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Today's
Stories
October
2, 2003
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess and Why?
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
Recent
Stories
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
October
2, 2003
The Moment of Myth
Edward
Said (1935-2003)
By HAMID DABASHI
Close proximity to a majestic mountain is a mixed
blessing -- one is at once graced by the magnanimity of its pastures
and the bounty of its slopes, and yet one can never see where
one is sitting, under the shadow of what greatness, the embracing
comfort of what assurance. The splendor of mountains -- Himalayas,
Rockies, Alborz -- can only be seen from afar, from the safe
distance of only a visual, perceptive, appreciative, awe-inspiring
grasp of their whereabouts.
A very happy few -- now desolate and
broken -- have had the rare privilege of calling Edward Said
a friend, fewer a colleague, even fewer a comrade, only a handful
a neighbor -- the closer you came to Edward Said the more his
intimate humanity, ordinary simplicity, the sweet, endearing,
disarmingly embracing character -- his being a husband, a father,
a father-in-law, an uncle, a cousin -- clouded and colored the
majesty that he was. Our emails and voicemails are still full
of his precious words, his timely consolations, anecdotal humor,
trivial questions, priceless advice -- all too dear to delete,
too intimate to share. We were all like birds flying around the
generosity of his roof, tiny dandelions joyous in the shade of
his backyard, minuscule creatures pasturing on the bounteous
slopes of the mountain that he was.
The prince of our cause, the mighty warrior,
the Salah al-Din of our reasoning with mad adversaries, source
of our sanity in despair, solace in our sorrow, hope in our own
humanity, is now no more.
In his absence now it is possible to
remember the time when you were and he was not part of your critical
consciousness, your creative disposition, your presence in the
world -- when he did not look over your shoulder watching every
single word you wrote.
If remembering the time that you were
but he was not integral to you is not to be an exercise in archeological
futility, then it has to account for the distance, the discrepancy,
between the bashful scholasticism of the learning that my generation
of immigrant intellectuals received and the confidence and courage
with which we can stand up today in face of outrageous fortune
-- hand in hand with our brothers and sisters across races and
nations, creeds and chaos -- and say, "NO!"
Today, there is a solidarity of purpose
among a band of rebels and mutineers -- gentiles are among us
and Jews, Christians and pagans, Hindus and Muslims, atheists
we are and agnostics, natives and immigrants -- who speak truth
to power with the voice of Edward Said the echo of our chorus.
How we came here -- where we are, hearing with his ears, seeing
with his eyes, talking with his tongue -- is a question not for
making an historical record but for taking moral courage.
Now in the moment of his myth, when Edward
Said has left us to our own devices and joined the pantheon of
mythic monuments, is precisely the time to have, as he once said,
a Gramscian inventory of our whereabouts -- once with, and now
without him. Today the world is at once poorer in his absence
and yet richer through his memory -- and precisely in that paradox
dwell the seeds of our dissent, the promise of our future, the
solemnity of our oath at the sacred site of his casket.
I come from a generation of immigrant
intellectuals who mark the origin and disposition of their critical
intelligence from the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism
(1978). The shape of our critical character, the voice of our
dissent, the texture of our politics, and the very disposition
of our courage, are all rooted in every nook and cranny of that
revelatory text. It was in the year of the Iranian Revolution,
1979, less than a season after the publication of Orientalism,
that Samuel Klausner, who taught us theory and method, first
introduced me to Edward Said's spectacular achievement in an
utterly prosaic manner. I was a graduate student at the University
of Pennsylvania, finishing a dual degree in Sociology of Culture
and Islamic Studies. By the time I read Orientalism (inhaled
it rather, in one deep, satisfying swoop -- drank it like a glass
of freshly squeezed lemonade on a hot summer day), I had already
read Karl Marx, Max Scheller, Max Weber, and George Herbert Mead
on the sociology of knowledge. What Said had argued in Orientalism
was straight out of a sociology of knowledge angle -- and yet
with a globality of vision, a daring, defiant imagination, and
with such an assured audacity that I remember I could not believe
my eyes -- that I was reading these words in that particular
succession of reason and rhetoric.
