Two events marking Edward Said's birth anniversary last Monday: a concert by Daniel Barenboim at the Carnegie Hall in New York and the screening of The Last Interview at the American University in Cairo. In his article Daniel Barenboim writes that Edward Said was many things for many people, but his was a musician's soul in the deepest sense of the word; while Amina Elbendary reviews the film The English and Comparative Literature Department at the American University in Cairo held its annual commemoration of Edward Said on Monday, 1 November -- his birthday. Organised by professor Ferial Ghazoul -- herself a one-time student of Said -- the evening included a reading of Mahmoud Darwish's latest poem "Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading" (the English translation of which by Mona Anis was published on these pages on 30 September) as well as the screening of the documentary film Edward Said: The Last Interview. In her introduction, Ghazoul explained that the aim of this celebration was to commemorate and not mourn Edward Said, announcing that the annual tradition aims at making various generations aware of Said's scholarship and intellectual contributions. The film was produced by D D Guttenplan, a former student of Said's at Columbia University, author of The Holocaust on Trial and London correspondent for The Nation, and directed by Mike Dibb. Essentially a long interview conducted by journalist Charles Glass, the film is composed entirely of talking heads shots -- the recording of what appears to have been an interview conducted at one sitting, with restricted camera movements. Said comes across as forceful and lucid despite his apparent illness and fatigue. He was to die less than a year later in 2003. The very title of the film, Edward Said: The Last Interview, evoked the memory of films like, for example, Dennis Potter: The Last Interview in which the British playwright Dennis Potter, terminally ill with cancer, bared his soul and discussed with Melvyn Braggs his thoughts on life and death. A comparable experience in the Arab world was Saad-Allah Wannus's television interview days before his death, also of cancer. Despite the similarity in title Edward Said's last interview is different. It is not as emotionally charged, perhaps, or as intimate as some viewers had expected it to be. In the first part of the film, Said discusses his illness and its influence on his thought and writing. Diagnosed with leukemia in 1991, Said did not, as he put it, either recover or die right away. The years of constant battling with the disease induced him to approach and rethink his early years and his relationship with his parents, producing in the meantime his remarkable memoir Out of Place. In the film, he does not go beyond the urge, indeed the ethos and need, to keep going and not look back. Illness, and one senses, also death, remain things that have to somehow be dealt with and taken in stride. He speaks of his illness as a long imprisonment, keeping him back. Whether the reluctance to bare his soul is due to Said's own reticence or his lack of familiarity with the makers of the film is not clear. Rather than an intimate conversation, The Last Interview comes across as a set of answers to the pre-arranged questions posed by Glass; the lack of a deep mutual understanding between interviewer and interviewee is obvious. The interview attempts to capture the fundamental core of Said's life and work. It deals with his early childhood in Cairo and Palestine, most of which is eloquently dealt with in his memoir. Indeed readers familiar with the memoir will find that Said's remarks in this film confirm the subtle tensions within the middle class Palestinian family, even though they do not reveal any deeper dimensions. Though Said did not mean to address the political circumstances of the Palestinian nakba head on, they were at the heart of that undefined tension and continuing sense of instability. It is perhaps telling that here too Said speaks of his move to the United Sates in 1951 as a most traumatic experience and the biggest shock of his life from which, perhaps, he never recovered. The interview moves from the autobiographical to the slightly academic, stopping at Said's education, his relationship to literature and music, his major works and their influence on subsequent scholarship. Needless to say, Orientalism gets its fair share of the discussion. Said discusses it in the context of his interest in the history of representations and othering especially in the aftermath of the 1973 War. Said also explains his views on the relationship between knowledge and power. The interview turns to important relationships in his life, other than those with his family. He explains his special connections with people who appear quite removed from him and his world. Being largely on his own and lacking inherited relationships of "filiation" he sought instead connections of "affiliation" with people across lines from himself, intellectuals often at the opposite extreme and connected with them in ways that were very much against the grain. Said also expounds on his interest in form as a possible connection between his interest in literature and in music. It is recurrent musical motifs that might be antagonistic to each other but yet run parallel to each other without necessarily being reconcilable that interest him. He is equally interested in unreconciled strains in his own life and this interest is also at the heart of his fascination with politics. Even though Edward Said is closely associated with the Palestinian struggle for independence, formal politics come secondary in this film. The interview does however discuss his critique of the Oslo Accords and his criticisms and differences with Yasser Arafat. It summarises the main views he expressed in his political essays of the 1990s and until his death, published firstly in Al-Ahram Weekly. Edward Said: The Last Interview is prefaced with a Roland Barthes quote: "The only sort of interview that one could, if forced to, defend, would be where the author is asked to articulate what he cannot write." Though the film is impressive, one would hesitate to argue that it fulfils this aim. It complements the image we have of Said through his prolific writings. Yet it is these writings and his ideas which remain the most articulate and will survive long after him. It stops short of enriching the voice we get through his writing and stands a few steps back from confronting what must have been a main preoccupation for Said in those days: death.
