Edward Said by Rustom Hakem Iskandar Adel

Author:Rustom, Hakem, Iskandar, Adel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

15

Edward Said and the Palestine Question

Avi Shlaim

Edward Said was an extraordinarily versatile and prolific scholar whose work ranged across academic disciplines. Although his principal field was comparative literature, he was also a student of culture and society. His 1978 book, Orientalism, exposed the ideological biases behind Western perceptions of “the Orient” and helped create a distinctive subfield that came to be called postcolonial studies. In addition to these literary pursuits, Said was a pianist of concert-playing standard and a leading music critic. Last but not least, he was a politically engaged intellectual and the most eloquent spokesman for the dispossessed Palestinian people.

Edward Said’s attachment to the Palestinian cause had deep emotional roots. He was born in Jerusalem in late 1935 to a wealthy Christian Palestinian family and spent his childhood in an area of the city that is today an opulent Jewish district. In December 1947, after the United Nations vote for the partition of Palestine, the family moved to Cairo, where Said’s father already had a branch of his business. The immediate family was thus spared the worst ravages of the catastrophe, which turned more than 700,000 Palestinians into refugees. But the cataclysmic quality of this collective experience, of the catastrophe, or Nakba in Arabic, seared itself in the boy’s mind.

Although Said was only twelve years old at the time and had no more than a semiconscious awareness of the event, he later recalled some memories with special lucidity. One was that many of the members of his extended family, on both sides, “were suddenly made homeless, some penniless, disoriented, and scarred forever.” He saw some of them again after the fall of Palestine, “but all were greatly reduced in circumstances, their faces stark with worry, ill-health, despair.” Yet they bore their suffering not so much as a political but a natural tragedy. This circumstance etched itself in Said’s memory with lasting results, mostly because he saw faces that had once been content and at ease become worn with the cares of exile and homelessness. “Many families and individuals had their lives broken, their spirits drained, their composure destroyed forever in the context of seemingly unending, serial dislocation.”1 For Said, this disruption had the greatest poignancy.

The second thing that Said recalled was the one person in his family who somehow managed to pull herself together in the aftermath of the Nakba. She was his paternal aunt Nabiha, who devoted her life to working with Palestinian refugees in Cairo. In the memoir of his childhood, Out of Place, Said gives a vivid account of this formidable relative who never discussed the political aspects of the dispute in his presence. A middle-aged widow with some financial means, Nabiha saw it as her lifelong task to help the refugees—by battling with the indifferent Egyptian bureaucracy, getting their children into schools, cajoling doctors into giving them treatment, finding jobs for the men, providing constant sympathy and support for the women. For Nabiha, being Palestinian imposed a duty to assist the unfortunate refugees, many of whom ended up penniless, jobless, destitute, and disoriented in the neighboring Arab countries.

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