Said, Edward (1935–2003)

Edward Said was an eminent writer, scholar, and speaker; a radical literary and cultural critic; and a [Page 1252]forceful spokesman for the Palestinian national self-determination cause. Said was born in November 1935 in Talbiyah, a section of West Jerusalem, then in the British Mandate of Palestine. He came from a well-to-do Christian family. Said first studied in the Gezira Preparatory School in Cairo, a colonial institution, and then in the Cairo School for American Children (his father was an American citizen). In 1947, the family returned to Jerusalem and Said attended St. George's School for a year. The approaching tumult of 1948—the year of the establishment of the state of Israel and the partition of Palestine—drove Said's family back to Cairo. Having completed Cairo School for American Children in 1949, Said joined Victoria College, a prestigious school, steeped in colonial tradition.

In 1951, Said's parents sent him to the United States, where he enrolled in Mount Hermon boarding school. Within 2 years, he had completed his secondary education, having excelled both as a scholar and a pianist. Said undertook his undergraduate studies at Princeton between 1953 and 1957. He then completed 5 years of graduate work at Harvard, obtaining his Ph.D. in English Literature in 1963. The same year he accepted a position as instructor at Columbia University, where he remained to the end of his life. He rose to the highest position of university professor at Columbia in 1992.

Said began his career as the quintessential private individual-cum-scholar. But the 6-day Arab-Israeli war of 1967, which turned him into an exiled Palestinian in the United States and made his entire people homeless, transformed him into an intensely and passionately engaged intellectual.

From the early 1970s, Said began writing on Palestine for the New York Times, Newsweek, and Le Monde Diplomatique. In 1975, he testified before the U.S. Congressional Subcommittee on International Relations, underscoring that the fate of Palestinians during the 20th century had been that of people declared foreigners in their own country. In 1977, he was elected to the Palestine National Council as an independent member. He resigned from that position 14 years later, following the Palestinian leadership's support of Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War.

The 1993 Oslo Accords between Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli government created widespread euphoria about peace. Rather than sharing in it, Said subjected Arafat's defeatist deal to unrelenting criticism, largely through his biweekly columns in Al-Hayat and All-Ahram Weekly. In 1999, he called for the establishment of a binational Israeli-Palestinian state. He argued for all-inclusive, democratic, and undiscriminating terms of citizenship. This was an evolution of his initial stand for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Said himself started working toward this end by promoting common understanding between Israelis and Palestinians through cultural exchanges.

Said died of leukemia on September 25, 2003, having battled with the disease since 1991, never relinquishing his pursuits. Said's first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), scrupulously examines the relationship between Conrad's fiction and his correspondence, and probes into the condition of Conrad's alienation. Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), for which Said received Columbia University's Lionel Trilling Award, is his most theoretical and philosophical work. With great originality of association, Said provides in it a literary response to a burgeoning political awareness. The questions of authority and power, and their contestation, which were to assume centrality in his thought and activities, are here examined in the context of possibilities that writers such as Conrad, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann seek in order to liberate their art from impositions with respect to language and literary tradition.

...