Hello friends,
We join progressives around the world in mourning the passing of Edward Said. Below are some tributes to a great man, posted by Portside, that express the loss far more articulately than I can.
Amy Goodman ran one of his last public speeches on Democracy Now! today and it was excellent. It's on their front page at www.democracynow.org
They've also posted an archive of 18 Said interviews and talks available at
http://www.democracynow.org/static/said.shtml
Carry on. We must.
Peace,
Mark Haim
Mid-Missouri Peaceworks
804-C E. Broadway
Columbia, MO 65201
573-875-0539
E-mail: peacewks@coin.org <mailto:peacewks@coin.org>
Web site: http://peaceworks.missouri.org <http://peaceworks.missouri.org/>
"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" --Thomas Jefferson
-----Original Message-----
From: portsideMod@netscape.net [mailto:portsideMod@netscape.net]
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2003 1:09 AM
To: portside@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Edward Said, 1935-2003
1 The Electronic Intifada
2 John Nichols (The Nation)
3 Alexander Coburn (Counterpunch)
4 The Los Angeles Times
5 The Guardian (UK)
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REMEMBERING EDWARD SAID
The Electronic Intifada
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1974.shtml
We mourn with greatest sadness the death today of
Professor Edward W. Said. We extend our deepest
sympathy and condolences to Edward Said's family, and
we share our profound sense of loss with the large
community that loved him.
Professor Said maintained his relentless engagement
with people, culture, and politics all over the world,
even in the last weeks of his decade-long struggle
against illness.
Said is known throughout the world as a public
intellectual, and there are few fields of intellectual
endeavor that are untouched by his contributions. A
prolific and path-breaking scholar whose contributions
helped transform humanities and social sciences, Said's
impact and engagement went far beyond the academy. Said
was also an activist who worked courageously for
justice, and fearlessly spoke truth to power.
When images and narratives of the Palestinian struggle
were dominated by misrepresentations, caricatures and
hateful stereotypes, Said was for years often the sole
and most effective advocate for this cause in the
United States. Despite relentless and vicious personal
attacks, Said never abandoned a vision of peace between
Israelis and Palestinians based on deep mutual
recognition of the other's histories and narratives,
and reconciliation leading to complete equality. He
taught and inspired a new generation of activists to
speak with clarity and always search for truth no
matter who it offends.
Throughout the 1990s, Said's newspaper columns provided
a constant critique of the depradations, falsehoods and
failures of the Oslo 'peace process' that lead only to
the further alienation of Palestinians from their land
and a betrayal of the vision of reconciliation and
justice for which he strived. Said was among the first
to understand and articulate how this process, premised
on preserving the vast power imbalances and injustices
between Israelis and Palestinians, would lead to the
present disaster, and never shirked from criticizing
the Palestinian leaders who helped make this possible.
Said's journey back to his birthplace in Palestine, in
the mid-1990s, after decades of exile, helped many
Palestinians to come to terms with their own experience
of exile and dispossession and encouraged many
Palestinians to embark on their own journeys home.
Said's books, among them "The Question of Palestine,"
"After the Last Sky," "The Politics of Dispossession,"
and the memoir of his youth, "Out of Place," remain
seminal works which both personalize and humanize the
Palestinian predicament and place it in political
context.
Despite the worsening situation in Palestine, Said
never succumbed to despair. Until the end of his life,
he was actively engaged in the Palestinian National
Initiative, a movement to mobilize the energy of the
entire population towards a non-violent struggle for
peace and liberation.
Yet the greatest significance of Said's contribution is
not that he was an outstanding advocate for justice and
peace in Palestine, but that he located this cause
within a much greater struggle for a truly universal
and humanist vision, and a rejection of ethno-
nationalism and religious fanaticism. He taught by
example that being faithful to a cause did not mean
blind loyalty to leaders or symbols, but necessitated
self-criticism and debate. This fact meant that his
engagement with the Arab world, and fierce criticism of
its status quo, was as important as his work
communicating with people in the west.
Edward Said was a fountain of humanity, compassion,
intellectual restlessness and creativity. At a time
when the crude calculus of raw power and fanaticism
threatens to swamp global discourse, his irreplaceable
voice never needed to be heard more.
Ali Abunimah
Arjan El Fassed
Laurie King-Irani
Nigel Parry
for The Electronic Intifada
--
ABOUT US: This e-mail was sent by The Electronic
Intifada, an educational
non-profit project focused on media coverage of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, found at
http://electronicIntifada.net. More information about
our work can be found at
http://electronicIntifada.net/introduction/.
