Remembering Professor Edward Said
And the secular-socialist Palestinian movement that no longer exists
“We woke up from a coma, to see a monocolored flag (of Hamas) do away with the four-color flag (of Palestine).”
— Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), National Poet of Palestine, lifelong member of Israeli communist movement and contributor to Hebrew culture
Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and died in New York City in 2003. He was Professor of English Literature and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, authored 22 books and innumerable articles; he was a classically trained pianist, music critic for The Nation magazine, and a dissident/oppositional member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He had two children, one being the writer, Najla Said. As we can see, from Said’s polymathic range, multiple aspects to his personality and work characterize his legacy. However, at least one of the consistent threads running through his wide body of work is his devotion and contribution to the national liberation of the Palestinian people. In today’s world, where the supposed “friends” of Palestine largely consist of hysterical, misguided, ignorant reactionaries who tend towards violence rather than discussion, or others who openly support Hamas, Professor Said’s caliber of leadership and thoughtfulness constitutes a vacuous void.
In polar contrast to those who chant, “From the river to the sea,” Professor Said never once denied the claim of Jewish people to land in Palestine, always maintaining support for mutual recognition. Said’s main political contribution, actually, as often pointed out by his longtime friend, Christopher Hitchens, was to help westerners understand that many people held legitimate claims in Palestine.
As Hitchens often noted, prior to Said’s rise to world fame, the conflict was typically formulated as, “the Jews vs. the Arabs.” Said re-framed it to its proper nationalist context of “the Israelis and the Palestinians.” Sadly, the debate today has, in some cases, yet again, retrograded into: “the Zionists vs. the Muslims.”
Said’s books and their impacts
In contrast to the drivel written and uttered today by the above-referenced modern-day hate preachers, who pass under the guise of being “pro-Palestinian,” Professor Said wrote groundbreaking masterpieces that changed multiple academic fields including literary theory, international politics, and Middle East affairs. Said’s other great friend, the inimitable novelist, Salman Rushdie, once said of him, “What makes Edward so important is that he reads the world as closely as he reads books.”
When Salman Rushdie faced assassination attempts organized by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, for his “blasphemous” writing of The Satanic Verses, Said staunchly defended Rushdie.
Said’s first works focused on literary theory, such as a study of Joseph Conrad (1966, 1975). His first seminal work, Orientalism (1978), analyzed “the affiliation of knowledge and power.” It examined how scholars of the period of empire created an image of “the East,” providing justifications for the supremacist ideology of imperialism. Then, The Question of Palestine (1979), described the struggle between Zionism and (later) Israel and the oriental realities of the Middle East. Covering Islam: How the media and experts decide how we see the rest of the world (1981), paid a closer look at how “Islamic revival” was covered in the mass-medias of imperialist countries at the time.
In 1986, Said published, After the Last Sky. This title was taken from a poem written by the National Poet of Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). Darwish spoke multiple languages, including Hebrew, considered himself a part of Israeli/Jewish culture, and held lifelong ties to the communist movement in Israel. He lived long enough to see the rise of Hamas, whom he derided as a “Taliban-type” political force, in 2005, after they shut down a music festival set to be held in Gaza. “We woke up from a coma to see a monocolored flag [of Hamas] do away with the four-color flag [of Palestine],” Darwish lamented.
Likewise, many awoke in the early hours of Oct. 7, to find a similar music festival suddenly mowed down by Hamas gunmen.
The Darwish poem from which Said’s 7th work borrowed its title is from one called, The Earth is Closing Upon Us:
The earth is closing on us
Pushing us through the last passage
And we tear off our limbs to pass through
The earth is squeezing us
I wish we were its wheat, so that we could die, and then live again
I wish the earth was our mother, so that she’d be kind, to us
I wish we were pictures on the rocks, for our dreams to carry, as mirrors
We saw the faces of those to be killed, by the last of us, in the last defense of the soul
We cried over their children’s feast
We saw the faces of those, who would throw our children out of the windows, of this last space
Our stars will hang up mirrors
Where shall we go, after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly, after the last sky?
Where should the plants sleep, after the last breath of air?
We will write our name with scarlet steam.
We will cut off the hand, of the song, to be completed by our flesh.
We will die, hearing the last passage.
Here, and here, our blood will plant its olive tree.
(Transcribed from Rushdie’s 1986 public reading, in conversation with Said)
Responding to Darwish, Rushdie once said, “After the last sky, there is no sky. After the last border, there is no border.”
These are a few of the many works on literature, geopolitics and music Said would publish. Others included, Culture and Imperialism (1993), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988), The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994, and his memoir, Out of Place (1999).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Said’s books were banned for a longtime by the Palestinian Authority, in Gaza and the West Bank, available only at Steimatzkys in Israel. But, as Said would also point out, the authority had called him years later, asking if they could have the license to publish his works.
