Writers and thinkers from around the world gathered in London last week to pay tribute to the late . Frederick Bowie reflects on the legacy of a man who offered the Arab world a new perspective on itself In 1997, I was indirectly responsible for being invited to speak as part of the inaugural series of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures. By the time the event came to be held, I had moved abroad, and a friend of mine whose politics were forged in Poland during the Solidarity years was nominated to host Said on his visit. When I returned to England several months later, I asked how the lectures had gone. My friend was not someone who took kindly to academics as a rule, and I was used to hearing his sarcastic excoriation of the leading lights of critical theory and practice. So as I asked my question, I was expecting the worst. But as soon as I mentioned Said's name, his face lit up with what I can only call wonder. "He's a prince!" he said, simply. And as he spoke, his eyes widened even further, as if he was still trying to come to terms with the fact. On Sunday 3 October, over a thousand people did their best to cram into the Logan Hall of the University of London (capacity 950) to pay homage to this prince who died a year ago last month. The fact that Tsahal also chose to mark the first anniversary of Said's death by staging a brutal and bloody reinvasion of Gaza is, of course, just a cruel coincidence, even if at certain times during his life this urbane and elegant man was probably the best- known "terrorist" in the United States. That same morning, one delegate told the conference, BBC news had reported that a group of Palestinian civilians had died in Jabaliya Camp after their car was hit by an air-to-surface missile " probably fired from an Israeli helicopter gunship" (my emphasis). The casual obscenity of that "probably" is just one tip of the vast, but now not wholly invisible iceberg, to which Said devoted his life's work: the solid mass of structural misrepresentation which separates discourse from reality in Western "versions" of the Middle East. As Graham Usher, Jerusalem correspondent for The Economist and Al-Ahram Weekly said in his presentation, "What Said showed me was that conflict is never simply a dispute over territory; it is always a struggle of narratives. Our job as reporters is not to cover Palestine, but to uncover it for a Western audience." The sense of (mis)representation as a narrative which is never set in stone, however dense and solid it may appear to have become, is central to Said's legacy. Yet his work has in its turn been the victim of repeated, often willful misunderstanding. For when confronting other people's falsehoods and misrepresentations, Said never simply championed that simple version of "the truth" to which he might claim privileged access. Instead, as a critic and philologist (his own favourite term for his trade), he focussed on analysing the ways in which structures of misrepresentation are able to acquire an autonomy and force of conviction almost equal to those of the world itself. Partly through his training -- he saw himself as steeped, for good and ill, in Western culture, as a scholar of the Western tradition -- partly out of intellectual inclination, he declined to place his main hope in the raw facts that gave the lie to the Orientalist paradigm, or to the Zionist propaganda machine. For he understood all too well how facts, of which he had an incomparable mastery, could easily serve as the basis for a new and equally oppressive system. Rather, he put his trust in something more complex, and less easily reduced and manipulated than facts -- in individuality, and the truth of individual experience. It was this conviction which lay behind the dual nature of his intellectual work. On the one hand, he possessed a genuine respect for the cultural systems constructed by intellectuals in the service of power, and their ability to accommodate many different kinds of "truth" without swerving from their underlying aims. As his former student Timothy Brennan put it, "We cannot understand Orientalism unless we grasp that it is about how intellectuals create a reality, and that the book sets out to admire them." On the other hand, Said believed in criticism as a methodology which could do more than just judge texts: instead of simply rejecting or accepting them en bloc, it could work to bring out their buried contrapuntal nature. In the words of American University in Cairo comparative literature professor Ferial Ghazoul, he turned criticism into "an instrument of transitive action on behalf of the voiceless". The contrapuntal nature of Said's thought was at the heart of last week's conference, Edward W. Said (1935-2003): A Continuing Legacy, organised by the Palestine Society of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and supported by the Sir Joseph Hotung Research Programme in Law, Human Rights and Peace Building in the Middle East. For it was the explicit intention of the organisers, led by Awad Joumaa, to pay tribute to Said not through passive memorials, but by actively and critically engaging with his work. Benita Parry described Said's humanist criticism in terms of his rejection of synthesis as the end term of the dialectical process, and the refusal of consolation which Said himself identified in Auerbach, when he spoke