By the mid-1970s, my generation of sociologists
at Penn had already started reading Michel Foucault in a systematic
and rather unusual curriculum given that the discipline of sociology
was then being rapidly sold out to federally funded policy research
and demography -- a downward spiral from which a once groundbreaking
discipline never recovered. But at that time at Penn, Phillip
Rieff, Digby Baltzell, Samuel Klausner, Harold Bershady, Victor
Lidz, and Fred Block were serious theorists with a relatively
universal approach to their sociological concerns. I wrote my
doctoral dissertation with Phillip Rieff advising me on the sociological
aspect of my work and with the late George Makdisi on the Islamic
aspect. But the seed that Orientalism had planted in my critical
consciousness never left my thoughts after that fateful Fall
semester of 1979 when we read it with Samuel Klausner in that
dimly lit, tiny room on the fifth floor of McNeal Building off
Locust walk on the Penn campus -- smack in the middle of the
hostage crisis in Iran, when I could hear a chorus of Penn undergraduates
shouting in unison, "Nuke Iran, Maim Iranians!"
Take Orientalism out of that curriculum,
Edward Said out of our consciousness, and my generation of immigrant
intellectuals would all be a bunch of dispirited souls susceptible
to chronic melancholy, or else, horribile dictu, who would pathetically
mutate into native informers of one sort or another -- selling
their souls to soulless sultans in DC or else to senile patriarchs
in Princeton.
I had no clue as to Edward Said's work
in literary criticism prior to Orientalism, and for years after
my graduation I remained entirely oblivious to it. It was Orientalism
that would not let go of the way I thought and wrote about modern
or medieval Islamic or Iranian intellectual history. From then
on, I began a journey, at once professional and personal, moral
and intellectual, that brought me literally to his doorstep on
the campus of Columbia University -- where I now teach. To my
dying day, I will cherish the precise spot next to Miller Theater
on the corner of 116th and Broadway where I met Edward for the
first time and went up to him and introduced myself -- the gratitude
of a liberated voice in my greetings.
I discovered Edward Said first from Orientalism
then his writings on Palestine, from there to his liberating
reflections on the Iranian Revolution, and then from there I
began an almost Jesuit training in every single book he ever
wrote and the majority of his essays and articles, reading and
re-reading them like a dutiful student preparing for a doctoral
exam, long after I was giving doctoral examinations.
Today, of the myriad of things I have
learned from Edward Said, nothing matters to me more than the
rhapsodic eloquence of his voice -- the majesty, confidence,
courage, audacity, and poise of his diction, without which my
generation of immigrant intellectuals would have been at the
mercy of mercenary academics and embedded journalists who have
now flooded the gutters of the mass media -- uttering their pathologies
with thick Arabic, Persian, or South Asian accents and yet speaking
with a nauseating "We" that sides with the bankrupt
architects of this predatory empire. In Edward Said's voice,
in his princely posture and magisterial air of confidence, the
fragile tone of our almost silent objections and the frailty
of our say in the matter suddenly rose to the occasion.
Through Edward Said we suddenly found
comrades we never knew we had, friends and families we never
suspected in our own neighborhood -- Asia, Africa, and Latin
America suddenly became the extension of our home away from home.
Jose Marti I discovered through Edward Said, as I did Kojin Karatani,
Chinua Achebe, Eqbal Ahmad, Tariq Ali, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri
Spivak, Seamus Deane, Masao Miyoshi, Ngugi wa Thiongo. Everyone
else we thought we knew he made new sense of for us -- Aime Cesaire,
Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahmoud Darwish, Nazim Hikmat,
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
As the color of our skin began to confuse
the color line drawn tyrannically between blacks and whites in
the United States -- segregated in the respective corners of
their misplaced confidence about their races -- we Asians and
Latinos, Arabs, Turks, Africans, Iranians, Armenians, Kurds,
Afghans and South Asians were instantly brought together beyond
the uncommon denominator of our origin and towards the solidarity
of our emerging purpose, the nobility of our handshake with Edward
Said.
For years after I had come to Columbia,
I could not quite reconcile the public, mythic, iconic Edward
Said, and the immediate Edward of my increasing acquaintance
and friendship, camaraderie and solidarity. It was as if there
was an Edward Said the Magnificent for the rest of the world
and then another Edward for a happy few. The two were not exactly
irreconcilable; they posited a question, a distance in need of
traversing -- how could a mortal so fragile, frail, and accessible
cut a global figure so monumental, metaphoric, parabolic?
