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A unique literary career unfolding in print
***Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays is more than a summing up of a unique career; it is also a book for our time, especially for a world transformed by September 11, 2001 when fears of a "clash of civilizations" were being stirred by chauvinists on both sides. It is also particularly relevant now that we can witness the Israeli policy of pogrom in Palestine on television every day. Finally, it is of immense significance for us in Bangladesh as we see the attempt to whip up fundamentalist emotions and nationalistic feelings by some politicians who would take us away from the vision of a secular, socialistic, progressive Bangladesh that was the dream of our founding fathers, writes Fakrul Alam***
AT 617 pages, Edward A. Said's Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays is a big book, but it is substantial also in its contents, for it is a distillation of the seminal ideas he has been circulating in lectures, essays, reviews, and review essays over the last three decades. The earliest piece in the collection, an evaluation of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, dates back to January 1967, while the penultimate one, "Between Worlds", an autobiographical essay, was printed in 1998. Only the final piece, "The Clash of Definitions", an attack on the alarmist Samuel Huntington, has never been published before, but it makes a fitting conclusion to a book showcasing an intellectual who has time and again challenged scholarly chauvinism and reductive views of cultural "others" contained in work produced by jingoists masquerading as "experts". In between, Said assays his favorite philosophers, historians, and writers (Vico, Melville, Nietzsche, Conrad, Lukacs, Auerbach, Benjamin, Gramsci, Adorno, Poulet, Blackmur, Foucault, Williams, and Mahfouzhe is a true eclectic!), analyzes his favorite composers and pianists (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Glenn Gould), critiques people of Huntington's ilk (Naipaul, Bernard Lewis, and others), describes his favorite cities (Cairo, Alexandria, and New York), and surprises us with articles on, among other things, Ernest Hemingway, the art of belly-dancing, Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan films, the broadcaster Walter Lippman, and the Italian political filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo.
The sixteenth book that the sixty-seven year old Said has authored, Reflections on Exile offers in one cover almost all the major themes he has pursued in his career ever since he published Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Biography (1966). That book was essentially a rewriting of his Harvard doctoral dissertation and here he returns to Conrad with an essay on Conrad and Nietzsche and another one where he sees the Polish-English writer's classic novel of Latin America, Nostromo, as a fictional study of imperialism and its discontents. The field of orientalism, the subject of Said's most famous book, is re-traversed directly in the essay, "Orientalism Reconsidered" and indirectly in pieces such as "Egyptian Rites", where he considers once again the subject of Western (mis)represe-ntations of Egypt, and in "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors", where he focuses on the way intellectuals have been inspiring and sustaining imperial ventures for generations in the course of studying them. The western tendency of essentializing Islam and stereotyping Muslims, and branding them with labels such as "terrorists" ( the better to repress them!), also the subject of Said's important book, Covering Islam (1981), is treated again in essays such as "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" and "The Clash of Definitions".
But the passion that drives Said in almost everything he does is Palestine. The plight of Palestinians as they have to contend endlessly with Israeli aggression and heartless western policies is the subject of at least six of his books, The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky : Pales-
tinian Lives (1986), Blaming the Victims, (1988) The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994 (1994), Peace and its Discontents (1995), and The End of the Peace Process (2000). Palestine comes centrally to Reflections on Exile in the essays, "Reflections on Exile", "Identity, Authority, and Freedom", "Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation" and "On Lost Causes", and indirectly in many other pieces.
