he says, "I have no sense of cumulative achievement. Every day is for me like the beginning of a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it." - sentiments that I know intimately. For both of us, political awaking came with the defeat of 1967 and led to a new career of active involvement in the politics of Palestine.  He went on to great fame and signal achievement while my own progress was much more modest. But at the heart of his life was a persistent sense of dispossession and lack of belonging that tormented but also animated him, just as it does me. He was a cosmopolitan in the best tradition, because, as I know so well, those who lack the citizenship of their native land become citizens of the world.

Perhaps it was this sense of identification that made our encounters over 24 years so meaningful and, for me, so unforgettable. I first met him in Libya in 1976. We were both the guests of Colonel Gadhafi at a conference on Zionism and racism, which was a favorite topic then following the UN General Assembly Resolution of 1974 on Zionism. I little realized at the time that when I met this rather shy young man how eminent he would later become. The next time I saw him was in New York in 1978 when his major literary work, Orientalism, had just been published. Being no historian myself, I little appreciated the importance of the book. The storm of controversy it aroused was remarkable, and when I finally read it, I began to understand its significance for Palestinians in particular.  As is well known, what he does in this book is to expose a fundamental aspect of the Western approach towards the Orient: that conventional Western literature and scholarship about the East is colored by colonialist attitudes and regards the oriental 'other' as something less than human, an interesting object of study, rather like a zoo animal. But there is more to the book, as I will explain below.

Like all great ideas, it seemed simple and instantly familiar, as if we had all known it for ages. But it aroused hostility and admiration in equal measure. Living in Britain, I can remember the storm of vituperative commentary that appeared in literary journals and the way it polarized British historians into opposing camps. He was criticized for his allegedly simplistic analysis of Western writings on the East and of denigrating the genuine and painstaking work of many Western scholars. Many pointed to the dearth of corresponding studies the other way around. How many eastern scholars can one point to who have studied the West with such care or even at all? To my mind, there is something in these criticisms, but this was not the real point of the book. For Edward Said's real achievement is to have defined what I will call, the will to dispossess that is at the heart of this scholarship. His writings are properly situated in the politics of dispossession that have their springboard in his Palestinian origins. To understand his significance properly is to understand the recent history of Palestine. The country he was born into in 1935 was a land ruled by a British colonial administration under the Mandate granted by the UN in 1922. The environment of his childhood was colonialist and the Zionist enterprise, which had begun to flourish under British patronage at that time, was also colonialist. Although the Said family was affluent and his father a wealthy Christian businessman who afforded the young Edward a Western-style education in expensive schools, the general parameters of Arab existence were inescapably colonialist.

These influences dominated his upbringing. Even his first name is a result of them, chosen by his mother after the Prince of Wales whom she admired; evidently no Arab role model inspired her to the same extent. When the Said family left Jerusalem in 1947, they went to Cairo where he attended an English-style public school. Arabic was forbidden at home, except when speaking to the servants. As Said himself has noted, this induced a split in his sense of identity during adolescence from which he never recovered. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 led to the forcible expulsion and flight of three quarters of a million Palestinians. This physical dispossession had its parallel in his spiritual dispossession and became a basic theme in his worldview.  The Palestinian refugees' right to return to the homeland they were evicted from was a central aspect of his work. Always he returned to the fundamental elements of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians: the latter's dispossession and Israel's evasion of its responsibility for their plight.

From the start of Israeli statehood, that evasion took a path of obsessive denial. In order to maintain its fiction of innocence, Israel set about eradicating all traces of the Palestinian presence in the land. Over 400 villages were demolished and new settlements sprang up in their place. The history of 'Israel' that Israeli children learn at school is distorted to exclude the Palestinian presence. An intricate mythology of Israel's origins maps a Jewish continuity from Biblical times to the present, only interrupted by phases of transient settlement by Romans, Ottomans and British. If you knew no different, it is entirely possible to believe that no Arabs had ever existed in the country but for a few wandering Bedouin tribes. By such methods, the Israelis attempted to annihilate a whole people, their history, their memory, their language and their culture.

All Palestinians feel this insult of a double dispossession, aimed at their bodies and souls, their existence as a separate people with a history denied and their resulting sufferings unacknowledged. Edward Said felt this keenly and his writings all reflect it in one way or another. Orientalism has to be understood in this way. The Orientalist writers who described the Arabs dispossessed them too, though elegantly and with erudition. For, a people who are re-created through the prism of an alien scholarship influenced by alien notions of supremacy, are robbed of their true identity. And that is a sort of dispossession too.  

* Ghada Karmi's memoir, In Search of Fatima, was strongly endorsed by Edward Said.