Who Owns Antiquity? by Cuno James;

Who Owns Antiquity? by Cuno James;

Author:Cuno, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press


FIVE

IDENTITY MATTERS

I want to insist that the terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like “America,” “The West” or “Islam” and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be oppressed.

—Edward Said1

Born in Jerusalem, raised a proud Palestinian and a Christian; educated in English and American primary schools in Cairo (in the first case, with Armenian, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, and Copt students; in the latter, with American students almost exclusively) and then in a U.S. prep school and U.S. universities; by profession, a literary scholar (Western literature); by love, a music critic (European piano music and opera); and by commitment, a social critic (mainly of matters in the Middle East and how they are represented in Western media), Edward Said was no one simple thing. No one is, he would insist. He closed his memoir, Out of Place, by reflecting on the nature of identity. “I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance.” In his published conversations with Daniel Barenboim, he spoke of identity as “a set of currents, flowing currents, rather than a fixed place or a stable set of objects.”2

Surely this is how we all see ourselves, if we think about it. We are never only one thing, even if when asked we try to simplify ourselves to a few things: a married, white, professional, middle-aged father with a university education. The currents that flow through us originate in our genes, experiences, and imagination, and are constantly coursing through one another, intermixing and overlapping. The metaphor is apt: currents are never static and can only be separated with effort imposed from the outside. Said described them as “always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme.”

The journalist and novelist Amin Maalouf was born in Lebanon, raised speaking Arabic, lives in France, writes in French, and answers when asked whether he feels more French or Lebanese, “both!” And he means both at once. “You can’t divide it up into halves or thirds or any other separate segments. I haven’t got several identities: I’ve got just one, made up of many components in a mixture that is unique to me, just as other people’s identity is unique to them as individuals.” And yet social and political pressures assert themselves from time to time, we are “pressed to take sides or ordered to stay within [our] own tribe,” and forced to reach down deep inside to some original, irreducible, undeniable core identity, as if all the rest—in Amin’s words, “a person’s whole journey through time as a free agent; the beliefs he acquires in the course of that journey; his own individual tastes, sensibilities, and affinities; in short his life itself”—counts for nothing.



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