Alif: A Journal of Comparative Poetics: Edward Said and Critical Decolonisation, No.25, edited by Ferial Ghazoul, Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo, Cairo: 2005. pp305 (English) & 259 (Arabic) This unique collection of essays explores the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said's critical contributions to decolonisation and to the resistance to hegemony, as the volume's title implies. Simultaneously eloquent and heartfelt, the book contains pieces by contributors who knew Said well from close personal interaction, as well as by colleagues who collaborated with him on a professional basis. Whether in English or in Arabic, the contributions collected here are full of profound and intense insights into Said's mind and intellectual interests. They touch on some of the burning issues of our time, such as the current project of neo-liberal globalisation, instrument of contemporary neo- colonialism, and many of them are at once sensitive, trenchant and illuminating. Said possessed both the commitment and the vantage point from which to assess decolonisation and the resistance to neo-colonialism, and as such his work is pertinent not only to Palestine and the Arab world, which was, of course, one of his main interests, but also to other places as far afield as South Africa, Japan, China and India. In their re- examination of major issues pertaining to decolonisation and resistance, the contributions also explore the interface between intellectuals and their respective societies, another favourite subject of Said's, some of them responding to the aggressive projection of state power by the US and introducing some valuable analytical insights. However, what holds the essays together is their joint commitment to themes especially dear to Edward Said, whether those themes are political or personal. Indeed, political themes in this book are explored from the standpoint of the personal, something in the tradition established by Said himself. As the introduction to this collection notes, Said, born in Cairo, "crossed geographical and disciplinary borders to become an intellectual of the world" and to speak "on behalf of the voiceless." Said's personal trajectory is thus also a political one, and this tying together of public and private themes is one of the hallmarks of the volume. Typical of the volume's commitment to remember Edward Said the man as well as Said the public intellectual is a "Tribute to My Father" by Edward Said's daughter Najla Said. "Daddy," she writes here, "became my best friend when I was 12 years old, obsessively, ravenously reading Jane Eyre... funny that it was the Bront�s that brought us so close. Throughout school and college, he read every single paper I wrote before it was handed in... He appreciated the finer things, yes, but I think that they really meant nothing to him. If he saw that you liked some thing, it was yours." American academic Michael Wood follows this with a fine piece entitled "Desperate Youth" that unites personal and professional memories. In it, Wood remembers how he felt during the few weeks following Said's death in 2003. First, he looked through old photographs, and then "one day I saw a film clip which showed Edward and Salman Rushdie and others on a panel ... The footage wasn't that old ... But Edward looked so desperately young that I was completely bowled over. It was as if he had died again. The past ran right up to the present and was folded into it. But the film image was also full of what had not happened yet, or perhaps it was separated from me by the weight of what I knew was to happen." Viewing this footage from the mid 1980s, when Said was not yet suffering from the cruel illness that was eventually to lead to his tragically early death, Wood feels that the images "the film conveyed were ones of hope," Said appearing there as the very image of assurance and expectation. "I think this is what I meant when I said to myself that Edward looked desperately young," Wood notes. "He wasn't desperate, and in the mid-eighties he wasn't as young as all that, but he was living in another world, a world that had once been his and ours. This was a world where the store of future possibilities, not endless, but not clearly registered as finite either, made itself seem like a form of youth; and make it seem in retrospect, now that those possibilities are fulfilled or cancelled, even more like a form of youth." No less poignant is another memory of Said that again mixes the personal and the professional. Andrew Rubin was a student and then a colleague of Edward Said's, and he writes here that "what I came to learn about Edward, as his last doctoral student, his research assistant, and friend, was that both his life and his work were part of a willful human and humane endeavour." Rubin is in awe of Said's charismatic public persona, noting that "his demystifying and explanatory powers were gifted, at times entrancing and inspiring," and he also notes the experience of studying with Said at Columbia University in New York, where Said was University Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. "In the literature seminars I took with him at Columbia University," Rubin writes, "I recall the sense of urgency, immediacy, and the flawless fluidity with which he would discuss the writings of Joseph Conrad, the music of Beethoven, or the way he would recount his personal impressions of [the celebrated Caribbean historian] CLR James in the twilight of his life." Rubin's essay ends by comparing the Palestinian and South African struggles for national liberation and self- determination. "Unlike the white settlers of black South Africa, a great many of the Jewish settlers were the survivors of one of the most horrific crimes of the twentieth century," Rubin writes, noting that Said always pointed out that the Palestinians had been the hapless "victims of victims." "Edward," he says, "always saw reconciliation in the form of its antithesis or opposite," and for him there was always a characteristic ray of