Edward Said was a longstanding friend and comrade. We first met in 1972, at a seminar in New York. Even in those turbulent times, one of the features that distinguished him from the rest of us was his immaculate dress sense: everything was meticulously chosen, down to the socks. It is almost impossible to visualize him any other way. At a conference in his honour in Beirut in 1997, Edward insisted on accompanying Elias Khoury and myself for a swim. As he walked out in his swimming trunks, I asked why the towel did not match. ‘When in Rome’, he replied, airily; but that evening, as he read an extract from the Arabic manuscript of his memoir Out of Place, his attire was faultless. It remained so till the end, throughout his long battle with leukaemia.
Over the last eleven years one had become so used to his illness—the regular hospital stays, the willingness to undergo trials with the latest drugs, the refusal to accept defeat—that one began to think him indestructible. Last year, purely by chance, I met Said’s doctor in New York. In response to my questions, he replied that there was no medical explanation for Edward’s survival. It was his indomitable spirit as a fighter, his will to live, that had preserved him for so long. Said travelled everywhere. He spoke, as always, of Palestine, but also of the unifying capacities of the three cultures, which he would insist had a great deal in common. The monster was devouring his insides but those who came to hear him could not see the process, and we who knew preferred to forget. When the cursed cancer finally took him the shock was intense.
His quarrel with the political and cultural establishments of the West and the official Arab world is the most important feature of Said’s biography. It was the Six Day War of 1967 that changed his life—prior to that event, he had not been politically engaged. His father, a Palestinian Christian, had emigrated to the United States in 1911, at the age of sixteen, to avoid being drafted by the Ottomans to fight in Bulgaria. He became an American citizen and served, instead, with the us military in France during the First World War. Subsequently he returned to Jerusalem, where Edward was born in 1935. Said never pretended to be a poverty-stricken Palestinian refugee as some detractors later alleged. The family moved to Cairo, where Wadie Said set up a successful stationery business and Edward was sent to an elite English-language school. His teenage years were lonely, dominated by a Victorian father, in whose eyes the boy required permanent disciplining, and an after-school existence devoid of friends. Novels became a substitute—Defoe, Scott, Kipling, Dickens, Mann. He had been named Edward after the Prince of Wales but, despite his father’s monarchism, was despatched for his education not to Britain but to the United States, in 1951. Said would later write of hating his ‘puritanical and hypocritical’ New England boarding school: it was ‘shattering and disorienting’. Until then, he thought he knew exactly who he was, ‘moral and physical flaws’ and all. In the United States he had to remake himself ‘into something the system required’.
Nevertheless, he flourished in the Ivy League environment, first at Princeton and then Harvard where, as he later said, he had the privilege to be trained in the German philological tradition of comparative literature. Said began teaching at Columbia in 1963; his first book, on Conrad, was published three years later. When I asked him about it in New York in 1994, in a conversation filmed for Channel Four, he described his early years at Columbia between 1963 and 1967 as a ‘Dorian Gray period’:
ta: So one of you was the Comp Lit professor, going about his business, giving his lectures, working with Trilling and the others; yet at the same time, another character was building up inside you—but you kept the two apart?
es: I had to. There was no place for that other character to be. I had effectively severed my connexion with Egypt. Palestine no longer existed. My family lived partly in Egypt and partly in Lebanon. I was a foreigner in both places. I had no interest in the family business, so I was here. Until 1967, I really didn’t think about myself as anything other than a person going about his work. I had taken in a few things along the way. I was obsessed with the fact that many of my cultural heroes—Edmund Wilson, Isaiah Berlin, Reinhold Niebuhr—were fanatical Zionists. Not just pro-Israeli: they said the most awful things about the Arabs, in print. But all I could do was note it. Politically, there was no place for me to go. I was in New York when the Six Day War broke out; and was completely shattered. The world as I had understood it ended at that moment. I had been in the States for years but it was only now that I began to be in touch with other Arabs. By 1970 I was completely immersed in politics and the Palestinian resistance movement.footnote1
His 1975 work Beginnings—an epic engagement with the problems posed by the ‘point of departure’, which synthesized the insights of Auerbach, Vico, Freud with a striking reading of the modernist novel—and, above all, Orientalism, were the products of this conjuncture. Published in 1978, when Said was already a member of the Palestinian National Council, Orientalism combines the polemical vigour of the activist with the passion of the cultural critic. Like all great polemics, it eschews balance. I once told him that, for many South Asians, the problem with the early orientalist British scholars was not their imperialist ideology but, on the contrary, the fact that they were far too politically correct: overawed by the Sanskrit texts they were translating. Said laughed, and insisted that the book was essentially an attempt to undercut the more fundamental assumptions of the West in relation to the Arab East. The ‘discourse’—Foucault was, alas, an important influence—of the Orient, constructed in France and Britain during the two centuries that followed Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, had served both as an instrument of rule and to shore up a European cultural identity, by setting it off against the Arab world.footnote2 He had deliberately concentrated on the exoticization, vulgarization and distortions of the Middle East and its culture for that reason. To portray imperialist suppositions as a universal truth was a lie, based on skewed and instrumentalist observations that were used in the service of Western domination.
Orientalism spawned a vast academic following. While Said was undoubtedly touched and flattered by the book’s success, he was well aware of how it was misused and would often disclaim responsibility for its more monstrous offspring: ‘How can anyone accuse me of denouncing “dead white males”? Everyone knows I love Conrad.’ He would then go through a list of postmodernist critics, savaging each of them in turn for their stress on identity and hostility to narrative. ‘Write it all down’, I once told him. ‘Why don’t you?’ came the reply. What we recorded was more restrained: