The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  We, too, have lost the sense of space. We think of Palestine not as “an extensive Palestinian state” but as a small, extremely congested piece of land from which we have been pushed. Every effort we make to retain our Palestinian identity is also an effort to get back on the map, to help those fil-dakhil to keep their precarious foothold. This is a secular effort—as are most of the struggles of our own recent political history—and I would insist that religious considerations are secondary, are consequences, not causes. But the map, like the land itself, or like the walls of our houses, is already so saturated and cluttered that we have had to get used to working within an already dense and worked-over space. Far from being innovators, we are latecomers, a people in the late twentieth century trying to gain the right of self-determination that everyone else has (even the Falklanders, juridically at least, have what we still seek). We do what everyone does, therefore; there is no novelty about us. Our efforts seem like adornments to what is already adorned.

  Every direct route to the interior, and consequently the interior itself, is either blocked or preempted. The most we can hope for is to find margins—normally neglected surfaces and relatively isolated, irregularly placed spots—on which to put ourselves. We can only do so through much perseverance and repetition (so many have already done this ahead of us) and in the knowledge that our distinction may well appear at the end and after much effort as a small nick, a barely perceptible variation, a small jolt. Irony. Imposition. Odd decorum.

  As our situation has worsened, our closely managed acts of self-assertion have grown odder, more ironic, and darker. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the conquerors would periodically put a captured Palestinian—male, able-bodied, potentially a trouble-maker—on the radio, and make him go through paces for the benefit of other Palestinians. This was a propaganda exercise to which, on the West Bank and in South Lebanon (the areas whose inhabitants were the targets of the exercise), Palestinians had no comparable response or propaganda apparatus of their own. Insofar as they could respond, they had to do so through the already ongoing discourse of the Israeli interrogation itself, as in the dialogue that follows here, translated from the colloquial Arabic. Note the deliberately stupid miming tactics of the hapless, but by no means witless, prisoner:

  ISRAELI BROADCASTER: Your name?

  CAPTURED PALESTINIAN fedayi (“GUERRILLA”) : My name is Ahmed Abdel Hamid Abu Site.

  I.B.: What’s your movement name? PAL.: My movement name is Abu Leil [“father of night”].

  I.B.: Tell me, Mr. Abu Leil, to which terrorist organization do you belong?

  PAL.: I belong to the Popular Front for the Liberation [tahrir ]—I mean Terrorization [takhrib]—of Palestine.

  I.B.: And when did you get involved in the terrorists’ organization?

  PAL.: When I first became aware of terrorism.

  I.B.: And what was your mission in South Lebanon?

  PAL.: My mission was terrorism . . . in other words, we would enter villages and just terrorize. And wherever there were women and children, we would terrorize. Everything and all we did was terrorism.

  I.B.: And did you practice terrorism out of belief in a cause or simply for money?

  PAL.: No, by God, just for money. What kind of cause is this anyway? Why? Is there still a cause? We sold out a long time ago.

  I.B.: Tell me, where do the terrorist organizations get their money?

  PAL.: From anyone who has spare money for terrorism; in other words, from the Arab regimes that support terrorism.

  I.B.: What’s your opinion of the terrorist Arafat?

  PAL.: I swear that he’s the greatest terrorist of all. He’s the one who sold us and the cause out. His whole life is terrorism.

  I.B.: What’s your opinion of the way the Israel Defense Forces have conducted themselves?

  PAL.: On my honor, we thank the Israel Defense Forces for their good treatment to each terrorist.

  I.B.: Do you have any advice for other terrorists who are still terrorizing and attacking the IDF?

  PAL.: My advice to them is to surrender their arms to the IDF and what they’ll find there is the best possible treatment.

  I.B.: Lastly, Mr. Terrorist: Would you like to send a message to your family?

  PAL.: I’d like to assure my family and friends that I’m in good health, and I’d also like to thank the enemy broadcasting facility for letting me speak out like this.

  I.B.: You mean the Kol Israel, the Voice of Israel?

  PAL.: Yes sir, thank you sir, naturally sir.