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Against Blind Imperial Arrogance
by John Nichols
The Nation
09/25/2003
Edward Said closed one of his last published essays
with the lines: "We are in for many more years of
turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the
main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible,
U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can
hardly hope to remedy."
Saidbs frustration was obvious, but so too was the
determination of the man Salman Rushdie once said
"reads the world as closely as he reads books." No one
worked harder and longer than Said to awaken Americans
to the damage their government's policies had done to
the prospects for peace and justice in the Middle East.
It cannot be said that he succeeded in that mission,
but nor can it be said that he failed. If successive
presidents refused to listen to Said's wise counsel,
millions of citizens were influenced directly and
indirectly by his speeches, writing and tireless
advocacy. To the extent that there has been a
broadening of sympathy for the cause of Palestine and
Palestinians in the United States in recent years --
especially among younger Americans -- it can be traced
in no small measure to the work of the world-renowned
scholar, author, critic and activist who has died
Thursday at age 67 after a long battle with leukemia.
Born in 1935 in British-ruled Palestine, and raised in
Egypt, Said came to the United States as a student. He
would eventually become a professor at Columbia
University and the author of internationally acclaimed
books on literature, music, culture and imperialism.
His groundbreaking 1978 book, Orientalism, forced open
a long-delayed and still unfinished debate about
Western perceptions of Islam.
Said was horrified by the ignorance and distrust of
Islam, Arabs and, in particular, of Palestinians that
he found in the United States. "Every empire... tells
itself and the world that it is unlike all other
empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control
but to educate and liberate. These ideas are by no
means shared by the people who inhabit that empire, but
that hasn't prevented the U.S. propaganda and policy
apparatus from imposing its imperial perspective on
Americans, whose sources of information about Arabs and
Islam are woefully inadequate," Said wrote in July.
"Several generations of Americans have come to see the
Arab world mainly as a dangerous place, where terrorism
and religious fanaticism are spawned and where a
gratuitous anti-Americanism is inculcated in the young
by evil clerics who are anti-democratic and virulently
anti-Semitic."
Said bemoaned the "blind imperial arrogance" of the
United States and argued that, "Underlying this
perspective is a long-standing view -- the Orientalist
view -- that denies Arabs their right to national self-
determination because they are considered incapable of
logic, unable to tell the truth and fundamentally
murderous."
Echoing the concern he had expressed for many years,
Said reminded his American readers that, "Since
Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an
uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises
throughout the Arab world, producing untold misery --
and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have
Americans become to their own ignorance and the
blandishments of U.S. advisors like Bernard Lewis and
Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the
Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that
what we do is correct because "that's the way the Arabs
are." That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma
shared uncritically by the neo-conservatives who are at
the heart of the Bush administration simply adds fuel
to the fire."
http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=976
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A Mighty and Passionate Heart
by Alexander Cockburn
CounterPunch
September 25, 2003
Edward Said died in hospital in New York City Wednesday
night at 6.30 pm, felled at last by complications
arising from the leukemia he fought so gamely ever
since the early 1990s.
We march through life buoyed by those comrades-in-arms
we know to be marching with us, under the same banners,
flying the same colors, sustained by the same hopes and
convictions. They can be a thousand miles away; we may
not have spoken to them in months; but their
companionship is burned into our souls and we are
sustained by the knowledge that they are with us in the
world.
Few more than Edward Said, for me and so many others
beside. How many times, after a week, a month or more,
I have reached him on the phone and within a second
been lofted in my spirits, as we pressed through our
updates: his trips, his triumphs, the insults
sustained; the enemies rebuked and put to flight. Even
in his pettiness he was magnificent, and as I would
laugh at his fury at some squalid gibe hurled at him by
an eighth-rate scrivener, he would clamber from the
pedestal of martyrdom and laugh at himself.
He never lost his fire, even as the leukemia pressed,
was routed, pressed again. He lived at a rate that
would have felled a man half his age and ten times as
healthy: a plane to London, an honorary degree, on to
Lebanon, on to the West Bank, on to Cairo, to Madrid,
back to New York. And all the while he was pouring out
the Said prose that I most enjoyed, the fiery diatribes
he distributed to CounterPunch and to a vast world
audience. At the top of his form his prose has the
pitiless, relentless clarity of Swift.
The Palestinians will never know a greater polemical
champion. A few weeks ago I was, with his genial
permission, putting together from three of his essays
the concluding piece in our forthcoming CounterPunch
collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I was
seized, as so often before, by the power of the prose:
how could anyone read those searing sentences and not
boil with rage, while simultaneously admiring Edward's
generosity of soul: that with the imperative of justice
and nationhood for his people came the humanity that
called for reconciliation between Palestinians and
Israeli Jews.