If, on the one hand, Said writes as a Palestinian intellectual in exile, combating western distortions of the image of Palestine and Palestinians and of Islam, and exposing the persistence of imperial ventures emanating from USA, on the other hand, he is the consummate intellectual, the cosmopolitan man of letters at home in the world of theory and "high" culture, the interdisciplinary, comparatist theorist and critic. Said's engagement with theory, amply evident in his second book, Beginnings (1975), is demonstrated in Reflections in Exile in the piece on R. P. Blacker, Georges Poulet, and E. D. Hirsch titled "Sense and Sensibility", the two entries on Michel Foucault, and the essays "The Future of Criticism" and "Travelling Theory Considered". In the last-named piece, an update of the celebrated essay "Traveling Theory", published in his sixth book, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Said illustrates elegantly how as a theorist he can travels effortlessly across borders and in time. Starting with Lukacs's theory of the novel, Said's peregrinations in this piece takes him to Adorno, and finally to Fanon, to demonstrate the history and progress of an idea, and to show how theory always travels, always moves "beyond its confinements, to emigrate". In the process, Said reveals how "the work of theory, criticism, demystification, and decentralization" is never complete, and how the movement may result in gains as well as losses.
Said's passion for "high" culture comes out in his essays on western music. A gifted pianist himself, he has a flair for analyzing Western music. This was evident in the book Musical Elaborations (1991). In Reflections on Exile, Said meditates on the pianist's art in "Remembrances of Things Played: Presence and Memory in the Pianist's Art" and "Bach's Genius, Schumann's Eccentricity, Chopin's Ruthlessness, Rosen's Gift". Not surprisingly, Said prefers polyphony in music and is a champion of counterpoint; in music, as in theory and practice his preference is also for those performers and critics who move back and forth between the "refined, rarefied world" of art to the quotidian and human life itself.
In his 1999 memoir, Out of Place Said revisited the scene of his childhood and took us to his origins in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt, tracing the steps that would take him from the Middle East to the life of an émigré
intellectual in America. In Reflections on Exile he leads us to the Cairo of his boyhood in "Cairo Recalled: Growing Up in the Cultural Crosscurrents of the 1940s Egypt" and the essay titled "Cairo and Alexander". But throughout the book he takes every occasion he can get to ruminate on Arab culture, as evident in "Homage to as Belly-Dancer' where he celebrates the career of Tahia Carioca, finding in her, "a still point of the turning world".
The essays collected in Reflections on Exile are arranged chronologically, and reading them as they appear in this book allows us to get a sense of a unique literary career unfolding in print. Intellectually, Said seemed to have digested Vico early; he has learnt from the Italian philosopher to be secular in stance and to view history as not a given but as something created. From Nietzsche he understood that the Will is always bent on acquiring power and language is something that could be put to use in the struggle for interpretations. His early training was also in phenomenology (Georges Poulet and M. Merleau-Ponty), philology (Auerbach and Curtis), and the central European tradition of nondoctrinaire Marxism ( Lukacs, Benjamin, and Adorno). After finishing undergraduate work in Princeton, where he appears to have become a lifelong admirer of his teacher R. P. Blackmur and his
mastery of the critical essay, and on completing his doctorate in Harvard, Said embraced the life of a professor of English and comparative literature in Colombia. His first book, not unsurprisingly, was on Conrad. The first few essays collected in Reflections on Exile published from that time are on phenomenology and literary criticism and esoteric/ eccentric writers such as E. M. Cioran as well as the Polish-English novelist.
But the fourth essay of Reflections on Exile signals a broadening of Said's interest. This piece on T. E. Lawrence is followed by one on Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction after 1948. In them, Said seems to be getting back to his roots and also exploring the causes that uprooted his family and sent it in exile. Written in 1969 at a time when, as we gather from one of his essays, he spent a Fulbright year in Beirut teaching himself Arabic literature and viewing first-hand the devastation caused to Palestinian lives by Israeli policies, these essays reveal Said not only focusing increasingly on imperial history and its insidious and persistent aftereffects but also on the role Arab writers are playing in ensuring the survival of their race through works intended to preserve "what was in imminent danger of extinction".
