Interview with Edward Said

[Music] network site and are a beer man investors are fooling Metin on Van Riper verb etre beat Valley turret to evaders hop music and politic is a aim fund amazed infiltrator called - Cletus even on sedate international family he does an honor fanclub up trader has played his or her from the Palestine see Zack I would say it you were born in a country that no longer exists you were brought up a Christian in a predominantly Muslim world you live most of your life in New York as an Arab in a predominantly Jewish city and you're finally a pioneers in the literary Faculty of university now that is quite confusing seen on paper nonetheless there is one person combining these things for you well I I think I identify myself really as a kind of intellectual person who travels a lot between things I don't think of myself as inhabiting a field or a place really I mean obviously I have an address but I but you know it's not it's not an address that means that much to me you know I I think I like to think of myself as a sort of energy in motion and I've never believed in the notion of professionalism that is to say that you become a professional and do only that I've spent a lot of time invading other fields fields that are not my own like music or various forms of area studies anthropology and so on and so forth because I believe I think in the end that a rational effort can overcome most of the obstacles laid before one and in my case they they're political as well you know because as you said I was born in a country that doesn't exist anymore it's called Palestine and that loss I think signified to me a tremendous need to make up for it in some way and to live in different countries of my own making as a matter of speaker as a fact there was a country which was not of your making in your youth your early years and you described it in your memory out of place as a strangely continuant complete continuous country you grow up in Cairo in Egypt but traveling to the Lebanon for holidays to Bellus time for family visits it was all very easy as if there was one part of the world without obstacles all right I mean I felt it as continuous I mean there were different places I mean certainly I felt that Palestine which is where my family was from was the only place where I felt truly at home because all my extended family was there and we would spend long periods of time there for example during the war 42 we spent most of that here in Palestine and I went to school and we spent the summer in Ramallah which was that a summer resort it's now the main city on the West Bank and Lebanon we used to spend our summers and each of them had its own flavor but I never found its own you know cast of characters you know The Grocer in one place and I was because of the way my mind his work was made up and the way we moved I was always comparing you know and the grocer in Cairo versus the grocer in Lebanon and the handyman in Palestine and the handyman in Cairo and soda but my relatives were mainly in Palestine but but no family in Egypt so the handyman's from the different places address from did they belong to one culture yes I think they did I mean most of them were Arabs spoke Arabic the lingua franca was Arabic and even in school for examples the last school I went to entire which is called Victoria College which is where King Hussein went and where I was going to say Michelle shell who but almost Shareef the actor it was a good school it was supposed to be a good school but I mean I I didn't really learn that much there because it was it was very combative and hostile because the teachers were all English and we were all something else now in that school there were Italians there were Greeks there were Armenians there were many different kinds of Arabs there are many different kinds of Jews Sephardic Jews European Jews and so on and yet that sense of of difference we were all brought together by the fact that we lived in an Islamic country and that the language was Arabic so there was a there was a kind of unity there you and he any diversity yes but but there was another reason to be brought together the college was not without reason called Victoria College John absolutely it was it was a triumph of British imperialism where you were taught that you could learn about England which is what we did all the time we never learned anything about where we were I mean there was no whatever well I learnt all about you know the English kings I remember very clearly in my first year I wrote I thought an excellent essay for history on the enclosure system at the end of the 18th century you know in all the fields the common ages yeah we're suddenly enclosed you know by proprieties which is major social change meant absolutely nothing to me but I mastered all the facts and I produced an essay that I got an a on or something or an a-minus which was abstract work totally totally had nothing to do with anything and it's quite remarkable that since that time my my imagination is now concentrated on geography in a certain way and that all my work has a kind of geographical basis to it rather than a temporal or historical basis but but in any case so we learnt about Britain as the sovereign center Metropole of the world which it was in those days and we were taught that we that we could learn about it but we could never become it so I mean that was the the core of British education imperial education that you could learn the language you could learn the history as a subject but not as a participant in it not as somebody who belonged to it so it was there was a sense of inferiority with it you see did this lead to a sort of double lingua franca I mean Arabic coming from home which which bound all these various people together and English being English not only as a natural language but also as a system of thought being the program of instruction yeah and thereby that was a that was my that was my experience I mean it wasn't everybody's because I mean I suppose some of the people in school for example some of the Jewish boys tended to speak French at home you know right we happen to speak Arabic and I've never really known which is my first language I mean I always went between English and Arabic and later French because so many of my schoolmates spoke French yeah and because your parents both spoke English as well yeah they must look English as well my mother was educated in the American system my father was educated in the English system and then he went to America of course spoke but he but his but his English was not his native language his native language was Arabic and you could hear it in his voice and in his intonation the same with my mother did he never connect the Arabian layer from which you came and the superstructure of the English car never they were always kept separate the the the Arabic superstructure rather sub sub stratum the home stratum was always for me the language of intimacy the language of familiarity the language once spoke