On the musical side of the ledger, Edward published Musical Elaborations (1991), which examined the intersection of the public and private meaning of music, filling a wide gap in literary theory. Incorporating the music criticism of Adorno, musical ideas from literary works by Proust, and criticism by Benjamin and de Man into his work, he discusses performers Glenn Gould, Arturo Toscanini, Alfred Brendel, composers like Beethoven, Wagner, and Strauss.
Two posthumous works on music were published in Said’s name, completed by his widow, Mariam. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2003), Mariam writes in the forward:
“Edward was in the process of writing this book when he passed away on Thursday morning, September 25, 2003.
“In late August we were in Europe: first in Seville, where Edward participated in the West Eastern Divan workshop, and then in Portugal visiting friends, when he fell ill. We returned to New York a few days later, and after three weeks of high fever he began to pull through. He felt well enough to resume work Friday morning, three days before his illness took over for the last time. He said to me as we were having breakfast that morning,
“Today I will write the acknowledgements and preface to Humanism and Democratic Criticism [2004] (the last book he finished, which was about to come out). The introduction to From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map [2004] I’ll finish by Sunday. And next week I’ll concentrate on completing Late Style, which will be finished in December. …
“My recollection is that this idea—writers’, musicians’, and other artists’ “late works,” “late style,” “Adorno and lateness,” etc.—became part of Edward’s conversation sometime at the end of the 1980s. He had begun to be interested in this phenomenon and was engrossed in reading about it. He discussed it with many friends and colleagues and began to include examples of late works in many of his articles on music and literature. He even wrote specific essays on the late works of some writers and composers. He also gave a series of lectures on “late style,” first at Columbia and then elsewhere, and in the early 1990s he taught a class on the topic. Finally he decided to write a book and had a contract in hand.”
Music at the Limits (2007) was a compilation of Edward’s essays and articles on music spanning three decades.
Although politics and music may seem to have been compartmentalized, Said found (and often found himself in) brilliant and synchronous ways in which both gelled. In a May 2001 discussion with Christopher Hitchens, Said described his friendship with the Jewish, Argentinian-born, Berlin-based pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim.
Hitchens: Is there to be a striking chord with the Israeli side? To stick with my rather poultry musical analogy, I was wondering if you would tell us about your friendship with Daniel Barenboim.
Said: “Daniel Barenboim and I met, completely by chance, in the lobby of a London hotel about ten years ago. We were both staying there. I was doing the Reese lectures at the BBC. I had actually just bought a ticket for a concert he was about to give the next night or that weekend, and I recognized him; he claims to have recognized me, but I doubt it. [He says jokingly — J.S.]”
Hitchens: I thought “mutual recognition” was your mantra.
Said: “No, Palestinians are always ready to recognize the other. So we spent the weekend together, he practicing, and me polishing my lectures, in between meeting and talking. It led to a great friendship. He was the first, I think, as far as I know, the last Israeli to play a concert on the West Bank, which I arranged for him to do in Birzeit…
Hitchens: “Birzeit being the university.”
Said: “Yes, Birzeit being the leading university on the West Bank, which has been closed by the Israelis the last three of four months, by the siege that I referred to. And (Barenboim) donated his services. There was a great deal of trepidation because he was Israeli and there was a lot of tension. But he very bravely came, we drove there together, a piano was shipped from Jerusalem for him to play. And he played to an audience composed entirely of Palestinians.
”He gave a speech at the end, I gave a speech at the beginning in Arabic, he gave one at the end, after he played. He then played an encore. By the way, he played a full program. It wasn’t a token kind of musical lollipop. It was a real quite challenging program. And at the end of the program, before he gave a speech, he played an encore with a very gifted young Palestinian pianist who (I should also say) he has taken on, as a kind of protege. He’s with him in Berlin, even as we speak.“And then he gave a speech to the audience in which he felt, he said, the necessity to make a gesture. He’s not a politician, but he did feel that the mutual ignorance and hostility between two peoples who are destined to live together simply won’t do.
“Subsequent to that we did something quite unusual, which I’m very happy to be able to tell people here about. It was the summer of 1999. This was the year that Weimar, in East Germany, now a part, of course, of united Germany, and being the cultural capital of Europe, and Weimar being of course the great cultural city of Germany: Goethe lived there for fifty years. Bach worked there. And on and on. Schuller was there. …
“So in that sight, in the music school or Musikgymnasium, we had a musical workshop, in which Daniel conducted an orchestra. Yo-Yo Ma was there to give masterclasses, as was Daniel in piano, and I was what’s called in German, the diskussionsleiter, the discussion leader at night. And we would discuss politics and music. And who were the participants? Well, they were carefully selected group of 78 musicians from Israel and most of the neighboring Arab countries, including Lebanon and Syria. There were twelve Syrian musicians. There were about ten Palestinians. There were at least 15 Egyptians. There was an Iraqi. There was a Tunisian and a group of Israelis.
