Edward Said,  1935-2003

The Man Who Sought Liberty

 Mihir Bhattacharya

EDWARD Said died in New York on September 25, 2003. His last years were marked by a prolonged and dogged fight with Leukaemia.  In a way what went on in the battlefield of his body is reminiscent of the bitter struggle he waged against imperial domination throughout his distinguished career.

The foremost political issue he continuously sought to bring into the arena of public discussion was the cause of Palestine and its people. It is not generally  known how much opprobrium, injustice, insult and threat was directed against Said for his spirited, eloquent and untiring efforts on behalf of his people. He was well-settled in the United States, a respectable academic, one of the pillars of the alternative intellectual establishment, an international celebrity who would be adored for his very difference. The west is continuously looking for safe deviance which can be fitted into cosy slots and which would legitimise the overarching dominance of mainstream intellectual and cultural productions.  But Said was anything but safe. A thorn in the flesh of the imperialist-zionist consensus, an indefatigable campaigner for the liberation of Palestine, a defender of the rights of refugees and migrants, he stood out in America as a man who would not be cowed or corrupted into complicity. Said had his differences with various strands of political leadership in the Arab world, and he was a never a part of the Palestinian or Arab community in the full sense of the term; he was a secular, democratic, independent-minded participant in the cause against imperial hegemony, bitterly critical of regressive Islamic positions, trying continuously to evolve a rational, humane, equitable order of peoples living together, continuously frustrated by entrenched bigotry, oppression and injustice. Two major books – The Question of Palestine (1980), and After the Last Sky (1986) – and a great many articles described the moral and intellectual work through which he sought to reach his imagined community.

This community, the Palestinian or the Arabic or the Oriental, had not been easy to imagine, or having imagined it, easy to reach. Said was not really a refugee or a displaced person. There was a certain choice in the first part of his career which eased this very clever and erudite man into the appointed slot of civilised, urbane, distinguished academic. His early work – Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966) and Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) – did enough to launch him into the trajectory of success which needs one or two damn good books. But the will to challenge the logic of Arnoldian high culture is already there, the search for an alternative critical position is immanent. This called for elective affinities. And Said chose to be a Palestinian, an Arab, a third-world person. Later on, he would imagine himself into a community of exiled, footloose, transnationally nationless people. This gave a moral and visceral edge to his critique of the western canon, his radical interrogation of the prescribed ramble among the masterpieces. The firm anchor in a secular, rational, critical view of the world, memorably put on view in The World, the Text and the Critic (1984), demands a kind of partisanship which stand up to the quasi-theological orthodoxies of the west.

Locations are very important in Said’s work. He makes it very clear in the beginning of his major work Orientalism (1978) that he was writing from a definite position, a position which has moral, intellectual, historical and geographical specificities, and without which much of the import of what he wants to say will be lost. The breathtaking novelty of Orientalism shook up the intellectual establishment in the Anglophone world; it came at the right time. Foucault’s brand of historical Post-structuralism was just beginning to form something like a fashionable orthodoxy; the flush from the hard-headed theoretical anti-humanism of seventies Marxism was fading; right wing reaction was taking over the control of political and economic centres of power knowledge. The cultural turn was already in place. Said’s book goes into the intellectual and cultural construction of the western view of the east — the vanquisher putting the vanquished in place.  As Said himself acknowledges, his work follows that of a great many others — both eastern and western, but his harnessing of the Foucauldian paradigm of power generating discourse and discourse determining praxis gave a particular slant to his argument and a certain power to his rhetoric. The world of the silenced, the repressed, the disempowered is set in stark contrast to the coercive reconstruction of the orient in hegemonic western discourse. The breadth and depth of the scholarship, the elegance of the argument, the cutting edge of ethical liberalism which underlies his sympathy for the underdog — all this combined to make the academic world sit up and take notice. Orientalism was the shaping influence on a great deal of other work. It was the pioneering text in what came to be known as Postcolonial Studies. Said’s particular inflection of Post-structuralism extended the horizon of the humanities and social sciences in many third world countries. Despite its limitations, Orientalism continues to be a seminal text in understanding the discursive formation known as the west.

Said himself saw some of these limitations in later work. But the theoretical thrust of Orientalism is a little lost in collections such as Imperialism and Culture (1993). His strength of scholarship and of textual analysis continued. In fact, Said belonged to the breed of polymaths who had made western literature their happy hunting ground. His taste in western classical music, about which he wrote with enormous elan, his grasp of theory, his knowledge of languages, his meticulous scholarship and very shrewd judgements — all this would have ensured for him a respectable position in academic circles. That he was great deal more than an esteemed scholar and critic is due to the choice he had made in mid-career, a choice of location, a moral position which generated a certain kind of politics.

Said was no Marxist, let alone communist. Marxism in Orientalism is consigned to the catch-all container of Eurocentric discourse. In fact, his understanding of the economic base of modern-day imperialism was not very profound, and one is never sure whether he had ever thought out the theoretical implications of people’s freedom or people’s democracy. He was passionate about freedom from dominance and he wanted freedom for all. But just what would bring this freedom remains a little hazy. And yet, the untheorized or inadequately theorized evasion of Marxism notwithstanding, Said’s work will remain a testimony to the strength of conscientious-objectionism in the interstices of western thought. If we feel solidarity with the millions who thronged the streets of western cities to express anger and anguish over the plight of the Iraqi people or to condemn the global ambitions of imperialist capital working through the WTO, we realise that the world needs more people like Edward Said. He will be missed.