When two years ago an infamous charlatan
slandered me in a New York tabloid and created a scandalous website
to malign my public stand against the criminal atrocities he
supports, my voicemail was flooded with racist, obscene and threatening
messages by the lunatic fringe he had let loose. Smack in the
middle of these obscenities, as if miraculously, there was a
message from Edward -- a breath of fresh air, refreshing, joyous,
re-assuring, life-affirming: "Hamid, my dear, this is Edward
. . ." Life was so amazingly beautiful. I kept listening
to those obscenities just for the joy of coming to Edward's message.
There was something providential in his voice -- it restored
hope in humanity. Today at Edward's funeral, the heartbroken
few who could look over the shoulder of the pallbearers of Edward's
coffin were witness to yet another sublime restoration of hope
when Daniel Barenboim played Bach's Prelude in E-Flat from Part
I of the Well-Tempered Clavier as a musical tribute to his deceased
friend. Those in the vicinity of this miracle saw and heard that
the Maestro's loving farewell was no longer just a virtuoso pianist
playing a beautiful piece of music-- but that they were privy
to Daniel Barenboim speaking with Edward Said for the very last
time, in the common language of their choice, privilege and transcendence.
Edward Said was the walking embodiment
of hope -- one extraordinary incident that sought and detected
an extraordinary sparkle in otherwise very ordinary people who
happened on his watch. Years before, when I had open heart surgery
and my dear, now departed, friend and colleague, Magda al-Nowaihi
was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Edward was extraordinary
in his support: calling on us regularly, sending us his new books
and articles, reading our manuscripts, making fun of what he
called our postmodernisms -- he was the sound of our laughter,
the color of our joy, the shape of our hope. Magda fought her
malignant cancer for years until her young children became teenagers;
I defied my congenital fate and lived -- Edward, the model of
our endurance, the measures of our truth, the meaning of our
daring to walk into a classroom.
The closer I became to Edward the more
impossible it seemed to tell what exactly it was that went into
the making of his heroic character in such mythic measures --
by now I was too close to the mountain, embraced by its grace,
oblivious to its majesty. But even in public, the account of
his life that Edward Said published is no different. One reads
his Out
of Place (1999) in vain looking for a clue, a succession
of historical or psychological causes and traits, as to what
great or consequential events make for a monumentally moral life.
Everything about Edward Said was rather ordinary, and yet an
extraordinary adventure was made of the prosaic occurrences of
this very life.
Born in Palestine in 1935, named Edward
after the Prince of Wales, he lived a life of exile like millions
of other Palestinians in the Arab world. Sent to Mount Hermon
High School in New England, and subsequently to Princeton and
Harvard for his higher education, Edward Said reports of no extraordinary
event that one can identify, analyze, theorize as the defining
moment of the mythic figure that he cut at the time of his untimely
death. Edward was an ordinary man. Edward Said was a giant. The
distance was covered by nothing other than the glory of his daring
imagination.
Knowing Edward Said personally was a
study in how heroes are made from the flesh and blood of the
most ordinary and perishable realities. A Palestinian, an exile,
an academic intellectual, a teacher, a scholar, a husband, a
father, a friend: none of this common and abundant evidence of
a disjointed world can account for the sum total of Edward Said
as a towering figure measuring the very definition of a moral
life.
"Did you know Professor Said,"
I asked Chaplin Davis here at Columbia when looking for a place
for Miriam Said to receive the flood of visitors who wanted to
pay their respects last Friday. "I never met him,"
she said, "but I know he was a warrior," and then she
looked at me with a bright set of shining eyes and added ".
. . for justice." "It was just like a light going off
on campus," another colleague said of Edward's death.
If one is to begin anywhere to place
the particulars of Edward Said's moral and intellectual life
together it is not in the prosaics of his exilic life that he
shares with millions of others, Palestinian or otherwise, but
in the poetics of his creative defiance of his fate -- where
he was able repeatedly to give birth to himself. At his death,
Edward Said was the moral mandate, the volcanic outburst of a
life otherwise wasted in and by accidents that accumulate to
nothing. Exile was his fate and he triumphantly turned it into
the fruit of his life -- the gift he gave to a world now permanently
cast into an exilic departure from itself.
We can find few places in Out of Place
that reveal the creative concatenation of such moments better
than the concluding paragraph of the book. Like his life, Said's
autobiography has to be read from its endings and not from its
beginnings. "Sleeplessness for me," he says, "is
a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost" (295).
