On different kinds of otherness – Adam Shatz in LRB:

“When Edward Said joined the Columbia University English department in 1963, a rumour spread that he was a Jew from Alexandria. He might as well have been. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 to well-off Palestinian Christian parents, he had grown up in the twilight years of multicultural Cairo, where many of his classmates were Egyptian Jews. His piano teacher was Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had moved to Cairo in 1931 and founded a French-speaking conservatoire. Said’s closest friends at Princeton and Harvard, Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.”

(…)

“Thanks to his father’s service in the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War, Said was an American citizen, and if he was reinventing himself, well, that’s what immigrants did in the New World. The Egyptian literary theorist Ihab Hassan had shed his Arab identity when he moved to the US, and had never looked back.”

(…)

“Wadie, who was proud of the whiteness of his skin and sometimes pretended he was from Cleveland, identified with America more than with Palestine. (The Saids celebrated Thanksgiving.) Edward also spent part of his childhood in the family’s homeland, in the West Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talbiyah, but after 1948, as he wrote in his memoir, ‘Palestine acquired a languid, almost dreamlike, aspect for me.’ It was only thanks to his aunt Nabiha, who did charitable work among Palestinian refugees in Cairo, that he became aware of the Nakba, which Wadie passed over in silence.”

(…)

“Hilda, his mother, was ‘my closest and most intimate companion for the first 25 years of my life’. (The intensity of the attachment was due in part to Hilda’s loss of a baby boy the year before Edward was born.) Their relationship, Said wrote, had ‘shattering results for my later life as a man trying to establish a relationship ... with other women’. According to Brennan, Wadie sent his fifteen-year-old son to the Mount Hermon boarding school in rural Massachusetts not because of his rebellious behaviour at the British-run Victoria College, as Said later claimed, but because he feared that the ‘obsessive intimacies’ with Hilda would hinder Edward’s emotional development.”

(…)

“The summer after graduation, while driving through the Swiss mountains, Said collided with, and killed, a motorcyclist; when he woke up, a priest was giving him the last rites. Only a few months later, he was in graduate school at Harvard. His mentor there was Harry Levin, the author of a study of realism which Said considered on a par with Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. As Brennan points out, Levin’s belief in ‘universal interrelatedness’ inspired Said’s own practice of making unexpected connections between literary and cultural traditions, between fiction and contemporary philosophy. While seeing a psychoanalyst, attending Glenn Gould recitals in Boston and working on his Conrad dissertation, Said began to discover the ideas that would shape his imagination as a critic: Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (the subject of his 1967 essay ‘The Labyrinth of Incarnations’), Lukács’s analysis of ‘reification’ and Sartre’s theory of commitment.”

(…)

“Hilda had already succeeded in sabotaging his love affair with a Lebanese Christian woman, seven years his senior, whom she considered unsuitable. Said was furious and refused to serve as his father’s go-between with a business partner in New York, declaring that ‘my whole attitude to my past is in ruin.’ (Hilda responded by asking where he would be without his father’s business.) He also wrote seventy pages of an unfinished novel, ‘Elegy’, about a shady Lebanese Christian owner of a ‘failing printing company and a grubby stationery shop’ and his sickly wife, ‘stuff[ed] away in a shabby apartment’. Said didn’t spare himself, including a mocking self-portrait of a clueless employee called Mufid who idles away his time on things that were ‘utterly lost on everyone else’. Brennan presents the lost manuscript (and a story Said submitted around the same time to the New Yorker) as evidence of the novelist he might have become, but it seems more like a thwarted attempt to settle scores with his family and break free of the past. He put aside his literary ambitions, and grew estranged from Jaanus, whom he later divorced. In 1970 he married Mariam Cortas, a Lebanese Quaker whose family knew the Saids; they had two children, Wadie (a restoration of William’s Arab name) and Najla. Hilda was overjoyed: she had regained her wayward son. In his private life, at least, filiation prevailed over affiliation. Said would seek out the company of other women, many of them high-profile academics, while quietly griping about the ‘bourgeois myth, which I now live, with increasing discomfort and unhappiness’. But he never seriously contemplated giving up his life as a husband and father.”

(…)

“While he styled himself an anti-imperialist, Said was mostly an old-fashioned liberal when it came to campus politics. He supported the 1968 student strike against the war in Vietnam called by Students for a Democratic Society but recoiled from their attack on the university, and from what he saw as puerile anti-authoritarianism. When a group of striking students disrupted one of his lectures, he insisted that they leave and called security when they refused.”