to the quote-unquote natives you see and the language we spoke amongst ourselves as a subversive language at school because the first the rule of the school in Victoria colleges English is the first language English is the language of school anybody speaking any other language will be punished severely so we spoke Arabic as a way of defying the teachers but there was no intellectual connection between them I knew nothing about Arabic literature about Arabic history whatever I knew I knew on my own or through what I heard at home or from relatives and so on and so forth um but for example music you're a music lover your vinter seems a very young very young age what sort of music an almost Western music oh it was always Western music I the first concert I think I was taken to was to a concept by uncle zoom who was the most famous singer at the time and it was a dreadful experience for me I think I was 8 or 9 I didn't like I mean first of all it didn't begin until 10 o'clock at night I was half asleep I was you know I was a kid and there was this great crowded theatre didn't seem to be any order to it the musicians would wander onstage and sit down and play a little bit wander off then come back and finally she would appear and they would sing together and with with her Orchestra and her songs would go on for 40 to 45 minutes and to me that there wasn't the kind of form or shape it seemed to be all more or less the same and the tone was mournful melancholic I didn't understand the words above all what I missed I realize now what I missed was counterpoint it's it's very monophonic music and it would I think it's designed to send people not exactly into a stupor but it would induce a kind of melancholic Hey which people like and I found very disturbing I mean mentally it made you inactive I think I mean it's entirely subjective so I very early on rejected it and began to focus exclusively on western music for which I hungered more and more for example the songs you sang whether in English on in English on yes but I don't agree so never except three maybe songs that I used to associate with my family especially my mother and when there were family gatherings for example in Lebanon half of my mother's family was Lebanese so we had a lot of Lebanese relatives and I recall also in Palestine my mother's brother used to play there owed and they would sing songs that were unfamiliar to me but I could catch the the theme I remember a few of the words but compared to the richness that I loved the western music that I was getting through records we didn't have any records at home Arabic records we had lots of Western records very haphazard collection lots of Beethoven lots of Mozart a little bit of bass very little vogner a little bit of ricotta ours I learnt all that at home Rossini I loved Rossini at a very early age that was more coherent and it was something that I was studying as a pianist not a very good pianist but I was studying it whereas the Arabic stuff was was always smaller and it would it wasn't consistent it wasn't part of my daily routine of my life and in church you were brought up in the Church of England yes I was both and I was sang hymns in Arabic and in English but I never could get because of course the schools I went to the first schools were also really mean we had religious and as a small boy we had everyday we had to sing hymns in the morning before the school began and they were all English hymns now occasionally when we were in Jerusalem I would go to Arabic services and they were the same hymns except with Arabic words so you know since I was more familiar with the English the Arabic words would just go by me I could sing them and I could sort of read them but they didn't make the impression that onward Christian soldiers that made that made a great impression on me Oh God our help it you know their arabic words for that too but completely different I mean isn't without the same triumphalism and the same marching so so so the church was really also an English expensive and and does this introduce a sort of say cultural schizophrenia I don't know that it was schizophrenia I just thought it was different parts of my life you know that I still feel that I mean for example now the language I speak at home with my wife who's an Arab is Arabic and now that my oldest son has learned Arabic although he grew up in New York and was born in America he speaks Arabic - we speak Arabic so I think of it as really different parts of my experience and I it's not at all no it's not schizophrenia it's a little older I girl the more I feel I bring them together in some way so it's like it's like polyphony it's like at a point that's the way I don't want a change in life speaking for tens of years English with your son and then changing Arabic yes it's astonishing it's astonishing and in a way we're all converting them my daughter who doesn't speak any Arabic at all understands so if I say something to an Arabic she and she says yes or no etcetera but she refuses to answer in Arabic but she doesn't know it well enough but she too finds it also part of her cut part of her you know her apparatus what does it mean this yes this is this this going back to the language well I think I don't really know it's a it's a very interesting point I it's not really going back it said give it it's giving it more ominous sounds giving it more prominence it was there all along and and during the course of the last I say 2025 years I felt myself to be growing back into a part of my life that especially during my later education I had completely reject not reject and just put aside you know so I putting something on a shelf like a book a book that you read once a noob I put it on a shelf don't look at it for 20 or 25 or 30 years and then you bring it down you start reading it again it comes back to you and then it becomes a part of your daily experience and I think that's what happened you describe the Arabic world of your youth as I said as a continuum when did it break the continuum well I think 48 for me because I never I never went back to Palestine and by the spring of night we left my immediate family my parents and my sisters and I left Palestine in December of 1947 for the last time we went to Cairo and one of the reasons we couldn't stay Jerusalem it was because the British had divided the city into zones zone a zombie cetera and we lived in zone a let's say and my school is in zone D when I turned 12 which was in November 47 I needed a pass I couldn't before that I could go directly you know because I was too young but then I needed a pass and then the question of renewing the pass it just became logistically very hard and of course I think I don't know because both of my parents are dead but at the time my impression is that it seemed to them that the situation was getting too tense for us to stay as we used to and I was getting too old and you know my sisters your the education had to be continuous so then we went back to Cairo of two or three months