hope, "post- apartheid South Africa loosely providing a model of coexistence, interdependence and reconciliation." Yet, Palestine and the Middle East were not Said's only political interest, and it was not only in the Middle East that his ideas found an extensive following. In a contribution to this volume by Diasuke Nishuhara unassumingly entitled "Said, Orientalism and Japan," the writer discusses Japan's singular historical position, being a non-Western power that nevertheless ruled as a coloniser over much of East Asia in the first half of the 20th century. Nishuhara notes that Said's development of ideas of post-colonialism have found fertile ground on the Japanese left and among thinkers concerned to condemn the traditions of pre-war Japanese militarism. The Japanese translation of Edward Said's pathbreaking work on the relationship of Europe to the Arab world, Orientalism, (1978) appeared in 1986, and today most of Said's works have been translated into Japanese. Indeed, Nishuhara notes, "the name of 'Edi-wa-adou Sa-yi-yi-dou' is very popular among Japanese intellectuals today," and when Said visited Japan he was swiftly "surrounded by Japanese worshippers and sympathisers, including the Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe." Another intriguing cross-cultural exchange of views is to be found in Fadwa Abdel-Rahman's contribution to this memorial volume, entitled "Said and Achebe: Writers at the Crossroads of Culture," which links Said's work with that of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. Abdel-Rahman argues that "Achebe's and Said's cultural relations to empire can be examined metonymically through their respective personal names. Achebe was baptised 'Albert Chinualumogu,' signifying the double cultural influences operating on his world ... he dropped the 'Albert' ... [and] also abbreviated his native Igbo name to 'Chinua', thus asserting that his native heritage is adopted, not arbitrarily, but electively and according to his own terms." While "Said did not take the drastic step of changing his name ... when it was his turn to name his own children, he chose for them distinguishably Arabic names, Wadie and Najla," the author observes. In much the same vein there is an ambitious piece here by Youssef Yacoubi entitled "Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad and Salman Rushdie: Resisting the Ambivalence of Postcolonial Theory," which deals with some of Said's professional positions within the field he made his own. "The strength of Said's personal and intellectual relationship to Eqbal Ahmad and Salman Rushdie, two highly visible South Asian intellectuals, rests in a shared notion that history, narrative, and politics are inextricably intertwined," Yacoubi states, arguing that an intellectual's work should be adversarial and detecting similarities between the work of these three writers. "For Said and Rushdie, the experience of 'paradoxical identity' offers new imagined homelands and new intellectual frontiers to cross," he writes. Richard Armstrong's "Last Words: Said, Freud and Traveling Theory" is another piece dealing with Said's academic work in cultural criticism. Examining Said's work on Freud, and in particular his discussion of Freud's well- known essay "Moses and Monotheism," Armstrong argues that Said forgets that Freud's "Moses is really a murder mystery," and he has interesting things to say about how Said's discussion of the "non- European" aspects of this piece are related to western imperialism and colonialism. Alif has long been distinctive in containing critical essays in both English and Arabic, and in the Arabic section of this issue many leading Arab intellectuals influenced by the life and work of Edward Said have published interesting contributions. Among these, there is an essay by the Palestinian critic Feisal Darraj entitled "Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said: Two Different Problematics," which studies the intellectual debt owed by Said to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, best known for his concept of "hegemony". Said, like Gramsci, strove to combine theoretical writing with political activism, and Gramsci's notion of "praxis", the translation of theory into practice, proved especially valuable to him. Said's political activism was most poignantly articulated in his struggle for a free Palestine, of course, and Hassan Nafaa, professor of political science at Cairo University, here contributes a lengthy essay on "Edward Said and Palestine." This essay expertly analyses Said's engagement with Palestine at different stages of his life and his contributions to the Palestinian question. Continuing the Palestinian theme and still in the volume's Arabic section, Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti contributes an essay entitled "Edward Said: The Voice of Independent Thinking," which discusses the ways in which Said, as an independent thinker, departed from the commonplaces of Palestinian national liberation discourse, introducing new ideas at crucial junctures. Still on the topic of the struggle for national liberation, Egyptian novelist and professor Radwa Ashour contributes an article entitled "The Voice: Franz Fanon, Eqbal Ahmad and Edward Said," in which she looks at seminal influences on Said's thinking about national liberation, charting the development of his writings on it and paying tribute to Eqbal Ahmad, a close friend of Said's and colleague in political resistance of Frantz Fanon. Ahmad's thinking on these issues profoundly affected Said, Ashour writes, so much so that he dedicated his book Culture and Imperialism to him. There are many other pieces in this issue of Alif dealing with the life, thought and legacy of Edward Said, many of them of the highest quality and by an impressive team of international contributors. Anyone new to Said's thought, or needing a reliable survey of it, will find in this enjoyable and well-put-together memorial volume a good place to start. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