His literary energy was prodigious. Memoir, criticism,
homily, fiction poured from his pen, a fountain pen
that reminded one that Edward was very much an
intellectual in the nineteenth- century tradition of a
Zola or of a Victor Hugo, who once remarked that genius
is a promontory in the infinite. I read that line as a
schoolboy, wrote it in my notebook and though I laugh
now a little at the pretension of the line, I do think
of Edward as a promontory, a physical bulk on the
intellectual and political landscape that forced
people, however disinclined they may have been, to
confront the Palestinian experience.
Years ago his wife Mariam asked me if I would make
available my apartment in New York, where I lived at
that time, as the site for a surprise 40th birthday for
Edward. I dislike surprise parties but of course
agreed. The evening arrived; guests assembled on my
sitting room on the eleventh floor of 333 Central Park
West. The dining room table groaned under Middle
Eastern delicacies. Then came the word from the front
door. Edward and Mariam had arrived! They were
ascending in the elevator. Then we could all hear
Edward's furious bellow: "But I don't want to go to
dinner with *******, Alex!" They entered at last and
the shout went up from seventy throats, Happy Birthday!
He reeled back in surprise and then recovered, and then
saw about the room all those friends happy to have
traveled thousands of miles to shake his hand. I could
see him slowly expand with joy at each new unexpected
face and salutation.
He never became blase in the face of friendship and
admiration, or indeed honorary degrees, just as he
never grew a thick skin. Each insult was as fresh and
as wounding as the first he ever received. A quarter of
century ago he would call, with mock heroic English
intonation, "Alex-and-er, have you seen the latest New
Republic? Have you read this filthy, this utterly
disgusting diatribe? You haven't? Oh, I know, you don't
care about the feelings of a mere black man such as
myself." I'd start laughing, and say I had better
things to do than read Martin Peretz, or Edward
Alexander or whoever the assailant was, but for half an
hour he would brood, rehearse fiery rebuttals and
listen moodily as I told him to pay no attention.
He never lost the capacity to be wounded by the
treachery and opportunism of supposed friends. A few
weeks ago he called to ask whether I had read a
particularly stupid attack on him by his very old
friend Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic Monthly. He
described with pained sarcasm a phone call in which
Hitchens had presumably tried to square his own
conscience by advertising to Edward the impending
assault. I asked Edward why he was surprised, and
indeed why he cared. But he was surprised and he did
care. His skin was so, so thin, I think because he knew
that as long as he lived, as long as he marched onward
as a proud, unapologetic and vociferous Palestinian,
there would be some enemy on the next housetop down the
street eager to pour sewage on his head.
Edward, dear friend, I wave adieu to you across the
abyss. I don't even have to close my eyes to savor your
presence, your caustic or merry laughter, your
elegance, your spirit as vivid as that of d'Artagnan,
the fiery Gascon. You will burn like the brightest of
flames in my memory, as you will in the memories of all
who knew and admired and loved you.
http://www.counterpunch.org/
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Edward W. Said, 67; Respected Professor and Scholar
Advocated Palestinian Cause
By Elaine Woo , Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
September 26, 2003
Edward W. Said, an influential Columbia University
professor of literature whose public role as the West's
most eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause
brought him both condemnation and awe over the past
three decades, died at a New York hospital Wednesday
after a long battle with chronic leukemia. He was 67.
Said was a fascinating, complex figure who sometimes
spoke of his two quite separate lives. He was a
Princeton- and Harvard-trained literary scholar who
could knowledgeably expound on the works of such great
Western writers as Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and
Jane Austen. He also was an engaged academic, a thinker
and an activist whose articulate and emotional advocacy
of Palestinian sovereignty brought him wide media
exposure and an unwelcome degree of notoriety.
In the Arab world, Said was revered as "Mr. Palestine
in America," who brought a luminous intelligence to the
challenge of humanizing the Western world's perceptions
of the Palestinian struggle.
"He put us, the Palestinian cause, within the
consciousness of people who would much rather have been
dismissive," Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi told
The Times on Thursday. "He brought Palestine to the
world of intellect, and made it part of the public
discourse, particularly in the West."
He earned grudging respect from some critics, who found
him an effective spokesman for a cause they disagreed
with.
"He's been a brooding countenance, something like the
Elie Wiesel of the Palestinians," Martin Peretz, editor
in chief of the New Republic and staunch supporter of
Israel, once said of Said.
To others, however, Said was the "professor of terror"
-- the headline on an article in Commentary magazine
several years ago -- because of his once-close ties
with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser
Arafat and his fierce defense of Palestinian rights.