later the rest of my family my aunt's my cousin's my grandparent my grandmother uncles aunts etc all left Palestine and that is upon the formation of the State of the State of Israel and and not so much the foundation but the campaign to rid Palestine as many Arabs as possible so my family was part of about eight hundred and fifty thousand eight hundred thousand Palestinians who are now you know about four and a half million refugees today were you aware on a moment it happened what really was happening or is this now some sort of hindsight well it's not so much hindsight it's it's really it's a kind of posterior retrospective identification of things that puzzled me why was my father's cousins Miriam as whom I used to see in Jerusalem as a rather prosperous and confident man why did he appear in Cairo in the middle of 1948 dressed in a very threadbare suit much reduced in size and weight very sad living in in what to me at the age of 12 appeared to be poverty you know the widow there were no immediate answers to be had my father was not a expansive man he didn't speak about it and we were decidedly unpolitical my family as many middle-class families did in Palestine and in the Arab world insulated themselves from politics politics was thought to be done by other people lesser people or professional politicians who belong to the notable Muslim families we were minority Christians so we didn't participated in fights a lot what happened that I didn't understand so retrospectively I was able to interpret it as having to do with a fall of past wasn't a feeling of protest in your family no I don't think so I think it was a feeling of sadness and occasionally anger I remember very clearly for example in April of 1948 very very clearly shortly after dairy Essene which is biggest Arab massacre that done by the AeroGarden in that village just outside of Jerusalem my aunt and my cousin her daughter were talking about it with great passion as how the Jews entered the village killed 200 people and took away the women and paraded them through the streets of West Jerusalem or whatever part of or Tel Aviv naked I mean that made a tremendous impression on me and so I think there was a sense of anger and impotence at the same time because there was nothing we could do about it no feeling of organizing no no no there was no argument I look a lot of what happened in 1948 and already in a certain sense happened before there was a great uprising of the Palestinians against the British between 1936 and 1939 it was called a great rebellion and it was against British imperialism in protest against the Zionists incoming Zionists who were being favored by the British we thought so there was a great revolution and during that time I think occurred what was it enough to determine the fate of the Palestinians in 1948 all the organizations were destroyed by the British the leaders some of whom I now know their children and so on were exiled to the c-shell islands to Rhodesia and so on and the National Movement was broken during the time after that after 39 the the Jews became powerful and they were organized by the British they served in World War two with the British and they were organized and had arms much more than all the Arab you know the story these to say the Arab armies invaded and they were going to kill it there was there was no hope of that at all a because the Arab armies were much smaller badly organized poorly armed versus the Jews second because the Jews and the Jordanians had already arranged to divide the West back to divide Palestine so all of this was unknown to us but you know we've discovered it since yeah so there was no bus all these things were developing between say 48 and 56 to give two key dates you were following your I was good British education in America and then then American imbibed with the values of the anglo-american culture you say um no no no wait not imbibed with the values imbibed with the knowledge I never it's quite interesting but knowledge without values well without those values in other words I reserve for myself the right to read what they told me I'd to read and yet think differently so that at the same time that I was reading about let's say American history in American the foundation of the American Republic I was very aware that there was a great difference between that history and its pretended ideals and what I saw in the world from which I came which is quite different really age 15-16 yeah absolutely that when I first came to America I took a course in a man that you were required to take a course in American history and I remember thinking then how quickly because I was aware of it having read it from the British point of view yeah how quickly they passed over what happened to the Indians right what happened to the blacks the whole the whole question of slavery in the in the early 50s when I was a student in the textbooks of that time were completely elided don't forget very interesting it's just how important a personality in our lives in Egypt quite by chance Paul Robeson was I mean we had his records I grew up on Paul Robeson singing mother machree singing the song of the Volga boatmen I mean I remember so clearly and then I read about him and I remember what happened to him and then I heard and took courses in American literature in American history and I noticed well what happened to the slaves I simply no mention of them lost the idealization and the ndnd and the myth of occasion of American intervention abroad the Philippines the spanish-american war all of those things I was easily aware quickly aware that there was some discrepancy I didn't quite understand it but I realized that what we were be given in the book and what I lived and what I knew about whether in the call or as a non-white there was a discrepancy I didn't understand the discrepancy but I knew there was one the book that makes you most famous later in life is Orientalism in which essentially the thesis is you invented us the idea of the Orient is an idea of the Occident right what do you say about that part of the world its cultural and its history is predominantly fabricated by your minds which grew up in a colonial imperialist history yeah without talking about the values we return to that later on so what you're actually saying is that the idea of Orientalism already arises during your school as absolutely I'll tell you why it's not so much that they invented but that their description of the experience of being an oriental of what it was like to be an Arab or Muslim or an Indian or whatever didn't correspond to my experience and very early on I realized that there were two issues of major importance one was the fact that we were weaker that we were a lesser people and we were trained by education and by social organization the presence of British troops in an Arab I was very quickly aware of that you would have to be a fool not to be what were all these troops doing in Cairo during the war and in Palestine before 1948 that's