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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| David Barsamian and Edward W. Said, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (Cambridge, MA: South End Press 2003)
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| APRIL AND MAY were cruel months in 2004. Falluja, Rafah, Abu Ghraib prison. I thought of Edward Said's legacy when the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq erupted in the media bringing with it photos of an American woman soldier leading a naked Iraqi man on a leash, and grinning American men and women soldiers posing for the camera before a pyramid of naked Iraqi men forced to simulate sodomy with each other. The orientalist defense offered by the US military, that the photos were staged to deliberately culturally offend Arab prisoners during interrogations (the idea being that Arabs are people for whom homosexuality and women in powerful positions are especially degrading), went completely unquestioned by most Western journalists. After all, the Arab mind is a special thing. That the West too would have found such torture degrading and humiliating could go unremarked only because it is so deeply ingrained that the Orient is not the Occident. We have Said to thank for showing more clearly and unrelentingly than others how these ideas consolidate the power of the West. |
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When one sees photos of this kind, the challenge is to stay human, to avoid being eaten up by the anger and to think how to respond. Here too Said was a kind of spirit guide for many of us. When Rafah refugee camp was once again the scene of slaughter and house demolitions by the Israeli military in May 2004, I thought of one of Said's last pieces on dignity and solidarity in which he mentions the death of Rachel Cory, a Jewish American woman who one year earlier had tried to stop the bulldozers in Rafah with her body. Said took the time to offer condolences to her parents. He praised Rachel for her individual act of courage, believing until the end that such actions matter and will ultimately win the day. Condemning Arab leaders for having no dignity, Said offered Rachel Cory as the counter example, someone who saw and was willing to defend the dignity of Palestinians. There are many days when I don't share Said's humanism, days when dignity seems an odd word to use in the circumstances. This spring, however, I needed to think about dignity and what it might mean to stop the bulldozers, the massacres, and the torture, and to live a committed life that recognizes the dignity of all peoples. |
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Dignity is one of Said's parting gifts in Culture and Resistance. A series of interviews conducted by David Barsamian, this is a little book and one that can actually be read on a beach, so eminently readable is the prose. It is vintage Said with all the passion, generosity, and insight packaged as a primer of those themes for which he has long been known. Strangely, it is an appropriate last book covering his views on Palestine, Iraq, 9/11, teaching, culture, and most of all, commitment. I can just make out what a dignified path might entail for me, a teacher and a writer. |
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The book opens with Said's views on Arafat and, as he does throughout, he gives one or two pithy facts that seem to say it all. Arafat's security apparatus consists of 40,000 people, enough to make him the single largest employer in the Palestinian territories. An enormously unproductive part of the economy, laments Said, who sees Arafat as a micro-manager of the worst kind, unwilling to brook any challenges to his authority. Lest we are tempted to spend too long on Palestinian failings, Culture and Resistance gets to the heart of the matter very quickly. In 1948, 800,000 Palestinians were driven out of Palestine by design, an occupation, Said reminds us, that is transformed into a story about modernization in the Israeli settler narrative. In the Israeli story, Palestine was little else but a desert with a few Nomads until the Jews came. It is in order to dismantle what North Americans should recognize as the classic settler mythology of terra nullius (the land was empty and awaiting European improvement, occupied by people too primitive to really lay claim to it) that Said has always wanted the publication of maps. He once commented that one of the hardest things to do was to publish maps of Israel/Palestine in North America, something this volume finally addresses. There are no less than thirteen maps in an appendix to the book and they tell the story of conquest more eloquently than words can. |
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Aware as he was of Israel as a settler colonial project, Said was nevertheless always clear that the answer could never be the end of Jewish settlement on Palestinian land. A proponent of a binational state solution, Said insists in these interviews that we must refuse to think of Jews as crusaders or imperialists who must simply go back home. "The Israelis are Israelis," he says simply and forcefully, and Palestinian existence is inextricably linked to Jewish existence in Palestine/Israel. By the year 2010 there will be demographic parity between Palestinians and Israelis. Apartheid does not work well under these circumstances, and most especially not in a territory this small. There must be a vision that "will allow people to live and not exterminate each other." (7) |
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What gets in the way of that vision? $135 billion in US aid to Israel is one of those facts strewn across these interviews that stands as an entry point for discussing why the United States cannot be seen as an even handed, honest broker of peace. Commenting on the Israeli lobby in Washington, Said traces the story we are told in the media, the story of Palestinian violence and Israel's need to protect itself, and puts this against the counter views (his own included) that often fail to get published. We understand as we read just how little we have been allowed to know. Said, ever the literature professor, uses his skills to raise our awareness of language games among politicians and in the media. For example the word "occupation" is one under dispute and officially rejected by the US administration. |
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I looked for insights in this book that I had not heard before and found one in Said's comments on 9/11. Rejecting Eqbal Ahmad's argument that terrorism is the poor man's B-52, Said points out that the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Centre and killed so many people were not poor men. Educated and middle-class, they were people uninterested in dialogue or in making a point. There was no political message and there were no demands attached to the bombings, only silent terror. The terrorists were not part of anything, Said stresses, and we cannot reduce their actions to those of the powerless against a superpower. For this, and for his unwavering sense of humanity, I will miss Edward Said. This book offers to fill a part of the gap, providing quick vignettes of Said's views to be pulled out and reflected upon whenever the seasons prove to be as cruel as this spring's. |
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Sherene H. Razack
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto |
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