In the essays he wrote in the seventies Said appears bent on exploring the role of the extraterritorial intellectual from all sides. He is, for example, fascinated by the great Hungarian critic Lukacs who, in his pre-Marxist phase, forged an aesthetic out of loss, alienation, and exile, and who theorized then about the novel as the form for modern, unhoused man. But if Lukacs is exemplary for Said, Naipaul's stance puts him off, because the West Indian writer "prefers to render the ruins and dereliction of postcolonial history without tenderness". It is in this decade that Said strives to perfect his own theoretical position where he could make use of the insights of Foucault to show the complicity of knowledge and power in the discourse of Orientalism. It is at this time too that Said appears to have taken to heart the example of Gramsci by putting himself in the role of an organic intellectual, that is to say, someone who remains committed to his class of origin. In this, no doubt, he considers himself to be unlike Naipaul who, in Said's scathing formulation, is nothing but "a gifted native informer".
After the critical success of Orientalism in 1978, Said found himself in the forefront of what he has himself labeled as "oppositional criticism", that is to say, the kind of theory and practice that would be able to proclaim, as he put it first in his 1993 Reith Lectures, "the truth to power" (the lectures were printed in 1994 as Representation and the Intellectual). In the eighties, at the height of the Reagan era, Said exhorted his fellow American intellectuals in essays such as "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" to "break out of the disciplinary ghettoes" to which they had confined themselves. Unlike in the seventies, when he had been bent on highlighting the power of systems such as orientalism to overwhelm ordinary people in the Middle East, Said now urges his colleagues in this essay to devote themselves to "the recovery of a history hitherto either misrepresented or rendered invisible".
Nevertheless, Said gives in from time to time to feelings of irrevocable loss as he ruminates on himself as an exile in America. The title essay of Reflections on Exile is thus a somber meditation on what he calls "the tragic fate of homelessness in a necessarily heartless world" and on the realization of the "provisional" nature of all homes in the contemporary world. It is in this essay that Said introduces us to two of his favorite quotations about the fate of the exiled person. The first of this is from Adorno, who believed that an exile's true home is in his writing. This surely explains partly why Said has been so prolific over the years; it is as if he has found in writing not merely a tool with which to get back at those who have rendered him and his people permanently homeless, but also a stay against oblivion. The other quotation is from the medieval mystic, Hugo of St. Victor: "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to
whom every soil is his native one is already strong, but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land." In other words, what is lost can be compensated by the arrival of the cosmopolitan imagination; no wonder Said is a frequent critic of the excesses of nationalism, even as he champions the drive for nationhood amongst Palestinians!
As the eighties progressed, Said paid more and more attention to counter-narratives, to postcolonial attempts to either write back or reclaim through writing what had been ceded. This is why Said ends his critique of contemporary anthropology, "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors" not negatively, but by declaring that "exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries" can give rise to "new narrative forms…
with other ways of telling". As if to substantiate the point, Said returns to Arab literature in the next essay titled "After Mafouz" to highlight the works of recent Arab writers such as Ghassan Kanafani and Emile Habibi. These two, Said declares, resort to parody and exaggeration and experiment with language and represent the subversive imagination of the generation of writers who have succeeded the great Egyptian novelist.
At the end of "After Mahfouz" Said mentions how he was involved in the meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers where the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish drafted the Declaration of Statehood. Said participated in the event by helping Darwish rewrite the Declaration and translate it into English. This was the period in his life when Said was most active in the Palestinian cause and was undoubtedly the most visible Palestinian residing in the West. As he discloses in the most personal essay of the collection, "Between Worlds", he was even nominated by Anwar Sadat and Yasser Arafat to be a representative at the peace talks being held then. This was also when the Jewish Defense League put his office at Columbia University on fire. Commentary, the rabidly rightist Jewish-American magazine, attempted to smear him around this time by calling him "A Professor of Terror". But always the noncomformistin "Between Worlds" Said explains that he is drawn to the likes of Vico, Conrad, Adorno el al because they are so "highly individualistic" and because they are intellectual misfits Said managed to anger those on the left too by opposing the use of violence as the solution to the Palestinian problem. Ultimately, he drifted away from Arafat and became highly critical of the Palestinian leader because of his disapproval of half-measures such as the Oslo Accord. Said foresaw as early as 1992 that the treaty would neither bring peace, nor guarantee the Palestinians the basic rights to their lands or true independence.