number one and the second thing is that there were two standards there was one standard for the Englishman and there was one standard for us and the lives that we let as lesser people had very little to do with what they said the Oriental was for example I felt myself to be totally equal to the British kids and to the Americans but somehow by the doctrine of Orientalism I was meant to be different and lesser and I didn't feel that and that's where the that's where the experience derives from but you can react in in two different forms you can say well that's that point and and your school career and later your university career I was so successful mine that you were an equal on a certain date I didn't really feel it you know III always felt I was denied the kind of recognition that I felt I deserved for example in the American school I went to when I first came to America in 1951 my father sent me to a boarding school there was very austere it was a New England in western Massachusetts in a cold climate which I'd never been in before I was extremely lonely and unhappy I felt I was one of the few foreigners in the school they were all Americans mostly from Massachusetts in the Northeast and and one of the things I felt was that although I was clever you know I had a British education much more advanced much more concentrated than the American so I was quickly able to rise to the top of the class when the graduation finally occurred in my last year I was there for two years I was either first a second in the class but at the graduation I was not recognized as a first a second they put me aside for somebody else there was some standard used that denied me that recognition and so I became immediately suspicious of power that masks itself as judgment and fairness but in reality is arbitrary and I think I was passed over because I was different and they wanted some to Americans rather than this strange mixture of foreigners and and so from from the beginning I felt that I wasn't successful in quite the same way and I think early on I determined that my way would have to be different in other words I would continue I would go through the motions you know you can get A's and so on in school it's not difficult I mean I didn't find it difficult but the real path that I wanted to follow was my of my own making I didn't have a conventional career I had an unconventional career but but there is something of a double mind in that I mean a double bind with say the imperialist schooling on the one hand you're at a very young age aware of the double standard on the other hand if that is on the other hand you're the one who and dives into their literature into that music look at me there oh yeah but look at the way I dived in I mean my for example the first extended piece of work I did was on Conrad now Conrad in the early 60s was scarcely known I mean he wasn't now he's an industry but in those days Conrad was considered a kind of what I mean Ian Forster said you know something wrong about him you know mysterious any and all people who admired him like James and TS Eliot thought of him as a peculiar man well that's what attracted me to him that he wasn't the routine Englishman and moreover he was again a stranger out of place in England and masking himself as an Englishman BC and I felt that I was doing the same thing I mean I'm not Conrad obviously but but Conrad for all of his life he dressed like an Englishman he married an English woman Jessie George he acted like an Englishman but he had this incredibly thick polish accent so you know and it I felt the same thing I had this name you know and the fact is what people ask me where are you from so I was half from the Middle East at that time I didn't say I was from Palestine service I mean I said Middle East I'm an Arab and I left it at that later on I began I began to give it more prominence because after all it was where I was from and that's what I think that's why people like what we read were important but then develops this this philosophical attitude yeah I mean it begins with Conrad yeah identifying probably with his position studying his books right trying to find the the points of view you could recognize and and out of this grows the book Orientalism it became an eye opener and it became even the beginning of a new way of dealing with the kaanum of Western culture it opened it how did you experience the the tremendous intellectual success of our entities 'im well as a total surprise I mean in fact I didn't realize what I was writing all I thought I was doing very much under the influence of of my teachers not only not only the ones I'd actually had but people who meant a lot to me in the in the German school of philology people like our baahar Spitzer you know the analysis of the Glitter the great yeah I'm because I I feel I belong to that tradition although it's a tradition they wouldn't recognize me you understand I mean yeah yeah but for me it was something that I held on to and I was also very influenced by Vico you know teaching yourself so I taught myself to read these texts in which descriptions of the oriental appear in basically literary form and I thought I was writing a history of an idea I was totally unprepared for the reception because I couldn't in the early days I couldn't find a publisher or you know there was a kind of reluctant publisher academic press but what I actually wrote the book and commercial publisher happened to see it at a friend's house or something who might lent the manuscript to they called me and they gave me a lot of money and they publish it so it was published commercially the response really taught me more about the book than the writing of it because I had no idea I had no idea that what I had touched on a lot of issues at the society that had to do with questions of the other which were becoming too known now at the time questions of resistance which was now during you know the the the last part of the Vietnam period and the the rise of you might say identity politics and above all the new type of history which I apparently had written I didn't realize I was having you know when you sit down to write you say I'm writing a new this come on is not only my life writing this book based on a very personal experience or a very painful yes looks buried in the book yeah very of course it's not the main point of the book no of course but it's the the underlying layer of yuma's ground or after off of the book right I'm going into the heart of the matter and telling them yeah about their way limited way yes dealing with the culture music but you don't think this is just a she thought no no believe me I honestly thought don't forget I wrote the book entirely in isolation I had nobody to talk to in that respect I had nobody to share my ideas with I didn't realize what a formidable establishment I was taking on had I realized all of these things I wouldn't have done it you know I probably wouldn't have done it I've spent much more time reading and rereading and