  If you want a terrorist, given that all Palestinians who opposed Israel in Lebanon are terrorists, then any Palestinian you get is a terrorist, a “terrorist” with a vengeance. The ideological mufflers of the interrogator’s mind are so powerful as to shut out any alertness to the Palestinian’s parody of terrorism: Each line he speaks repeats and, by rhetorical overkill, overdoes what his interrogator wants from him. Buried in the black comedy of his performance is his message, which cannot speak straight out but must lie in wait to be perceived by others. This story and several others like it circulate among Palestinians like epics; there are even cassettes of it available for an evening’s entertainment.

  I am reminded also of the late poet Mu’in Basisu’s autobiographical Descent into the Water, which describes life in the Gaza Strip during the fifties, when it was ruled by Egypt. Basisu was a young militant in the Palestinian Communist Party who passed his formative years in a series of Egyptian jails. These travails took place entirely within an Arab (and not an Israeli) setting, which makes the irony of Arab “nationalists” abusing those very Palestinians whose cause is at the center of their nationalist concerns, all the more pronounced. Still more ironic for Basisu is the fact that his guards are Palestinians. When he and his companions come to the Cairo prison, “the secret police guards expressed joy at seeing us. Perhaps for one second in five years the Palestinian secret policeman pauses to remember that he is a Palestinian, but then he resumes writing his reports against Palestinians.”

  Palestinians are cast in the roles set for them by other Arabs. Basisu’s jailers are “mimic men,” although for one infrequent second their roles allow a break from the dreadful routine into which they have been fitted and to which they have become accustomed.

  The dynastic sense, the feeling for one’s immediate past, the effort of placing ourselves in a living continuum: there is little help to be gotten for such things. The closeness and clutter of the present force us to attend to the details of everyday life. Whenever I look at what goes on in the interior I am always surprised at how things seem to be managed normally, as if I had been expecting signs of how different “they,” the people of the interior, are, and then find that they still do familiar things. We Palestinians conduct ourselves, I think, with an energetic consciousness that there are still chores to be done, children to be raised, houses to be lived in, despite our anomalous circumstances.

  I am obsessed with how as a people we got here. In early 1982 I spent several weeks with a British film crew, recording life in a South Lebanon refugee camp for Palestinians. The sequences were to be part of a television documentary called “The Shadow of the West,” which concerned the essentially imperialist relationship of Britain, France, and the United States to the Arabs. A central component of the film was a look at a spinoff of that relationship, the question of Palestine. Many of the Palestinians I spoke to and filmed in South Lebanon were younger than I; Lebanon was all they really knew, so they deferred to the older people on matters historical. On two occasions I became perturbed by the inadequacy of our history and the way we use it. Once an old man was prodded into reminiscences of life in Palestine by a group of his young male relatives. He spoke about it very elaborately—the village he grew up in, the family gatherings, feasts and memorable occasions, the pleasures of being at home. But when I asked how it ended, how he became a refugee, he suddenly stopped. Then he got up and left.

  The second occasion concerned an old
woman who, along with a group of her nieces and daughters, was cheerily regaling me with advice about what, as a Palestinian living in America, I should be doing. Make a revolution, one of them said; have more children, said another, implying that the two I had so far produced testified at best to an impaired manhood and patriotism. Then we got on to life in Qasmiyeh, the refugee camp we were in. None of the women felt they would be there for long, as, after all, they didn’t belong there. Then I turned to the old woman, Um Ahmed, and said: “How did you get here?” She paused for a moment, as if such a question was a surprise, and then rather offhandedly said, “I don’t really know; I just found myself here.”

  But for the people who live in or near the interior where it is impossible to deny their Palestinian origins, there is at least the privilege of obduracy. Here we are, unmoved by your power, proceeding with our lives and with future generations. These statements of presence are fundamentally silent, but they occur with unmistakable force. When you compare them with the cautious worried glance of Palestinians in the West you cherish them more. Recently I was driving back to New York along Route 1 in New Jersey and stopped at a filling station. The attendant’s accented English spoke to me, as it did probably to no one else that day, of a Palestinian, a middle-aged, frighteningly busy man who never looked up from his pumps or his clipboard, “You’re an Arab,” I said in Arabic. “Yes, yes,” he replied with a sudden elevation of his bent head. “Where from, what place, what town?” I pursued him. “Jordan,” he quickly returned. “But you’re Palestinian, aren’t you?” “From Nablus,” he said, and then he moved away from me, busy still. It hurt me, his apparent unwillingness to declare himself, and I wanted to resume our conversation with a few words about not being ashamed to admit our backgrounds. . . . But perhaps he suspected me of being some sort of spy. In any event, he was too far away and too preoccupied with getting things done to give me more notice.