Said's stubborn, eclectic, and nonconformist attitude to things come out clearly in the essay "The Politics of Knowledge". Here he notes the contributions made by subaltern, feminist, and postcolonial scholarship, amounting to almost a "Copernican revolution in scholarship". Such scholarship has drawn attention not merely to how "Eurocentric" the curriculum in western universities tend to be but also to the necessity of assimilating different "cultures, traditions and situations" in the "canon". However, he will not advocate jettisoning one tradition at the expense of the other. On the contrary, to him "it is always a matter of opening and participating in a central strand of intellectual and cultural effort and of showing what had always been, though indiscernibly, a part of it, like the work of women or of blacks and servantsbut which had been either denied or derogated". Also, Said insists, unfashionably, that it is important to distinguish between good and bad writing and that the classics of western culture should not be denigrated but made available to all.
It is important to observe that what Said has to say in some of the pieces of Reflections on Exile has a special relevance for us here in Bangladesh. For example, Said is fond of reminding readers of Fanon's critique of postcolonialist independence parties that cover up the poverty of their policies by exaggerating their nationalistic
credentials or by promoting "the cult of the Grand Panjandrum (or maximum leader)" "The Politics of Knowledge"). How true this is of our history will be obvious to anyone except the blind followers of our leading parties. These parties, it is easy to see with the help of Said, have failed "to make the transition from nationalism to true liberation" and, in fact, are guilty of policies almost as oppressive and "pernicious" as was once pursued by the colonial state. Similarly, what Said has to say about universities in the Arab world could be applied equally to our universities. Thus when Said decries the advent of party politics in state universities in the Arab world and emphasizes its lamentable consequences, it is hard not to think that what he is saying is equally valid for the public universities of Bangladesh: "To make the practice of intellectual discourse dependent on conformity to a predetermined political ideology is to nullify intellect altogether" ("Identity, Authority, and Freedom").
And what should be the role of intellectuals/academics in the postcolonial era? By the end of the eighties Said was being invited to speak on the subject and comment on his work as a professor of English and comparative literature at universities all over the world. A few of the essays in Reflections on Exile take up this question. In "History, Literature, and Geography", originally a talk delivered at Cairo University, Said observes that one role of universities is to connect cultures as well as "counterpoint" them. In "On Defiance and Taking Positions", another essay delivered apparently to the American Council of Learned Societies, Said reveals he has focused on issues such as exile, imperialism, and the consequences of empire precisely because this was what he could bring to the study of literature. He urges his colleagues on this occasion not to avoid controversies, nor to "collaborate with the centralizing powers of society". He thinks that academics should take positions, highlight whatever is willfully marginalized or suppressed, and be "clearly on the side of freedom". Or, as he puts it a little later in the same essay: "the role of the intellectual is not to consolidate authority, but to understand, interpret and question it".
In the nineties, Said became seriously ill. For a while, it appeared that he was dying. Fortunately for him and his admirers, timely treatment at one of the most advanced medical centers of the world in New York restored him. The title of the essay "From Silence to Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature, and History" thus has a peculiar resonance for someone who has been following his career in this decade. Far from becoming silent, Said ended the decade with an outburst of writing that made his voice resound again in books, pamphlets, interviews, and a twice-monthly syndicated column in English and Arabic presented in newspapers all over the world as well as the Internet. As for the essay itself, " From Silence to Sound" is a typically eclectic performance from Said. In it, he ranges freely over the music of Wagner, Beethoven, John Cage, Keats's "Ode to Grecian Urn", Thomas Mann, Conrad, Adorno, and Foucault's writing to emphasize the alternatives faced by these great figures: on the one hand, silence, exile, and a withdrawal into the self; on the other, defiance, protest, and a questioning of authority "in trying to articulate the silent testimony of lived suffering and stifled experience". It is clear that in his personal life as well as in political stance, Said took the second option almost all the time. He refuses to be silenced, and insists on being heard! As he observed in an interview published in the Internationalist Socialist Review issue of June-July 2001, the conservative press in the west has been attempting to overwhelm him with negative attention in recent years because they want his silence, but "unless I die, it's not going to happen"!
