Attempts to cast Said as the consummate New York intellectual miss the point that his milieu was one of global, and specifically Palestinian, anticolo

The World of Edward Said

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2021-05-24 04:00:06

Attempts to cast Said as the consummate New York intellectual miss the point that his milieu was one of global, and specifically Palestinian, anticolonial struggle.

On February 2, 1977, Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein died in his New York apartment. Hussein had been born forty-one years earlier in Musmus, a town not far from Nazareth. Politics for Hussein, Edward Said remembered, “lost its impersonality and its cruel demagogic spirit.” Hussein, Said wrote of his dear friend, “simply asked that you remember the search for real answers, and never give it up, never be seduced by mere arrangements.” Sharply critical of his own society and its rulers—he had a map of the Middle East on his wall with “thought forbidden here” scrawled across it in Arabic—Hussein was also a partisan of the Third World. “I am from Asia,” he pronounced in an early poem, “The land of fire / Forging furnace of freedom-fighters.”

Said’s influence was profound, but he was not alone. Any intellectual history must account for the multitude of emigres, exiles, and migrants from Africa and Asia who carried the pillars of anti-colonialism across the world.