“And they all played together in this orchestra, which Daniel rehearsed, daily, for about three weeks, in the most painstaking way. It was an extraordinary education, to watch him take the Beethoven’s seventh symphony apart, measure by measure. They would do that during the day. There would be a lunch break. They would resume that in the afternoon. There would be masterclasses, chamber music. And then, at night, there would be the discussion. And then after the discussion, there was a kind of musical encore. We’re talking about 11:30 at night. A day that began at 9 in the morning, without any breaks, they would play chamber music together.
“I once played with Yo-Yo Ma. We played the Arpeggione Sonata by Schubert. It was a massacre of the piece. But it was quite extraordinary because there was nothing political about it. No politics were ever discussed. We started out with healthy suspicion of each other. And, by the end, I personally witnessed, to the blossoming, not to say tragic, love-affair of an Israeli cellist and Syrian violinist who were embracing madly the last two days separated tearfully at the end.
“It’s now continued. It’s become institutionalized. There was a Weimar last summer. And, this year, the auditions have already been held for young musicians, and it will be taking place in Chicago so that, in addition to all the musical making, they will have exposure to the Chicago symphony — a great orchestra which most of them have never had before. And what’s astonishing is all the normal barriers, including musical barriers, were broken down in a common goal, based on the principle that we all felt — Daniel and I, and Yo-Yo, too — that people should know how to live together before they talk about things like peace and negotiate.
“Two things further I would just like to mention. One is that near the end of the session, we took a visit to Buchenwald. And it was difficult for everyone because Daniel, after we came back, was challenged in the evening discussion, by one of the Jewish kids from Israel, who said to him, “How can you live in Germany?” And he doesn’t, he only conducts the Berlin state opera. So he explained, I must say, at great length. It was actually really moving. He couldn’t stop talking.
“He wanted to explain how an Israeli and a Jew who had grown up in Argentina, but had never experienced antisemitism, managed still to live in Germany. But not only that, but conduct Wagner, in Bayreuth, which was the seat, as everyone knows, of cultural Nazism. And, for the Arabs, it was difficult, which Daniel acknowledged it, because there was no comparable catastrophe for them to visit.
“For the Jewish kids, it was hard. One of the Jewish kids sitting next to me on the bus was a very gifted Israeli pianist. Not knowing quite what to say to him, I asked, have you ever been here before? He said yes. I was quite surprised because I thought nobody had visited the place before. And, I said, how? He said about ten years ago I’d come here with my father. I said what brought you here? He said my father had been an inmate at the camp and survived Buchenwald.
“That’s one episode. Another one, if I may conclude with this is, one of the surprises of the sessions was a ten-year-old boy called Karim (I won’t reveal his last name for a moment. But he was a very diminutive ten-year-old with an owlish pair of spectacles, and extremely intelligent and articulate, but also a piano prodigy. He would have masterclasses with Barenboim who was a piano prodigy himself at the age of 7, that were public events. 300 or 400 people would attend. This tiny little boy, whose feet couldn’t reach the pedals, but having to stand and play like this, being tutored by Barenboim. It was really quite amazing.
“Well, who is that boy? His name was Karim Said. He was the grandson of my cousin, Albert, who was close to me like a brother, and was seniorly unmusical.”
(Audience laughter)
Hitchens: “Abnormally unpromising.”
Said: “Exactly. Saids were known for this. When, at St. George’s, during choir practice, a false note would be hit. And the choir master would stop and say, is there a Said in the choir? Albert, now dead unfortunately, would repeat the story all through my childhood. But here was his grandson, a Palestinian boy, the favorite student of Barenboim, an Israeli musician. Strange ways.
(Dialogue transcribed from May 2001 conversation between Hitchens, Said)
Professor Said’s life and work, beyond his well-earned political and academic merits, crucially reminds us that the universal human language of music possesses an awesome power to bring the most divided people together in the most beautiful ways.
Said and Barenboim founded a foundation, in their name, in Seville which manages the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and the Musical Education in Palestine Project, among others. In Nov. 2004, Birzeit University renamed their music school, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. The Barenboim-Said Academy was established in 2012.
“Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final – resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. Separation between peoples is not a solution for any of the problems that divide peoples. And certainly ignorance of the other provides no help whatever. Cooperation and coexistence of the kind that music lived as we have lived, performed, shared and loved it together, might be.” — Edward Said
“Edward Said and I see our project as an ongoing dialogue in which the universal, metaphysical language of music links with the continuous dialogue that we have with young people, and that young people have with each other. Great music is the result of concentrated listening. Every musician listens intently to the voice of the composer and to each other. Harmony in personal or international relations can also only exist through listening, each party opening its ears to the other’s narrative or point of view.” — Daniel Barenboim
A symphony, a quartet, or an opera is not going to turn the world upside down, but music can change each and every one of us. Music is a physical expression of the human soul. Music is more powerful than words. And even the saddest of compositions has a spark of hope within it. Because of that, music ties humanity together. — Barenboim