rewriting as long as a as it is I wrote it I can say innocently it then took on a life of its own which has very little to do with my own experience of it um nowadays and you see almost a subdivision of subdivision of subdivision in dealing with the arts I mean if you wanted to talk seriously about a novel by a homosexual writer you at least have to be a noble sexual yourself of his hm and health same goes for all sort of cultural minorities based on the idea that the the classical canonic way of dealing with the arts is always in the fruit of a power structure if you see these tiny subdivisions these isolations of parochial dealing with art history feel guilty no not at all because that's nothing to do with what I wrote it's a misapprehension and a miss appropriate I say very very clearly does this mean I asked the question does this mean that only Orientals can write about the orient that only women can write about women that only blacks can write about blacks that only homosexuals can write I say absolutely not I believe and this is you might say the contradiction in the book that several people have picked up mainly there's a contradiction between the humanism of the book and the anti humanism of the system it describes on the other hand I retain my faith in the human in the humanist tradition that it's possible to deal with discrepant experiences truthfully without resolving them into simple things like only women should write about women only Chicano should write about Chicano only Latinos should write about Latino I think that's the most damaging mystery crime and miss misapprehension of what I'm saying that's why they debate all these things and they trace them back to me and people say you did that and I say absolutely not I'm talking from a universalistic if you like Cosmopolitan point of view to which I adhere and which is the only way that world makes sense to me I don't believe in the politics of identity although in many ways paradoxically I seem to be the father of identity politics but it's a thing I totally disbelieve in because I realize the damage that identities have done not only in power and powerless powerful and powerless but also identities between each other don't forget I grew up in an environment in Jerusalem this is very powerful where my earliest a prehensile was of communities locked and struggle with each other and I don't mean Jews and Arabs I mean Christians and Christians my earliest memories of going to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was my older cousin telling me this is the Greek Orthodox Chapel the same Church the Greek Orthodox Chapel and then feeling I'm somebody pulling at my jacket and saying no don't believe him that's their version of Christianity Christ was buried here in the Armenian Chapel that's what I grew up with and I hated it ever since you see because I think that is the end of humanism it's the end of human community community is not made up of divisions of this sort but rather of overcoming the divisions without destroying the differences I think the differences are so so that is stressing unive realistic vision is to fill a value standpoint but not a relativist know not around us at all I mean relativism strikes me as a cop-out say well you know everything you know I believe very strongly in universal standards for example I think there is such a thing as great art and I don't care whether you know whether the great art is written by a white man or a black woman or read something or other if it's great art it's great art yeah I have no problem with that at all and people come and tell me well yes but your main interest seems to be people like flow Barre and Dickens and so they're dead white males so I says so what if there's a great Arabic novelist I write about him too but I refuse to fall into the position of saying well some art is great but but it's only good for them I mean it's either good or not and as I grow older I'm much more interested in the problem let's say of aesthetics I think there's a definite branch of human activity which I call the aesthetic which has its own privileges which has its own which has its own domain which I'm interested in preserving this doesn't at all mean however this doesn't at all mean however that the aesthetic is immune to various affiliations and connections I mean look what look what the Nazis did with my sister girl look what the Nazis did with Fidelio I mean you know these are works that you could describe and I have described myself as works of liberation but at the same time they can be put to different uses so I think there's the aesthetic but there's also the appropriation of the aesthetic and I think one has to be able to deal with both of them that's also a question of balancing your position as a reader as a critic as a scholar and as a citizen right in a certain moment in your biography politics breaks through must have been round about 67 what happened oh the world I knew was shattered I mean I experienced the war of 67 the arab-israeli war June 1967 in New York and there in a city where there were no Arabs that I knew don't forget I wore my education with in Western literature there were no Arabs neither at Princeton when I was undergraduate nor at Harvard when I was a graduate student who were studying what I was studying there were some Arabs whom I knew who were studying Middle Eastern literature and some doing science in America in America which I've always opposed by the way I mean I think that it's crazy to come to America to study your literature yeah I mean you can do it better over there in any case all of a sudden I found myself almost by you know by magnetic attraction taken to the UN where an old friend of mine an Egyptian suddenly appeared called me up he said Edward were here delegation etc we're trying to make some rescue something out of that immense destruction of our world and very soon I was involved with Arabs in the reconstruction effort virtually became a Palestinian you know that was a little later that that took place later I was discovered by an old friend of mine from Princeton who was a Palestinian who was you know graduate student at Princeton who called me up after I would say 5th almost 12 years of not seeing him in 68 he was putting together a book on the war of 67 from an Arab point of view there was a need for an Arab voice I mean all we heard was a triumphalism of Israel the triumph of the West a triumph of this happening I think the destruction of abdun Nasser I mean it the chorus was deafening and I had no way to express it and then I got this providential phone call for my friend and I wrote an essay called the Arab portrayed in which I tried to for the first time in my life to give voice to the silent Arab the oppressed Arab the Arab who was being shot and killed beginning with a Palestinian but also going back in literature to the Arab of the Orientalist that was the first experience I had and then in the late 60s 69 70 for the first time in my life I went to Jordan