Interpretive Keys for Engaging Edward Said

Edward Said was one of the world’s premier public intellectuals. He wrote and spoke extensively—and in multiple languages—addressing pressing issues ranging from the US education system to neoliberal economics to the settler colonial genocide ravaging his people, the Palestinians. It’s striking, then, that Said only taught courses on comparative literature. Why this breadth of “worldly” engagement from a comparative literature expert?

Said provides partial answers to this question in his class The World, The Text, and the Critic. There he rails against philosophies and practices of “textuality” that ignore or aggressively downplay a basic truth: Texts are worldly, human artifacts that emerge from and reflect specific social locations. Moreover, whether or not a text has a wide reception or becomes canonized within a tradition depends, in part, on how that text relates to established power networks. Publishers understand this. So do students of literary transmission practices. Consider an example. The slave bible, a text missing 90 percent of the Old Testament and 50 percent of the New Testament, is a product of Anglo imperialism, racial capitalism, US and English slavocracies, and the Christian communities that advanced and inhabited all four. “Want to ‘Christianize’ the enslaved and maintain white power? Try the slave bible!” Many did. Thus, they replaced older textual transmission practices with one more compatible with their political economy and social order.

Said denounces reading practices that overlook a text’s social construction and power relations. So, as a student of literatures past and present, he labored to understand each text’s history and context. This world-oriented practice equipped him to be a leading public intellectual.

But there’s more to say. For we should ask what histories and contexts motivated Said’s reading practices and philosophies? Why this worldly focus? Said’s memoir Out of Place provides some answers.

Out of Place recounts Said’s upbringing and early adulthood. One of it’s main primary tasks is to present readers with the Palestine he knew as a child—one that settler colonialism destroyed. The book’s sixth chapter opens thus:

On November 1, 1947—My twelfth birthday—I recall the puzzling vehemence with which my oldest Jerusalem cousins, Yousif and George, bewailed the day, the eve of the Balfour Declaration, as “the blackest day in our history.” I had no idea what they were referring to but realized it must be something of overwhelming importance. Perhaps they and my parents, sitting around the table with my birthday cake, assumed that I shouldn’t be informed about something as complex as our conflict with the Zionists and the British.

My parents, sisters, and I spent most of 1947 in Palestine, which we left for the very last time in December of that year…. The signs of impending crisis were all around us.

Though in Palestine, Said didn’t understand what was or would transpire. No one told him what was happening. They shared a cake, not geo-political news or analysis about their impending dislocation. When Said speaks of “our conflict with the Zionists and the British,” he names and reinterprets events and relations his younger self overlooked and misinterpreted. The signs of crisis surrounded him. But Said didn’t know how to see the signs of the times. And his family didn’t help him.

Later in the chapter, Said offers additional reinterpretations of his childhood. He writes:

What overcomes me now is the scale of dislocation our family and friends experienced and of which I was scarcely conscious, essentially unknowing witness in 1948. As a boy of twelve and a half in Cairo, I often saw the sadness and destitution in the faces and lives of people I had formerly known as ordinary middle-class people in Palestine, but I couldn’t really comprehend the tragedy that had befallen them nor could I piece together all the different narrative fragments to understand what had really happened in Palestine…

My mother never mentioned what happened to [our extended family]. I did not ask my father; I had no available vocabulary for the question, although I was able to sense that something was radically wrong. Only once in a typically sweeping way did my father elucidate the general Palestinian condition, when he remarked about Sbeer and his family that “they had lost everything”; a moment later he added, “We lost everything too.” When I expressed my confusion as to what he meant, since his business, the house, our style of life in Cairo, seemed to have remained the same, “Palestine” was all he said. It is true that he never much liked the place, but this peculiarly rapid monosyllabic acknowledgment and equally quick burial of the past was idiosyncratic of him…

Said accompanies these recollections with an arresting word about trips his family took during these years of Palestinian genocide and displacement: “But what I remember about all our day trips was the sense of us as a self-enclosed little group, a sort of dirigible suspended above new strange places, making our way through foreign cities but remaining untouched by them.” Unaware, inarticulate, unassisted, and untouched—these words capture Said’s childhood relationship to his people’s sufferings.

To close: I suggest that Said’s parentally enforced, self-enclosed childhood shaped his approach to literature and public intellectualism. He couldn’t understand himself, his family, his people, or the world because he lacked historical awareness, social consciousness, and illuminating distinctions. Self-examination and self-understanding required Said to put on these traits and put off his family’s enclosed living practices. This came at a cost. As Said writes in The World, The Text, and the Critic:

A knowledge of history, a recognition of the importance of social circumstances, an analytical capacity for making distinctions: these trouble the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home among one’s people, supported by known powers and acceptable values, protected against the outside world.

Said’s Socratic philosophy and practice was isolating. In some ways, it furthered his exile, left him out of place. Yet it also liberated him, put him in touch with his people, empowered him to see and be with other oppressed peoples, and give him a renewed, more accurate visions of himself and the communities and world he inhabited. Through his reading and speaking, Said offered these Socratic gifts to the world.