He stayed awake when the world went to sleep -- the insomniac
conscience of the world, conversant with Minerva, observant with
his eyes wide awake, like a wise owl, all-seeing, all-hearing,
vigilant. "There is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately
shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night's loss, than
the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what
I might have lost completely a few hours earlier."
It is here, in the twilight borderline
of repeated promises of a dawning light against the assured persistence
of darkness, when it appears that the darker moments of our despair
must yield to brighter hopes, that we always find Edward Said
waiting for the rest of us to awake, to arrive. "With so
many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer
being not quite right and out of place." Right here, I believe,
Edward Said has rested his case and left his indelible mark on
the rest of us, trying, as we are, to learn from him how to complement
fatefully while remaining humanly incomplete. That, in my judgment,
is the principal reason why such a multitude of people ordinarily
at political and ideological odds with each other deeply loved
Edward without contradicting themselves or him. His was a spontaneous
soul -- he generated and sustained good will and moral purpose
on the impulses of the premise he was given, not on the projected
idealism of some metaphysical certainty.
What was paramount about Edward Said
is that in his utter solitude he was never alone. He always spoke
for an otherwise muted possibility of living a moral life against
all odds, a graceful David swinging his sling and launching his
stones against the Goliath of a world so mercilessly cast in
the logic of its own madness -- to be the moral voice of a people,
and to turn the tragic fate of that people into the tragedy of
a global predicament in which we have all become homeless Palestinians.
His virtue was to turn the vices of his time into momentous occasions
for a more universal good that went beyond the specificity of
one wrong or another. There was a catholicity to his liberating
knowledge, a generosity to his moral rectitude, that easily transgressed
boundaries and put to shame all territorial claims to authenticity.
He was, as he rightly said, always slightly out of place, but
that only brought out what was wrong with that place that could
not completely accommodate him in the entirety of his character
and culture.
In his legacy, Said has made a universal
virtue out of the particular predicament that the world handed
him at birth. Born in Palestine but denied his ancestral claims
on that land, raised in Egypt but schooled with a British colonial
education, dispatched to the United States by way of his father's
claiming a more permanent part of his American dream but constantly
driven to speak the truth of that lie to the powers that hold
it, Said turned the inevitability of his fate into the defining
moment of his stature as the iconic figure of an entire generation
of hope -- against a whole culture of despair.
Edward Said's life has its most immediate
bearing as an eloquent testimonial of a people much maligned
and brutalized in history. His life and legacy cannot and must
not be robbed of that immediacy. It is first and foremost as
a Palestinian -- a disenfranchised, dispossessed, disinherited
Palestinian -- that Edward Said spoke. The ordinariness of his
story -- particularly in those moments when he spoke openly,
frankly, innocently of his early youth, adolescence, sibling
rivalries, sexual maturity, etc. -- is precisely what restores
dignity to a people demonized by a succession of purposeful propaganda,
dehumanized to be robbed of their homeland in the broad daylight
of history. No assessment of his multifaceted achievements as
a teacher, a critic, and a scholar, no laudatory endorsement
of his universal humanism, no perfectly deserving appreciation
of him as a musician, an essayist, a subaltern theorist, a political
activist, etc. -- nothing should ever detract from his paramount
significance as a Palestinian deeply wounded by the fate of what
he repeatedly and wholeheartedly called "my people."
But Edward Said was not just a Palestinian,
though a Palestinian he proudly was. Edward Said also became
an icon, a moral paragon in a time when taking desperate measures
have cast doubt on the very possibility of a moral voice, and
here the ordinariness of his life makes the extraordinary voice
that he was even more enduring. Said was not just a Palestinian.
But he made every one else look like a Palestinian: made homeless
by the mad logic of a brutal game of power that has robbed the
whole world of any semblance of permanence.
How to remain an incessantly moral voice
in a morally impermanent world, how to transfigure the disfigured
mutations of the world into a well-mannered measure of truth,
how to dismantle the power that false knowledge projects and
yet insist that the just is right and the truth is beautiful
-- that is the legacy of Edward Said, right from the mountain
top of his majestic peak visible from afar, down to the slopes
of his bountiful pastures which few fortunate souls were blessed
to call home.
Hamid Dabashi
is the Chair of the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures
(MEALAC) Department, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies,
and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Comparative
Literature and Society at Columbia University.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
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