He gave his foes further cause for fury three years ago
when a French news agency photographed him throwing a
rock toward an Israeli position at Lebanon's recently
liberated border with the Jewish state. The rock hit no
one, and Said said his action had been wildly
misconstrued.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a
statement Thursday that although he disagreed with some
of Said's views, he "admired the passion with which he
pursued his vision of peace between Israelis and
Palestinians" and said that the U.S. and the Middle
East "will be the poorer without his distinctive
voice."
The author of more than 20 books, Said (pronounced Sah-
yeed) was best known for "Orientalism," an exploration
and analysis of Western views of the Islamic world.
Published in 1978, it has been translated into more
than two dozen languages and is required reading in
many fields.
Other major works by Said include the 1993 book
"Culture and Imperialism," in which he traced the
influence of 19th-century European imperialism in the
novels of authors such as Austen and Charles Dickens,
and "After the Last Sky; Palestinian Lives," published
in 1986, which examined through Said's text and Swiss
photographer Jean Mohr's images the transience of
Palestinian existence.
Said was also an accomplished pianist and a
musicologist who joined with Daniel Barenboim, an
Israeli and a world-famous conductor, to hold annual
workshops that drew together musicians from Israel and
Arab states.
A Palestinian who was born in Jerusalem, raised in
Cairo and schooled in the United States, Said lived as
an exile, an outlook that infused his extensive
writings.
"It's a very conflicted thing for me because I'm an
American and I'm also an Arab," Said told The Times
some years ago. "You can only imagine what this is
like. But then I remember once again that a Palestinian
is almost always out of place."
for the rest of this article go to
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-said26sep26,1,6007761.story?coll=la-home-todays-times
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Controversial literary critic and bold advocate of the
Palestinian cause in America
Malise Ruthven
Friday September 26, 2003
The Guardian
Edward Said, who has died aged 67, was one of the
leading literary critics of the last quarter of the
20th century. As professor of English and comparative
literature at Columbia University, New York, he was
widely regarded as the outstanding representative of
the post-structuralist left in America. Above all, he
was the most articulate and visible advocate of the
Palestinian cause in the United States, where it earned
him many enemies.
The broadness of Said's approach to literature and his
other great love, classical music, eludes easy
categorisation. His most influential book, Orientalism
(1978), is credited with helping to change the
direction of several disciplines by exposing an unholy
alliance between the enlightenment and colonialism. As
a humanist with a thoroughly secular outlook, his
critique on the great tradition of the western
enlightenment seemed to many to be self-contradictory,
deploying a humanistic discourse to attack the high
cultural traditions of humanism, giving comfort to
fundamentalists who regarded any criticism of their
tradition or texts as off-limits, while calling into
question the integrity of critical research into
culturally sensitive areas such as Islam.
Whatever its flaws, however, Orientalism appeared at an
opportune time, enabling upwardly mobile academics from
non-western countries (many of whom came from families
who had benefited from colonialism) to take advantage
of the mood of political correctness it helped to
engender by associating themselves with "narratives of
oppression", creating successful careers out of
transmitting, interpreting and debating representations
of the non-western "other".
Said's influence, however, was far from being confined
to the worlds of academic and scholarly discourse. An
intellectual superstar in America, he distinguished
himself as an opera critic, pianist, television
celebrity, politician, media expert, popular essayist
and public lecturer.
Latterly, he was one of the most trenchant critics of
the Oslo peace process and the Palestinian leadership
of Yasser Arafat. He was dubbed "professor of terror"
by the rightwing American magazine Commentary; in 1999,
when he was struggling against leukaemia, the same
magazine accused him of falsifying his status as a
Palestinian refugee to enhance his advocacy of the
Palestinian cause, and of falsely claiming to have been
at school in Jerusalem before completing his education
in the United States.
The hostility Said encountered from pro-Israeli circles
in New York was predictable, given his trenchant
attacks on Israeli violations of the human rights of
Palestinians and his outspoken condemnations of US
policies in the Middle East. From the other side of the
conflict, however, he encountered opposition from
Palestinians who accused him of sacrificing Palestinian
rights by making unwarranted concessions to Zionism.
As early as 1977, when few Palestinians were prepared
to concede that Jews had historic claims to Palestine,
he said: "I don't deny their claims, but their claim
always entails Palestinian dispossession." More than
any other Palestinian writer, he qualified his anti-
colonial critique of Israel, explaining its complex
entanglements and the problematic character of its
origins in the persecution of European Jews, and the
overwhelming impact of the Zionist idea on the European
conscience.
Said recognised that Israel's exemption from the normal
criteria by which nations are measured owed everything
to the Holocaust. But while recognising its unique
significance, he did not see why its legacy of trauma
and horror should be exploited to deprive the
Palestinians, a people who were "absolutely dissociable