where most of my family had gone after 48 I went to stay with my cousin I'd never been in Jordan before and while I was there I discovered friends and distant relatives of mine who had become part of the Palestinian movement and I immediately cultivated their friendship and they drew me in and by the early 70s I was part of the movement so it but he came here kind of a distant cousin from America by then a professor - Jordan embrace but a family yes embraced by the family and and and I discovered very soon embraced by the family in Arabic that there was you know my background the English literature the comparative literature our bath Panofsky spitzer or meant nothing there I very quickly determined that I would have to re-educate myself and a year later I came to the Middle East and spent a year in 1972 - or 1971 in Beirut literally re-educating myself 10 or 12 hours a day in Arabic why so even though this guilt no no the fantastic need for articulation I realized the hottest thing about that period and it's a pity it's lost was a renaissance in analysis and thinking of a kind that I had never experienced for me the experience of Arab nationalism of the Arab post imperialist phase beginning with independence after the British left was a lot of rhetorical phrases which I couldn't understand the difference between that again on the linguistic level that was so important was that this was a language of the people it was a spoken language it was the language of communication and I experienced politics as participation very early on I met Arafat you know we've been impossible in Egypt I couldn't have met abdun Nasser but I could meet her for the first time I thought this was my movement I was no longer out of place this was my people I was in America nobody seemed to hold out against me but the one thing that I didn't have was fluency in the language I had to put it aside like I said I put it on myself so then I studied I said it Arab philology with a wonderful old professor who was a friend of my father's who taught me every day from 7:00 to 11:00 in the morning we'd sit on his balcony in Beirut and he would start from scratch we started with Khalid ib'n Ahmad you know the founder of Erik philology because I was interested in philology which is what I had studied and then by the end I read and I gave my foods for the first time IRA Taha saying I read them in Hell dune I read as Ali I read all the classics of Arabic literature and I was able to communicate all this and retain my English and European fluency and again it fit it in your idea of the kernel absolutely yeah if there's an idea of the Canon and then I realized and I was one of the to realize that a good part of our war against Israeli occupation would have to be in the West in Western mind and there my familiarity with that mind and with that that culture stood me in good stead because by then I was also armed with a very powerful knowledge of the of the tradition from which I came I found it absolutely exhilarating to be able to move between the two your father brought you up with the idea that politics was not a thing you should do stay out of politics this was politicizing you work you father dies in the same period does one thing connect to the other I don't know no because my well in a way yes and no because my father was very worried that that of what he said the last thing he ever said to me he was here turned his face to the wall I had come from New York it was in the beginning of January or late January 1971 he was dying of cancer and we were talking about I was involved in an argument with a professor at Columbia exactly about the Israeli occupation my father read the correspondence he knew the man who had been the American ambassador in car and a friend of my father's he was an American and my father was disturbed that this man should turn against his son against me all of it concerning an Israeli visitor who was a colonel in the occupation army and I attacked him in public first thing I did in America that was that and my father the last thing he said to me he was going into a coma and I had to go back to New York he said I'm very worried about what the Zionists will do to you that was the last thing he said to me I went to New York by the time I got to New York he had died I came right back to Beirut and I remembered that and my my troubles began then in the early 70s what did they do to you well in the beginning it was they were mystified slightly by me because at the same time as you said I was successful I was a professor and so on and so forth so there would be criticism I'd be attacked I would be by the but ten years later I was having death threats as a routine part of my life in 1913 yes absolutely I mean I was I would get the most horrible threats to me and my family yeah by the late 70s you know five or six years later I remember we were on the run there would be threats to my person to my family my office was burned the abuse I got in the in the in the press and so on was it didn't stop me you know and I was I was supported by my family my wife was very strong and because I thought I was doing the right thing I thought that was terribly important but very soon I became a kind of symbol which I hated you know I didn't want that role but it was thrust upon me and in 1977 I mean at the time I was you know really I was a hard at work in Orientalism it's just about to appear I found myself I opened the door one day and I found 300 journalists outside my door said that had just said that he had named me to be the Palestinian representative at some peace talks it without a fact that they were going to have and my whole life was transformed I became a kind of public figure and the rest of the time since then I've really been escaping that role wasn't was that inviting or repulsive no I found a repulsive I've suddenly discovered that I had no control over my public image but background this is you you you you went to the Jordan studied the language in literature came in touch with the movement even met Arafat and now you come back to the United States a very eloquent man a very acceptable man for them I mean no dark reminiscences no associate etcetera and you speak out yes and you you clear yeah about your position so and my position I still had me a row what applying for a role well I didn't think so I thought I was speaking the truth and I thought I was saying things that hadn't been heard before I had no idea and to this day I do not understand it why the depth of hatred and evil directed towards me by American Zionists is so great I don't understand it these are people who live in America who have had no experience of the Middle East I find it easier to talk to his Raley's in Israel than I do to American Zionists it's a quite extraordinary recently there was a campaign against me by an American again American Israeli who attacked my early childhood they felt for thirty years I've been writing about Palestine they couldn't refute me so the one thing they found they