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"O Captain, My Captain"
Edward Said, The Best Teacher I Never Met
By Scott Boehm
Edward Said didn’t know I was planning to meet him in January. He will never read the letter I started
to write him two weeks ago. He will never have the chance to consider my capability as a scholar. And the loss is entirely
mine.
Internationally renowned critic, writer and scholar Edward Said died September 25th in
New York City after a 12 year battle with leukemia. He was 67.
I am only 26, a young, undistinguished idealist in the process of applying to graduate
schools to study literature. More than any single university – including his own, Columbia University – my dream
was to study with Dr. Said. In an age of isolated academics, Said advocated the role of "public intellectuals" and risked
taking unpopular stands.
For this, he received death threats. He was labeled a "Nazi" by the Jewish Defense League.
In 1985, his office at Columbia was burned. He was highly criticized for throwing a stone over a wall at an Israeli guardhouse
in 2000. And his criticism of Yassir Arafat and the P.L.O. often left him estranged from the Palestinian community. An ironic
result for a 14 year member of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile, and perhaps Palestine´s most respected activist.
Born in British-ruled Palestine in 1935, raised in Egypt and educated in the United States,
the professional body of work Said leaves behind reflects what he called "a cumulation of tides and currents" in his autobiography,
Out of Place, the writing of which was inspired by his leukemia diagnosis.
Another book, Orientalism, published in 1978 is what put Said’s name on
the intellectual map. In this monumental work, a sort of "re-mapping" of Western discourse about the imagined "East," Said
gave birth to postcolonial studies as a formal discipline within the humanities. The book produced contrary views, but could
not be ignored by the intellectual community. Indeed, much to Said’s own surprise, it became a best-seller in Sweden.
Culture and Imperialism was a follow-up to and an enlargement of the ideas put forth
in Orientalism. In it, Said introduced his concept of "contrapuntal reading," a phrase borrowed from classical music
– in which he was trained as a concert pianist.
This liberating method of considering texts allows for both the appreciation of canonical works – something
the politicized Left often has trouble doing – and the necessary amplification of repressed voices within those works
– which academy-entrenched traditionalists continue to avoid. The section on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
gave "voice" to the Antigua plantation upon which the protagonists depend not only economically, but psychologically as well.
Said’s interpretation sparked conservative outrage.
When I received the sad news of Said’s death, I instinctively glanced in the direction
of my bookshelf. Wedged between two volumes of postcolonial criticism, the often contentious discipline he unwittingly helped
to establish was my battered and African-dust covered copy of Culture and Imperialism.
Refposition.com is an Affordable Website SEO Company providing SEO Packages to get you top rankings on the web. seo company During the summer of 2000, after graduating from the University of Georgia – where
I majored in English and was first introduced to Said’s work by another courageous literature professor – I trekked
around the coast of Lake Malawi carrying Said with me. Though I had been to Africa before hearing Said’s name, reading
his critique of Western culture in an African context changed the way I "imagined the geography" I was experiencing. And reading
him led me to read Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi wa Thiongo. I am just one small example of how Said opened minds
willing to listen.
And a willingness to listen to, instead of speaking for others – learning from,
rather than defining – is at the base of Said’s philosophy. In one of his last articles, published July 20, 2003
in the Los Angeles Times, Said highlighted a lack of willingness to "listen" in the Bush administration. Entitled "Blind Imperial
Arrogance," Said writes that "every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission
is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."
Subtitled "Vile Stereotyping of Arabs by the U.S. Ensures Years of Turmoil," Said’s views about
the near future of both his natural home of Palestine and his adopted home of the United States were dismal. Without someone
who will rapidly fill Edward Said’s big shoes, his sudden absence nearly ensures the tragic accuracy of his predictions.
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