By the end of the twentieth century, and before the Al-Aqsada intifada began in the new century, Said seemed to have contemplated the possibility that true Palestinian independence was irrevocably compromised by the Oslo agreement and Palestinian statehood was a "lost cause". But typically, Said refused to give up. In "On Lost Causes" he wonders out
aloud whether his people were destined to be like the "native people of Hawaii, or of gypsies, or aborigines". His ruminations take him to a consideration of "the phenomenon of late style" in writers confronting the fact of mortality. But after taking us to the brink of defeat and death, Said pulls himself and us up by reminding us of the imperishable nature of the individual will. He concludes that "fortified by intellectual rigor and an unabated conviction in the need to begin again" no cause can be irrevocably lost. It is a thought worthy of the Palestinian intellectual who has joined his people yet again in the aftermath of the latest round of Israeli aggression and genocidal policies in this new century.
"On Lost Causes" makes for compelling reading, but surely the most powerful essay of Reflections on Exile is the concluding piece of the collection, "The Clash of Definitions". In it, Said takes on Samuel Huntington's provocative 1993 piece, "The Clash of Civilizations" to show how it is only one more of a long line of chauvinistic works produced by some western intellectuals who instead of trying to interpret and reconcile cultures do their best "to prolong, exacerbate, and deepen conflict" between them. Their stock in trade may be impressive-sounding titles such as the one formulated by Huntington, but in fact they operate on the basis of an "us-versus-them" worldview. Moreover, Said points out, academics like Huntington are guilty of stereotyping civilizations and reducing whole people to one or two negative traits.
In contrast to the "clash of civilizations" thesis, Said presents the possibility of creative interaction between them, of a hybrid and heterogeneous world containing currents and counter-currents that move cultures forward. Far from being monolithic, Said asserts, Islam contains many different strands; fundamentalism and terrorism are not the central facts about Islam. Indeed, the central fact about the contemporary world is that it is full of "mixtures, migrations, of crossings over". Huntington, then, is guilty of misrepresentation and jingoism by positing a clash between Islam and the West.. The responsible intellectual, Said implies, far from pitting one civilization against another should articulate the "borrowings and overlaps" between them. He therefore concludes Reflections on Exile by noting the "emergence of a sense of community, understanding, sympathy, and hope which is the direct opposite of what in his essay Huntington has provoked", and by urging "the dissolution of cultural barriers as well of the civilizational pride that prevents the kind of benign globalism already to be found, for instance, in the environmental movement, in scientific cooperation, in the universal concepts of global thought that stress community and sharing over racial, gender, or class dominance".
One must conclude, then, that Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays is more than a summing up of a unique career; it is also a book for our time, especially for a world transformed by September 11, 2001 when fears of a "clash of civilizations" were being stirred by chauvinists on both sides. It is also particularly relevant now that we can witness the Israeli policy of pogrom in Palestine on television every day. Finally, it is of immense significance for us in Bangladesh as we see the attempt to whip up fundamentalist emotions and nationalistic feelings by some politicians who would take us away from the vision of a secular, socialistic, progressive Bangladesh that was the dream of our founding fathers. One can only hope that the sixty-seven year old Said will continue to inspire Palestinians, secular intellectuals in universities, and humanists everywhere with his work for many more years to come. The signs are propitious: in the Preface to Reflections on Exile he promises us a book affirming "the continued relevance of humanism for our time". And September 11 and the new Palestinian intifada has galvanized him into an outpouring of essays, interviews, and lectures (check the Internet for samples). Long Live Edward Said!
Fakrul Alam is Professor of English at Dhaka University.