(…)

“In November 1974, Said’s argument was given a live demonstration before the world, when Arafat addressed the United Nations for the first time. Said helped draft the speech and added the closing line: ‘Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand.’ Although not opposed to armed resistance, he took a dim view of the PLO’s cult of the gun and believed that non-violent protest and diplomacy – the ‘olive branch’ – were more effective weapons, given the enormous disparities in military power. The war for Palestine was, he understood, a war of clashing narratives and images: ‘In no modern conflict has rhetoric played so significant a part in legitimating one preposterous quote after another.’ He soon became the PLO’s unofficial liaison with the US government. Although he felt closer to the secular leftism of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine than to the traditionalist nationalism of Fatah, he remained loyal to Arafat (‘a genius at mediation’) and in 1977 was elected to the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament in exile, as an independent.”

(…)

“The intellectual,’ Said wrote, ‘always stands between loneliness and alignment.’ His decision to align himself with a national liberation movement despised by many of his colleagues as a ‘terrorist’ organisation intensified his sense of loneliness and heightened his already acute sense of vulnerability and woundedness. In his introduction to Orientalism, which appeared in 1978, he wrote: The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanising ideology holding the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny.”

(…)

“The World, the Text and the Critic was also Said’s farewell to French theory. It wasn’t surprising, he suggested, that Derrida’s concept of undecidability and Foucault’s Nietzschean scepticism about truth had flourished in Reagan’s America: both provided sophisticated excuses for political quietism. This was an essentially Lukácsian critique of postmodernism as an expression of decadence. But his disenchantment also reflected a sense of personal betrayal: Foucault had abandoned the Palestinian cause; Derrida had wounded him by referring to him only as ‘un ami’ – not by name – in his book on Genet. When Said’s friend Jean Stein, the editor of Grand Street, asked him to review a book by Jean Baudrillard, he declined, saying that Baudrillard’s ideas are ‘all sort of like little burps’. He now preferred the company of Chomsky and John Berger, who believed that ‘there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems.’ His own style became less cluttered and precious – more ‘transparent’ and ‘worldly’. He used it to demystify the ideology of Zionism in The Question of Palestine (1979), and to dissect the American media’s tendentious portrayals of Muslims in Covering Islam (1981). But he also established himself as a belletrist, writing on Arabic fiction, bullfighting, tennis and belly dancing. He interviewed Gillo Pontecorvo, published essays on exile and Glenn Gould, and became the Nation’s classical music critic.”

(…)

“The disaster in Lebanon also marked the end of the revolutionary phase of the Palestinian movement, when the PLO styled itself as a liberation movement in the tradition of the FLN and the ANC. Arafat and his men were now in Tunis, and the movement was adrift. Said’s break with Arafat wouldn’t take place for another decade, but the rift had begun. On his visits to Tunis, he later wrote, he saw former revolutionaries who ‘drank only Black Label Scotch whisky, travelled first class, drove fancy European cars, and were always surrounded by aides, bodyguards and hangers-on’. In cautious, sometimes cryptic language, he began to express doubts about the movement’s direction. ‘Our insistence on “armed struggle”’, he wrote in After the Last Sky (1986), had ‘quickly turned into a worship of fetishised military postures, guns and slogans borrowed from theories of the people’s war in Algeria and Vietnam’. This emphasis ‘caused us to neglect the incredibly complex and far more important political and cultural aspects of our struggle, and it played right into the hands of Israel’. For all Arafat’s success in ‘connecting disparate segments of Palestinian life’, no leader had appeared ‘so catastrophically to be implicated in setbacks’.”

(…)

“The betrayal became official in September 1993, with the signing of the Oslo Accords – ‘an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles’, as he wrote in the LRB(21 October 1993). Not only had Arafat accepted a less generous plan than the Carter-Vance offer he’d dismissed in 1978; more humiliatingly, he had agreed to become Israel’s gendarme in the territories, policing Palestinian resistance rather than Palestinian borders. Said never spoke to Arafat again. He would visit Israel-Palestine and film a documentary for the BBC, but he didn’t feel at home in the West Bank, where political Islam was on the rise, eclipsing the secular nationalism he had always advocated, and where the Palestinian Authority banned his books because of his criticisms of Arafat. Exile, he decided, was a ‘more liberated state’ than a ‘final coming home’ – and, in any case, neither Israel nor the West Bank was home. When one of Arafat’s deputies was asked by a journalist about Said’s critique of Oslo, he replied that Said was an English professor whose views about Palestinian politics were as pertinent as Chairman Arafat’s opinion of a Shakespeare production.”

(…)

“The notion that Arabs and Jews in Palestine were condemned to hate one another contradicted everything his own life had taught him. Precisely because Jews had never been the ‘other’ to him, he wasn’t afraid that by acknowledging the Holocaust he would be supplying ammunition to Palestine’s enemies. On the contrary, the Palestinian case was strengthened, not weakened, by recognition of the Jewish catastrophe during the war.”

