Edward Said the intellectual

 

Edward Said, an influential individualistic, celebrated public intellectual, and distinguished literary and cultural critic, who is associated with Orientalism, a ground breaking  study, an indictment of English and French scholars for tattling a false image of the East, as a static backward and uncivilised for placing their knowledge at the service of Western imperialism. He was the spokesman for the Palestinian  cause in the West.

Timothy Brennan, a professor of humanities in the University of Minnesota,  was one of Said’s graduate students and close friend until Said’s death from Leukaemia in 2003.

In Places of Mind Brennan reveals Said’s private papers  and letters and interviews with Said’s family, friends, students, professional colleagues, detractors and defenders.

Timothy throws light into Said’s childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo in the 1930s and 1940s, school and university in America, and his deep engagement in the Palestinian struggle after the 1967 Arab-Israel war. Brennan’s book also revolves around Said’s  relationship with his austere and authoritarian  father and his adoring  but indecisive mother. Brennan also  completes the picture by showing how this formative period, and especially the first-hand experience of British colonialism and American imperialism  influenced Said’s later work and denunciation of British double dealing in the Question of Palestine and his critique of US support for Arab dictators.

In the late 1960s Said became obsessed with French structuralism and learn that Said had left behind tow unfinished novels  one rejected short story and at least 20 poems.  Both novels are autobiographical, have political plots and are set in the Middle East.

Said’s championship of Palestinian national rights earned him the friendship of Jewish luminaries such as Noam Chomsky and Daniel Barenboim and the American Zionists.

The most notorious attack came in 1989 in the Jewish-American monthly Commentary in an article titles  “Professor of Terror” as Said call for peaceful coexistence between Jews and Palestinians was twisted  to depict him as a violent anti-Semitic-fanatic.

In 1968, as a member of the Palestinian National Council, Said supported for recognition of Israel’s right to exist and the Palestinian declaration of independence in the Gaza strip and the West Bank with a capital city in East Jerusalem – a mere 22 per cent of historic Palestine.

When the PLO singed the 1993 Oslo Accord with Israel, Said immediately denounced it as an instrument of surrender, a “ Palestinian Versailles” because it contained no mention, of an independent Palestinian State.

 

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said by Timothy Brennan, Farrar, Stratus and Giroux $35/Bloomsbury £25, 464 pages.