said well they're inconsistencies in the first five years of his life so they attacked me and I understood three Selena spent first five years of your life won't we be mad Yankees he never talked to me never asked me any questions I think he said it wasn't necessary he did it all from the records be that as it may I wrote a rebuttal because the Wall Street Journal the New York Times The Washington Post all the major newspapers carried either articles by him or about this I submitted a rebuttal none of them would publish it not one American paper would publish it acting on a whim I said let me send it to her it's in Israel they published it the next day in Hebrew so I could publish more easily in Israel than I can in the United States quite extraordinary this has something to do with the subtlety of your discourse of your position which is of course accepting history as it is right and trying to improve upon the existing situation brilliant you've added brain that is ready no not the existing situation on coexistence of coexistence else um that is a very reasonable point and you understand why that has attracted opposition from all possible camps including Palestinians including excited yeah because because here we come back to the question of identity again and the idea that I want my own place as a young friend of my son told me who had been tortured by the Israeli and he told me this in 1996 and I said what do you do now he said I work for the Palestinian Authority I said what do you do there he said I'm an interrogator and a spy I said for whom for them I said but you were tortured by the Israelis he said yeah now it's my turn in other words if they torture now it's our turn to torture if we have police now if they have police we have I mean that's a twisted law that's a distortion of liberation I mean that we in the end we're creating a kind of mirror image of what happened to us and I think the reasonable thing is to say and this is very difficult for Palestinians to accept I'm the first Palestinian to say this publicly yes we have to admit that the Jews are the VIS rayul are the survivors of the Holocaust the Holocaust actually occurred many people don't believe that or believe that if it did occur it has no relevance I think it has a relevance but on the other hand I also feel that that shouldn't be used as a way of punishing us we had nothing to do with the Holocaust we can acknowledge their suffering and they must acknowledge our suffering and then we can lift gather in a state of coexistence in a state of citizenship I mean that's why the idea of citizenship is much more important for me than the idea of having my own state which is impossible in Palestine in a real state given that Jews and Arabs are so interlinked my how could anybody opposed to so much vegetables you'd be surprised you'll be surprised I said we don't deliver them explain it well yours is color well I think it's a deep-seated attitude of hatred or the other fear of the other ignorance of the other very important ignorance or the other you'd be so I mean extraordinary experience last summer in in 1999 August under the auspices of of of the German government barenboim who's an Israeli musician yo-yo ma who's chinese-american myself bring to vimar cultural capital of Europe in 1999 a group of Arab musicians from Syria from Egypt from Jordan from Palestine and a group of Israeli young people between the ages of 18 and 25 they sit in an orchestra together for three weeks trained by iron boy in the beginning they can hardly talk to each other the the Israeli I remember the first night I was a discussing leader the first night one of the Israeli cellist says listen I those're I didn't come here to hobnob with you when I finished this three weeks here I'm going to go to Lebanon I'm gonna have to kill Arabs I don't want to talk to them the same guy by the end of the three weeks had fallen in love with a Syrian violinist right and he suddenly forgot all about his you know his past and so and the same with the Arabs all of these things I were through experience and together and not and it was totally unpalatable I think this is the way to go you're going to go back to millions to teach I'm going to teach yes you know for a short period of time I can't because because of my I want to go to Palestine and teach what are you going to teach them I wanted to eat some Western literature Western Western thought and and put it in Arabic terms I'm going to do it in Arabic and constantly compare you know these the same kinds of things that exist in the Arabic tradition for example the notion of the memoir I'll teach Rousseau Augustine John Stuart Mill and I'll teach the Arabic tradition of memoir an autobiographical writing which is a great tradition of as early of Tahseen etc etc they 19 in 1942 til the end of the 40's British people came to Cairo to Victoria College to teach you snow on the English hills the enclosure system and now you're going to Palestine to teach him John Stuart Mill well what's the difference difference is that this is part of liberation that I think what I'm trying to contribute to is a liberation of the Palestinian from the ghetto in which he's been placed he will be trained to understand the other as something that he can do or he can do very important men and women can understand the other as an equal not to read it as an inferior but to say this is part of experience too we have our experience they have their experience this is a common human experience that's what I'm interested in doing the idea of a common human experience with difference but where a difference isn't used to dominate over the other universalistic again very universalistic as much as I can is there a specific role for music in pleading universalism yeah I think so in other words I think I think for for a whole giant know this until recently in the last couple of years there's a whole generation of young musicians who are very gifted at Western music who are also extremely trained well trained in the Arabic tradition and there's some this is a important discovery for me for example as a violinist who lives in New York called Simone Shaheen he's a Palestinian but he's also he's a classical peach with trained at Juilliard right but he's also trained in the kamancheh tradition it's the same instrument tune different very rare thing yes very very rare but he but he combines the two and I think that also can be can be put to to our advantage that we can break out of the confinement to use a phrase from Foucault and enter a community where we are as as the others are the important thing is to overcome separation see I don't believe I've never Sophocles I think separation is an instrument of power designed to keep the inferior inferior and so I want to overcome that as much as possible through music through literature through thought and through personal experience thank you very much at receipt for this splendid conversation [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Njoenka

