On
Edward Said:
Remarks
on September 25, 2003
Drew University, Conference on The American
Empire?
By
Richard
Falk
Visiting Distinguished Professor, Global Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara and Milbank
Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton
University
TFF
associate
November 7, 2003
We are gathered this evening at a moment of great
sadness, especially for those of us blessed by friendship
with Edward Said. This sense of loss is both wide and
deep. Edward touched many, many lives, including all
those people throughout the world who knew him through
words, written and spoken. His warmth and interest in the
life of every person with whom he came into contact with
was legendary. Edward never gave anyone the sense that
they were "ordinary." He conveyed to everyone he
encountered, however routinely, of their importance to
him.
These last years of Edward's life were both a tragic
ordeal for him and those close to him, and a glorious
chapter in an extraordinary life. It was glorious,
despite the pain and suffering, because Edward's courage
and perseverance were so inspirational for his family,
friends, colleagues, and activist collaborators. During
this period Edward never lost his robust commitment to
life, especially to those he loved, but also his
engagement with friendship, fine food, high culture,
humor. In this period, Edward was angry, but never
bitter.
Edward became an academic celebrity on the basis of
his literary criticism and cultural studies long before
he became famous as the most powerful voice of advocacy
on behalf of the Palestinian people. Edward was
multi-talented, performing as a piano soloist in public
concerts, writing influential music criticism, especially
on opera. He even excelled in sports, as I discovered to
my chagrin in the course of tennis and squash
battles.
Edward's struggle with leukemia cannot be separated
from his experience of the afflictions in these years of
the Palestinian people. Edward never abandoned either
struggle&emdash;that for his own health and life, and
that for the survival of the Palestinian people. No way
of honoring Edward's life would be more in keeping with
his sensibility than to support this struggle for
Palestinian rights.
Let me comment ever so briefly on Edward's scholarly
work. There will be countless conferences and symposium
issues of scholarly journals devoted to Edward's memory
and achievement. Edward achieved widespread recognition
early in his career as a literary critic of breadth and
originality, his study of the Anglo-Polish writer, Joseph
Conrad, being particularly admired and discussed. Conrad,
who had a profound feeling for the racist and nihilistic
implications of the European colonial project, and yet
spoke with a Western accent, remained a crucial figure in
Edward's later work. This interest, culminating in the
publication of Orientalism, which became one of
the most influential books written in the prior century,
and established Edward as a public intellectual
throughout the world. This book, more effectively than
any other, instructed a whole generation as to the deep
structures of inter-civilizational bias, and about how
this bias is linked to the mis-representations associated
with narrating the history and culture of "the other," as
well as with colonialist rationales for subjugating and
exploiting an alien civilization, in this instance the
Islamic world of the Middle East. In particular, Edward
shows how the leading Western scholarly specialists
constructed a self-serving account of this "Oriental"
other that greatly reinforced the colonialist
mentality.
These same Orientalists, more shameless and dangerous
than ever, have gained great prominence and pernicious
influence in the aftermath of 9/11. Such individuals as
Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami have been repeatedly
consulted by the Bush White House, and give repeated
prime-time exposure on mainstream TV. And what is worse,
dissident voices have been excluded. These new
expressions of Orientalism have added a self-satisfied
aura of justification to American foreign policy,
providing encouragement for recourse to aggressive
warmaking around the world, but especially in relation to
the Islamic world and the Palestinian struggle. The main
policy argument put forward by the Lewis/Ajami assessment
is that the Arab world in particular, but the Islamic
world in general, respond only to the language of
force.
There are, of course, many other dimensions of
Edward's work as "public" and "critical" intellectual
that could be mentioned, but I will not attempt to do so
now. As is widely known, Edward became very disillusioned
by the postmodernist turn of literary and cultural
studies, especially carrying the literary methods of
deconstruction to the point of making any given meaning a
matter of arbitrary assertion. Edward always believed in
the humanist context of cultural inquiry, and that the
identity of the critic had to be associated with an
engagement in the historical struggles of his era.