  When my thirteen-year-old, Wadie, and I were in Amman, he would ask everyone he met whether he or she was Jordanian or Palestinian. One bearded taxi driver with a strong Palestinian accent answered, “Jordanian,” to which Wadie impatiently shot back, “Where in Jordan exactly?” Predictably the answer was Tull-Karm—a West Bank town—followed by a verbose disquisition on how “today”—the occasion being that famous 1984 meeting of the Palestinian National Council held in Amman, at which King Hussein spoke—there was no difference between Jordanians and Palestinians. Wadie, perhaps sensing my sullen disapproval of the driver’s waffling and reacting to my unusual reluctance to press the point, insisted otherwise. “There is a difference,” he said, only at his age he couldn’t quite articulate it. For our pains the man drove us at least five miles out of our way, and then dumped us at the edge of the city. “Get someone else to take you back!”

  It isn’t wrong, I think, to comprehend these lapses about the past as the result of two forces. One is the bewildering and disorienting present. Look at the maze of uncertainties, conflicting predicaments, untidy overlappings of Palestinian life in Palestine. Look at it with some sense of what it means to negotiate it. You will immediately see its symbolic analogue in any panoramic overview of contested sites such as Gaza or even Amman, where the patchwork of overbuilt and structureless dwellings offers little perspective or direction. Everything seems packed in without regard to symmetry, form, or pattern. The second is that the past for all of us Arabs is so discredited as to be lost, or damned, or thought about exclusively in contrast to the present and a not too credible projection of the future. Perhaps this just amounts to the same thing, except that we tend too readily to grant the future (which is at best ambiguous) an aura of legitimacy. After all, as the Lebanese literary critic and novelist Elias Khoury has said, the legitimacy of the future is built almost solely on the illegitimacy of the past—that seemingly limitless series of failures, invasions, conspiracies, destructions, and betrayals. And after you’ve listed them all, there is not much more to say, so you say nothing. This in turn has allowed the entire apparatus of the modern Arab state, tyrannical and lusterless in equal parts, to propose itself as the legitimate guarantor of the future and, more important, the legitimate ruler of the present. Israel has tried to do the same thing, but for Palestinians the Jewish state has no moral legitimacy. Because they keep promising a bright future, Arab states do have some, but it is dwindling very fast.

  But once another power—Arab, European, or Israeli—invades your interior, dismisses your past, and stakes its claims on your future, perhaps it does not make any difference who or what that power is. I am not a great believer in the claims of ethnos, tribe, blood, or even patria, but I must, I feel, make the distinction between the varieties of invasion. It is a matter of what, say, the Israeli does not allow us that the Arab, highly ambivalent about us, does. Maybe it is simply a matter of degrees of alienation, or of various dialects of the same language (Arabic) versus totally different languages.

  The attitude expressed in the construction of settlements on the West Bank is unmistakable. Visually there is a rude interventionary power in them that, I am told, shocks even Israelis. One thinks not only of a coarse army of heedless and rough crusaders, but also— given some of the structures themselves—of a marching cancer. As for the effect on the landscape and Palestine’s ecology, the offense is deep and lasting.

  Palestine’s Arab identity—and I am perfectly willing to grant that it has other identities too—was and is being rewritten and defaced, as when you scrawl across a perfectly legible page and turn it into something ugly and offensive. This process continues with results, at a great distance from Palestine, that hurt a great deal. One example: New York magazine reports cleverly in its “Intelligencer” column (by one Sharon Churcher) on a national costume show of forty nations put on by UNESCO at its Paris headquarters. Included was a display of Palestinian embroidered dresses, the kind that have always been made and worn by Palestinian women. The title of Churcher’s piece, however, was “Terrorist Couture,” presumably because as a member of UNESCO, the PLO was responsible for supplying the exhibit of Palestinian dresses.