(…)

“According to Brennan, ‘he was still grumbling’ to friends about the Rutgers encounter months afterwards. He largely kept his distance from the anti-PC brigade, but he struck up a correspondence with Camille Paglia and, in speeches, issued warnings about the rise of identity politics in universities. ‘Victimhood, alas, does not guarantee or necessarily enable an enhanced sense of humanity,’ he said. ‘To testify to a history of oppression is necessary, but it is not sufficient unless that history is redirected into intellectual process and universalised to include all sufferers.’ He went on: It does not finally matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read. The idea that because Plato and Aristotle are male and the products of a slave society they should be disqualified from receiving contemporary attention is as limited an idea as suggesting that only their work, because it was addressed to and about elites, should be read today. Marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, and not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class or gender.”

(…)

“For all its crudeness, this charge has a grain of truth. All Said’s writings were touched by his ‘affiliation’. The burden of being a political spokesman, and his loyalty to Arafat, imposed certain limits on what he could say about the movement and the repressive governments of the Arab world: as Said often pointed out, affiliation could degenerate into filiation, into a familial structure of obedience and conformity. Only in his final decade did he express himself freely on the movement’s failures and the region’s dictatorships. But, as Brennan shows, the Palestinian struggle enriched Said far more than it constrained him. The themes that echo through his writing – the preference for exilic over rooted writing, the idea of ‘contrapuntal’ criticism, the insistence on secular humanism, worldliness and universality – can all, indirectly, be traced to Palestine. Not to the land itself, or to the people, but to the metaphor, the region of the mind, that he fashioned out of them.
This was no small achievement. As Said wrote in the LRB in 1984, Israel and its supporters had worked hard to deny Palestinians the ‘permission to narrate’ their experience. He helped to restore that right, not only by describing their dispossession and oppression, but by developing a powerful counter-myth to Zionism, which he sometimes called ‘Palestinianism’. In his 1986 collaboration with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky, Said described a nation of vivid fragments, rather than trying to assemble them into a seamless whole. He had no interest in the folk nationalism of the refugee camps, with its romance of repatriation and reclamation: the keys to old homes, women’s embroidery, the olive tree, the posters of Al-Aqsa mosque. Instead, he wrote of Palestinians as witnesses to a century defined by ethnic cleansing, wars of national liberation, and migration, in restless, nomadic pursuit of freedom: ‘a counterpoint (if not a cacophony) of multiple, almost desperate dramas’.”

(…)

“Brennan, a former student of Said’s, writes with a restrained affection that only occasionally slips into defensiveness or hagiography. He understands that, in private, Said could be a prima donna, ‘a personality marked by impatience and vulnerability, by turns angry and romantic’, playful and witty, capable of acts of generosity but also vain, in perpetual need of affirmation, and occasionally quite petty and vindictive. He shows us Said at home, preparing breakfast for Mariam, practising Bach partitas, but we also catch glimpses of his less appealing side: the vulgar gusto he displayed in intellectual combat (before going on stage to debate Bernard Lewis he told his friends, in Arabic, that he was ‘going to fuck his mother’); his irrepressible competitiveness (when Mariam was struggling to learn Hebrew he grabbed her textbook and said: ‘I would finish this whole book in two weeks’). He was perpetually dissatisfied, insomniac, hypochondriac. ‘If Said had a cough he feared the onset of bronchitis,’ Salman Rushdie wrote after his death, ‘and if he felt a twinge he was certain his appendix was about to collapse.’”

(…)

“Brennan was commissioned to write the book by the Wylie Agency, which handles the Said estate, and he was strongly discouraged from discussing Said’s many affairs. After his second marriage in 1970, other women recede from view, with one exception: his longtime mistress Dominique Eddé, a Lebanese novelist who published a perceptive study of Said’s life and work, Le Roman de sa pensée, in 2017.* While echoing several of Eddé’s judgments about Said’s work, Brennan characterises their on and off relationship of more than two decades as a ‘brief affair’ and ridicules her discreet book as the ‘largely autobiographical tell-all’ of a scorned woman who hardly knew the man she professed to love. This ad hominem attack injects a bellicose note into a book that otherwise studiously ignores Said’s private life. Brennan accuses Eddé of putting Said’s name on a petition he had never seen. The petition, though Brennan doesn’t mention the fact, was protesting a Holocaust denial conference in Beirut. Said added his own signature, but withdrew it when he learned that Eddé was the author. After the conference was banned, Said claimed that he had removed his name on free speech grounds. According to Eddé, he apologised to her shortly before he died.”

Read the complete article here.

This is a beautiful piece on a man who feels awkwardly familiar.

Sontag as the insider, Said as the outsider, as the insider-outsider. Dressed in Burberry suits it’s hard to be a complete outsider.

It’s easy to criticize his affiliation with liberation movements, seldom the intellectual survives the revolution or the political movement he decided to join.

And yes: “It does not finally matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read.”

Our obsession with identity is a vulgar distraction at best, but probably also an attempt and depoliticizing the debate, sheer sectarianism.