Therefore, he found the obscurity and apolitical stance
of most postmodernists as a sterile and unacceptable
retreat from engagement. Edward's spirit can be
epitomized by a line from the Palestinian national poet,
Mahmoud Darwish's line: "What use is thought if not for
the sake of humanity."
The publication of Culture and Imperialism in
1993 was another milestone in Edward's remarkable career.
This books explores in fascinating detail how culture and
geopolitics are organically connected for better and
worse. Just as Orientalism shows how the
imperialist uses culture and knowledge as a weapon of
oppression, Culture and Imprerialism demonstrates
how the cultural output of the imperialist becomes part
of the reality of those who are situated in the colonized
world and act in anti-imperialist modes. Edward's
contributions here are both to recognize what might be
called "the politics of knowledge," and to contend
convincingly that great writers are inevitable universal,
not merely national, figures. Shakespeare belongs to the
South just as much as to Britain, and the
English-speaking world. Edward himself epitomized both
the cosmopolitanism and the sense of exile associated
with this complex hybridity, involving both rootedness in
the specifics of experience and displacement and the
mobility of ideas.
Edward believed deeply in cultural experience as
transformative in ways that transcended diplomacy. He
often mentioned how important to him was his
collaboration with the fine Israeli pianist, Daniel
Barenboim. They published a book of conversations not
long ago, which discloses the potentiality in humanist
discourse for a transcendence of the most bloody and
relentless confrontation of two peoples at this time.
Edward worked with Barenboim also to establish summer
workshops for gifted young musicians from Israel and
Palestine, allowing the language of music to challenge
the hegemony of the language of violence. In 2002 they
shared the Asturias Concord Prize in recognition of this
collaborative work that combined art and politics
symbolically and substantively.
There are several notable features of Edward's central
preoccupation with the Palestine/Israel conflict. From
the first unfurling of the Oslo Peace Process in 1993,
Edward was skeptical, if not dismissive. He stood apart
from many Palestinian and progressive friends by this
insistence that this "peace process" was either a road to
nowhere or a clever diplomatic strategy to formalize
Israeli domination. He also stood apart from the
"responsible" consensus by rejecting the two-state
option, and insisting that genuine peace for the two
peoples could only arise within the framework of a
bi-national state. More and more of those involved in
searching for a solution are reluctantly reaching the
conclusion that a two-state solution is no longer viable,
given the cumulative effects of Israeli establishment of
"facts on the ground." If such issues as the Israeli
settlements and bypass roads, Palestinian refugees, the
city of Jerusalem, and the sharing of water are taken
into account, then only a bi-national state offers hope
of a peaceful and just solution. Of course, this outcome
must still be classified as "utopian," although the
alternatives are worse as "dysutopian."
Poetry is often more meaningful than words of
remembrance. I would like to read two poems that somehow
for me express the essential quality of this sad day. The
first poem is by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, and is
about the death of his father. It seemed appropriate as
Edward often said during these final years of illness and
political disappointment that "it was my anger that keeps
me going."
Do not go gentle into that good night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good me, the last wave by, crying how
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see the blinding sight
Blind eye could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears. I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The second poem is by W. H. Auden on the death of
William Butler Yeats, entitled "In memory of W. B.
Yeats." As with Edward's relationship to the Palestinian
struggle, Yeats had a complicated relationship with Irish
national politics, lamenting the excesses of the Irish
Revolution, yet remaining passionately involved in the
Irish experience. I include here only the first of the
two-part poem, although the whole poem is relevant.
In memory of W.B. Yeats
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted.
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sand in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable
quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was last afternoon as himself,
As afternoon or nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty.
Silence invaded the suburbs.
The current of his feeling failed; he became his
admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of
the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they're fairly
accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of
his freedom.
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly
unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
©
TFF & the author 2003
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