of a process of thought "constantly interrupted by the withholding of mutuality". Stuart Hall took up Parry's comments on Said's uneasy late style, paying homage to the way it obliges us to "think through those experiences which are discrepant, but nevertheless interpenetrating". One recurring theme was the role which Said's work, and in particular Orientalism, had played in the creation of a whole new academic discipline -- the field of post-colonial studies, from which Said was always careful to distance himself. Neil Lazarus argued that Said was right to do so, since by dismissing the tools of anti-imperialism as "unhelpful", post-colonial studies had ended up rationalising and adjusting to the failure of the decolonisation process, rather than extending the challenge to it. As Lazarus said, nothing could have been further from Said's own commitment to the possible liberation of the Palestinian people. Ella Shohat revealed a similar dynamic at work in the reception of Said in Israel. Although Said was a ferocious critic of the Oslo Agreements, it was Oslo that created an academic audience for his work, by effectively evacuating the question of the Palestinian right of return. As a result, his work was read in the context of what has come to be called "post-Zionism". As Shohat pointed out, the classic texts of the anti-colonial movement which were so important to Said -- the writings of Fanon, Césaire, Memmi and CLR James -- have never been translated into Hebrew. "Post-Zionism does not come after anti-Zionism, it comes after Zionism," she summed up. "Its appeal is based precisely on the fact that it by-passes the question of Zionism's relation to colonialism." Al-Ahram Weekly Editor-in-Chief Hani Shukrallah discussed a different kind of skewed reception -- that which greeted Said on his "return" to the Arab world, a return that began with his regular articles in the pages of this newspaper. "Said was practically put on a pedestal by the Arabs," said Shukrallah, "but his status was manipulated in such a way as to blunt his influence on political debate in the Arab world." Shukrallah analysed the "sordid choices" to which that debate has been reduced -- "Bin Laden or Bush, Saddam or Sharon" -- and the consequences of this sterile polarisation of the available cultural and political space: "You are not supposed to criticise your own struggle, instead of just expressing you anger. You are not meant to look for means of actually winning the battle." Other speakers sought to address Said's contrapuntal style less by dissecting it, than by applying it. Tom Paulin discussed Said's lexical debt to Yeats, and gave his own conflictual reading of a sonnet by Gerald Manley Hopkins. Nadia Abul-Haj discussed the play of narrative and counter-narrative in the field of biblical archeology. Joseph Massad, meanwhile, took Said's own conception of "beginning" versus "origin" and used it to investigate both Said's personal history, and the intertwined histories of orientalism and anti-semitism. "Said," Massad argued, "was able to see Zionism as a brand of anti- semitism, which produced the Palestinian as the Jew," while repressing its own intellectual and cultural heritage. It was in this sense that Said was able to tell Ha'aretz towards the end of his life that he considered himself to be "the last Jewish intellectual". As the conference drew to a close, the sense of grief which was never far away throughout the day was woven closely with the challenge of the present and expectations for the future. With Said's death still so close and his loss still so vivid to many of those present, there was little room for naive optimism. Nor did the larger world outside the hall collaborate to provide much cause for hope. Many speakers reminded the audience of the "inconsolable intellectual pessimism" (Parry) which marked Said's late work. "Stubborness", "intransigence", "a scandalous commentator on our scandalous world" (Parry again) -- these were the phrases which set the tone. Part of Said's legacy is to remind us that resistance is a ceaseless, always unfinished task. "He never forgot that Palestine did not exist," Massad remarked. Stuart Hall celebrated "the exemplary performance of his life and work", yet could not conceal his fear that "his like is hardly ever to be seen again". London- based Egyptian professor Sabry Hafez shared what he had heard from Swedish sources -- that had Said lived another year, he was in line to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nevertheless, the final message was one of pragmatic and practical encouragement. As Alexander Cockburn put it, "Edward was important not just for what he did in his books, but because they have encouraged so many people." It was fitting then that Massad should close the conference by insisting, in the wake of many speakers before him, on the new perspective which Said offered us all, Arabs and non- Arabs alike. "His legacy provides a point of departure for the struggle." Said's work is essentially a beginning, not an ending. In the words of his widow, Mariam, who had welcomed us at the beginning of the day, "Edward taught us that we must take intellectual risks, because the chances of success are greater than we suspect." And she added, "To keep his thought alive, is to keep Edward alive." On the evidence of this conference, then, is set to outlive us all.
