The Edward Said Reader by Edward W. Said & Moustafa Bayoumi & Andrew Rubin

Author:Edward W. Said & Moustafa Bayoumi & Andrew Rubin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

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The dynastic sense, the feeling for one’s immediate past, the effort of placing ourselves in a living continuum: there is little help to be gotten for such things. The closeness and clutter of the present force us to attend to the details of everyday life. Whenever I look at what goes on in the interior I am always surprised at how things seem to be managed normally, as if I had been expecting signs of how different “they,” the people of the interior, are, and then find that they still do familiar things. We Palestinians conduct ourselves, I think, with an energetic consciousness that there are still chores to be done, children to be raised, houses to be lived in, despite our anomalous circumstances.

I am obsessed with how as a people we got here. In early 1982 I spent several weeks with a British film crew, recording life in a South Lebanon refugee camp for Palestinians. The sequences were to be part of a television documentary called “The Shadow of the West,” which concerned the essentially imperialist relationship of Britain, France, and the United States to the Arabs. A central component of the film was a look at a spinoff of that relationship, the question of Palestine. Many of the Palestinians I spoke to and filmed in South Lebanon were younger than I; Lebanon was all they really knew, so they deferred to the older people on matters historical. On two occasions I became perturbed by the inadequacy of our history and the way we use it. Once an old man was prodded into reminiscences of life in Palestine by a group of his young male relatives. He spoke about it very elaborately—the village he grew up in, the family gatherings, feasts and memorable occasions, the pleasures of being at home. But when I asked how it ended, how he became a refugee, he suddenly stopped. Then he got up and left.

The second occasion concerned an old woman who, along with a group of her nieces and daughters, was cheerily regaling me with advice about what, as a Palestinian living in America, I should be doing. Make a revolution, one of them said; have more children, said another, implying that the two I had so far produced testified at best to an impaired manhood and patriotism. Then we got on to life in Qasmiyeh, the refugee camp we were in. None of the women felt they would be there for long, as, after all, they didn’t belong there. Then I turned to the old woman, Um Ahmed, and said: “How did you get here?” She paused for a moment, as if such a question was a surprise, and then rather offhandedly said, “I don’t really know; I just found myself here.”

But for the people who live in or near the interior where it is impossible to deny their Palestinian origins, there is at least the privilege of obduracy. Here we are, unmoved by your power, proceeding with our lives and with future generations.

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