Views: 79,982

Rating: 4.883534 out of 5

Keywords: Edward Said, Said, postcolonial, postcolonialism, orientalism, imperialism

Id: 676fB7ExZys

Length: 50min 31sec (3031 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/comix_corp]

Imagine seeing something like this on American or British or Australian TV. Two very learned people speaking for 40 minutes on deep topics, no interruptions, no "look at me" antics. Unthinkable

[u/thatnorthafricangirl]

Very interesting, and I have always appreciated Michaël Zeeman's way of interviewing.

+1 for Dutch subtitles. Now I can eat my chips and not worry about hearing the words.

[u/TheHolimeister]

This was one interview I used to listen to during work a couple of years ago. Such a joy to hear Said discuss all these topics.

[u/daretelayam]

Oh my god how many times is he going to dredge up that Um Kulthum anecdote, holy shit we get it you absolute musically-challenged pleb. Bougie-ass piano-class-taking Victoria-College-going Rossini-ass loving bitch

[u/Aretas_the_17th]

لا يدخل الجنة كاره سعيد

[u/[deleted]]

المحاور خطير. بدور على مقابلات تانية عملها.

احد ممكن يشرحلي مغزى ادوارد من آخر قصة، حقت الموسقيين العرب والاسرائيليين؟ مو كأنها دعوى تطبيع شعبي/ثقافي ولا يتهيألي؟

[u/SpeltOut]

In the foreword of the second edition of Orientialism Said much like in this interview defended himself from being a relativist however his answer is hardly acceptable. Much of his theory and his work de facto rarely ever specifies the cases which can accurately deemed non orientalist, there is nothing close to a precise list of demarcating criteria. This is a problem on much of all the philosophers of his intellectual tradition chiefly among them Foucault but also Butler, all of them start with seminal work which seriously put in question the existence of concepts such as the orient or sexuality or gender, and then they spend the rest of their careers in books and interviews denying any strong assertion they are accused of making in their original work.

The most problematic in their answers is this claim, repeated in this interview, of writing a "history of ideas" as if they could circumscribe their criticism to the pure realms of ideas independently of the fact that these ideas and concepts are themselves born and evolve in empirical and scientific fields. This is also a paradox since his criticism precisely starts in the empirical discrepancy observed during his young formative years between the universalist claims of the western canon and the mostly unequal reality of life under imperialism, this in turn begs the question: what use is there for the concept of orientalism if any naive teenager born in the colonised world can doubt the claims of the western canon solely from his experience? But more importantly why not continue in the same move of empirical inquiry rather than examine the value of western science in its tropes and literature?

The combined departure from a purely emirical criticism to a theoretical study of ideas on their own and the lack of specification of the domain of their criticism has transformed their work into dogmas and has shielded them of any serious criticism that was leveled at them. When contradicted with empirical studies they can always claim that their critical work is on the pure realm of ideas while not precluding the reality of such studies.