The One About Edward Said

(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, SEPTEMBER 30, 2003)

Being online the night we heard that Edward Said died was to receive a demonstration of how deeply the man had affected his world. It was only by coincidence that I hit Google News a bare minute, literally, after Reuters and AP put the first notices up on their website: if you typed in ‘Edward Said’ just then, at that precise moment, all that came up were these two terse reports announcing that Said had succumbed to leukaemia after years of battling the disease.
Five minutes later, the bigger Western papers and the more important Arab news sites had picked it up. Ten minutes down the line, and Google News was swamped with links, starting with Al-Ahram Weekly where Said wrote regularly, proceeding to newspapers everywhere in the world, from Melbourne to Jerusalem, New York to Nevada, Valparaiso to Bombay. To witness this phenomenon was like watching a switchboard light up, was like having the lights turned off just as you look up at the sky, so that what seemed like blankess is suddenly filled with spreading, urgent pinpoints of light. Each time I searched, more and more links came up, until it seemed that the whole world had been informed, and that the whole world was mourning the death of Edward Said with the same intensity.
The Palestinian world had cause to mourn. Said occasionally grew tired of the paradoxical position his espousing of the Palestinian cause put him in—he, who had been among the first to articulate original thoughts about the injustice that had been visited upon him and his people, was condemned to restate that argument, to remind the world ceaselessly, to endlessly reiterate the roots of the problem.
Said, not a writer given to expressing himself emotionally in general, offered a rare glimpse of his personal anguish in his memoir, Out of Place: “Even now the unreconciled duality I feel about the place, its intricate wrenching, tearing, sorrowful loss as exemplified in so many distorted lives, including mine, and its status as an admirable country for them (but of course not for us), always gives me pain and a discouraging sense of being solitary, undefended, open to the assaults of trivial things that seem important and threatening, against which I have no weapons.”
Ultimately, the man who had been stigmatised as an indifferent, lazy student in his schooldays, would learn to wield the powerful weapon of his mind. Said’s critiques of the kind of mindset that allowed the Palestine question to fester for so long fed and were in turn fed by his seminal treatise on how to reread the literature we had taken for granted, in Orientalism.
It wasn’t till I read Out of Place and some of his more autobiographical writings that I realised the care and attention with which he had deconstructed his own background, always searching for the right symbols. One of the schools he went to was divided into “houses”, very like my own alma mater in Calcutta, and I still remember the wry recognition this passage called forth: “[The houses] further inculcated and naturalized the ideology of empire. I was a member of Kitchener House; other houses were Cromer, Frobisher and Drake.” Those of us who grew up owing allegiance to Charnock, Martin, Hastings and Macaulay (rather than Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru and Bose, for instance!) might indeed have cause to wince.
As Said’s reputation grew, so did the viciousness of the attacks on him. Perhaps the most pernicious attack on Said was the one perpetrated by Justus Weiner, who wrote in an article for ‘Commentary’ that Said had lied about his roots. Weiner claimed that Said’s house in Palestine never existed, or at least belonged to a distant family member; that Said had never studied in St George’s School in Jerusalem; that in effect, Said was guilty of creating a fictionalised Palestinian past in order to claim a greater solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The attack was treated with an amazed contempt when it first appeared: the truth of the matter was so very different.
It was true that the house in Palestine didn’t belong to Said’s immediate family, but it was also true that Said and his sister were born in that house, and that they spent much time there—individual ownership, as most Indians will immediately understand, accounting for far less in the clan than family ownership. Records were not available for the years in which Said was at St George’s—for all students, not just for Said—but there were at least four fellow students who could corroborate his presence there.
It was an especially vicious attack because as was apparent when it was first articulated, it was aimed at dispossessing Said twice over. He had already been removed from the land, as had many of his generation of Palestinians; now he was being dispossessed of his own memories. And it was vicious because it has lasted; it resurfaced in the usual form of rumour (“Said lied about his roots—how can you trust him?”) shortly after his death on several websites. Said had to return time and time again to explain his support for the Palestinian cause; now it seems as though Said’s supporters are caught in the same circle of endless rebuttal.
More serious, in some ways, are the attacks launched on Said by critics of his theory of Orientalism. Perhaps the most prominent but the least intellectually coherent of these critics is Christopher Hitchens, who attempted to assault Orientalism in a recent review for The Atlantic, but then veered off into a defence of the US war on Iraq and a diatribe against all those who, like Said, had attacked George Bush and the invasion.
Far more interesting is the criticism offered by commentators like Vijay Nambisan, to take just one example. Nambisan’s critique of Orientalism was expressed in his recent book, Language As an Ethic. Reading Kim and reading Said’s comments on Kipling, Nambisan came to the far more damaging conclusion that “Said ignores the rich (opulent, exotic) Indian material. He devotes the book to Europe’s picture of the Arab world.” Orientalism, one of Said’s two lasting legacies, has come under fire of late, and this is an excellent thing: the debates over Said’s once-pathbreaking work seem likely to lead into new directions, though I suspect that the Nambisan line will be more fruitful than the noisier Hitchens line of attack.
The next ten years might see a new Orientalism, or indeed a completely new theory, and I think Said would have been very glad of that. If Orientalism, or his treatise on Culture and Imperialism, had sunk into oblivion, that would have represented a defeat of his ideas, of his sense that no aspect of the world and how we read it should be exempt from examination. Socrates decreed that the unexamined life was not worth living; Said spent every moment of his adult years, whether he was addressing political questions, literary questions or a passion like classical music, examining and questioning the world that he inhabited and made such a contribution to. He left no intellectual heirs worthy of his name, and perhaps that is the only real tragedy.