  Churcher implies that the PLO was hijacking Palestinian culture, and that UNESC0 fell for it. She quotes Owen Harries (the Australian who led the successful Heritage Foundation campaign to get the United States to leave UNESCO), who accuses UNESCO of using the national costume ploy “to convince the U.S. they [the PLO] are changing”—presumably from a Communist front to a legitimate cultural agency. Churcher then draws upon her large fund of knowledge for the coup de grâce: “UNESCO may not have that good a fix on terrorist couture: It showed the ‘Sunday best’ of an upper-middle-class Bethlehem lady, a Middle East expert observed.”

  If you sort out the plague-on-all-your-houses aspect of this item, you’ll see a number of things suggested. First of all, we are led to believe that the Palestinians never had folk, popular, or authentic native costumes; the dresses exhibited are only the Sunday dress-ups of the upper middle class. Second, the PLO and UNESCO, both scoundrels, are in league, the former lying about its people, the latter either complicit or ignorant, or both. Finally, the small picture of one of these costumes is not allowed to speak for itself. It is described as “upper middle class” by an unnamed “expert,” and just in case the point of the PLO-UNESCO deceit is missed, the whole discussion is herded under the rubric of “terrorist couture.”

  The facts are that the picture is indeed of a Palestinian woman’s dress, that it is a kind made and used by all classes, and that there exists an extensive anthropological and folkloric literature on such dresses, almost any item of which would have confirmed the PLO’s fulfillment of UNESCO’s charge that costumes should be national, popular, genuine. In a small way, one can see the mischievous dirt-doing of the item (which is part of a much more complex and extensive pattern). Everything about Arab Palestine is rewritten. Turn it into something extremely suspect, show that it is connected to terrorism, or ridicule it and push it away derisively. There are no Arab Palestinians. The
land did not exist as Palestine, and perhaps the people did not exist either. “We Palestinians” have almost imperceptibly become “they,” a very doubtful lot.

  A story like that always evokes a kind of tired bitterness in me. Who, in the great scheme of things, is Sharon Churcher? She produces a few lines of column in a frivolous magazine, and I feel impelled to bring logic, history, and rhetoric to my aid, at tedious length. We need to retell our story from scratch every time, or so we feel. What we are left with when we get to scratch is not very much, and memory alone will not serve. This seems to be the point from which Jabra Jabra’s powerful novel, The Search for Walid Massood— an extraordinary work of late-blooming Palestinian sensibility— takes off: that memory is not enough. The “innocence and ambiguity” of memory, Jabra writes, require sentences that correspond to that memory exactly. But no such sentences exist, and they would take years to produce, with very doubtful results. “What has been cogently thought,” Adorno says, “must be thought in some other place and by other people. This confidence accompanies even the loneliest and most impotent thought.” That is another way of phrasing the Palestinian dream: the desire for a perfect congruence between memory, actuality, and language. Anything is better than what we have now—but still the road forward is blocked, the instruments of the present are insufficient, we can’t get to the past.

  Still, I am impressed by some of the methods used to restore Palestine in the meantime. There is the steady trickle of memoirs: the daybooks, journals, albums, diaries, and recollections of various Palestinians. All of them rely on the notion of statement—enunciations grounded in personal authority—and strive for the clarity of unquestioned evidence. The journals of Akram Zuayter; Hisham Sharabi’s somber autobiography, Al Jamr wa’l Rumad (Ashes and Embers); the testimony of Zakaria al-Shaikh on resisting the Sabra and Shatila massacres in his eyewitness report, as a camp-dwelling refugee, of the 1982 inferno. Others I have read and been impressed with arise from, as it were, a scene of regular life inside Palestine (min dakhil Filastin)—the harrowing, episodic narrations of Raja’i Buseilah, a blind Palestinian poet and scholar, who recounts his experiences as a child in 1948 forced to leave Lydda (thanks to the prodding of the then Hagannah commander, Yitzhak Rabin); Walid Khalidi’s immense compilation of largely personal photographs of Palestinians during the period between 1876 and 1948, Before Their Diaspora; Shafik al-Hout’s memories of Jaffa, “The Bride of Palestine”; the little encyclopedia produced a couple of years before he died by Shafik’s father-in-law, Ajjaj Nouweihid, Rijal min Filastin (The Men of Palestine), a work of affectionate compilation that recalls Abbasid biographical dictionaries and in which I found reference to my father’s family.