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| 1847085970
| 9781847085979
| 1847085970
| 4.32
| 473
| 2001
| Aug 02, 2012
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really liked it
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but the work of man is only just beginning and it remains to man to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recesses of his passion And no race posses but the work of man is only just beginning and it remains to man to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recesses of his passion And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty of intelligence, of force, and there is a place for all at the rendez-vous of victory -Aime Cesaire Said returns so often to those lines, and even after having read this entire book, all 46 of the essays it contains, I still feel I do not understand the significance he feels in them. Like many of the other concepts and arguments deployed and investigated here, it leaves me still wondering and questioning and struggling. And that is a very good thing, I think; out of this struggle, what may come? But I feel something I don't often feel when reading; the need for someone to join me in the journey, to read with me and discuss with me and help me to make sense of all this stuff. Maybe the emphasis Said puts on inclusion and collaboration has had the effect, not only of making me feel my inadequacy, but of teaching me to go out and find answers elsewhere, not expecting myself to be complete and capable of understanding the world on my own... Introduction "The historical experience of imperialism for the imperialised entailed subservience and exclusion; therefore the historical experience of nationalist resistance and decolonisation was designed for liberation and inclusion. Much of what went wrong in the subsequent development of nationalism was the direct result of either forgetting or rejecting this edifying equation" Said then suggests that the idea of historical experience acknowledges that "the dominant and subaltern peoples in imperialism" share the same world and that there is "only one worldly cultural space, the common possession of all [...] and also a universal language of rights and ideals, in which to wage the struggle for liberation and inclusion" (and that this acknowledgement reflects a reality of colonisation - that the culture of the coloniser becomes by force a part of the world of the colonised) Possibly I must change my mind? These universals are uncomfortable. He ends by talking about Palestine and the influence of Palestine, and the state of being an exile, on his thought. He closes: "Since almost by definition exile and memory go together, it is what one remembers of the past and how one remembers it that determine how one sees the future. My hope in this book is to demonstrate the truth of this, and to provide my readers with the same pleasure I derived from using the exile's situation to practice criticism. And also to show that no return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that a full return, or repatriation, is impossible." I feel grief at this conclusion for the Palestinians, but there is something else here, some tension between memory's determining the imagination of the future, and the impossibility of return to the past. I am reminded I think, to critically carry the past (without which I know nothing), dream & build the future (the only place we can go) and to witness the unanswerable, to be restless, to seek the ambiguities that are the truth. Essay 1: Labyrinth of Incarnations [Merleau-Ponty] "perception involves not only the thinking body but also the incarnated mind" "Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that we use our body to know the world; space and time are not abstractions but almost-entities that we haunt and inhabit. The body is not an object that receives impressions which the mind then translates in its function as a subject..." Merleau-Ponty on Cezanne's doubt: "Yet it was in the world that he had to realise his freedom with colors upon a canvas. It was on the approval of others that he had to wait for the proof of his worth. That is the reason he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas. That is the reason he never finished working. We never get away from life. We never see our ideas or our freedom face to face" Now I am putting these ideas here without knowing yet how to interpret them, only knowing that they speak to me. I remember reading about Cezanne's doubt, how he painted Monte Ste Victoire again and again... Merleau-Ponty suggests Cezanne "simply expressed what [things] wanted to say" and I guess I can suggest that in this reading, Cezanne was trying to paint what he felt about the mountain or what the mountain said. Essay 4: A Standing Civil War [T.E. Lawrence] "We race over in the first dawn to the College's translucent swimming pool, and dive into the elastic water which fits our bodies closely as a skin: and we belong to that too. Everywhere a relationship: no Loneliness any more - T.E.Lawrence, The Mirror Essay 5: Arabic Prose and Fiction After 1948 Said suggests that, as interpreted by Constantine Zurayk, "[al-nakba] caused a rift to appear between the Arabs and the very possibility of their historical continuity as a people" In this context, it became urgent for creative people to articulate the present in order to restore that possibility. I think here of the strong sense in "The Woman from Tantoura" of a beautiful story that I wanted to hear being derailed soon after it began, and how the text itself fragmented. Said highlights the importance of "the scene" as contemporaneity: "a scene formally translates the critical issues at stake in the Arab world". Essay 9: Tourism among the Dogs [George Orwell] I was quite startled by Said's on-point commentary of Stansky & Abrahams Orwell: The Transformation which reveals the political poverty of his work "Orwell's writing life was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values... but it was always being overshadowed and hidden by the adventurous content of his material, which had the effect of persuading his readers that he spoke as one of the oppressed" "What then is the literary history narrated in Orwell: The Transformation? Surely the consolidation of Orwell's plain style as it reported without unnecessary adornment the views of a decent man. Many good things have justifiably been said about this style, although it is curious how they have often tended to prevent other things from being said. For instance, the plain reportorial style coerces history, process, knowledge itself into mere events being observed. Out of this style has grown the eye-witness, seemingly opinion-less politics - along with its strength and weakness - of contemporary Western journalism. When they are on the rampage, you show Asian and Asiatic mobs rampaging: an obviously disturbing scene presented by an obviously concerned reporter who is beyond Left piety or right-wing cant. But are such events events only when they are shown through the eyes of the decent reporter? Must we inevitably forget the complex reality that produced the event just so that we can experience concern at mob violence? Is there to be no remaking of the power that put the reporter or analyst there in the first place and made it possible to represent the world as a function of comfortable concern? Is it not intrinsically the case that such a style is far more insidiously unfair, so much more subtly dissembling of its affiliations with power, than any avowedly political rhetoric? And more ironically still, aren't its obsessive fantasies about indoctrination and propaganda likely to promote exactly that "value-free" technocracy against which one might expect plainness and truth to protest?" Essay 10 & 12: Bitter Dispatches from the Third World/Among the Believers [V.S. Naipaul] Said picks up on a story Naipaul reports, of learning the name of jasmine - a scent he had known and a name he had known finally connecting after years of not touching each other in his mind - and relates them to Naipaul's "bitterness", affection for the West, nostalgia for colonialism and disdain for "Third World" places and people. "For his portrait of 'wounded' India, Naipaul resorts to an almost hysterical repetition of how the place has no vitality, no creativity, no authenticity; read the book's last half and you will not believe that this, in its turgid denunciations of a poor country for not measuring up, is the great Naipaul everyone has been extolling. Frustratingly, he points out, Naipaul's work is made use of by British and USian critics who share those sentiments and by politicians, and doubtless is believed by readers like myself struggling (or not making much critical effort) to decide which stories, which witnesses to believe about countries and cultures and people beyond our direct experience. Said comes to the rescue, pointing out the distortions and omissions in Naipaul's images. In Essay 12 "Among the Believers", Said's exposure and denunciation blazes with righteous rage; Naipaul's agenda is to show, with "no appreciable respect for history" (the text is full of inaccuracies as well as selective examples), that Islam and Muslims are inferior to "the West". "Naipaul wouldn't make a trip to Israel, for example, which is not to say that he wouldn't find rabbinical laws governing daily behaviour any less repressive than Khomeini's. No: his, audience knows Israel is OK, "Islam" not. And one more thing. If it is criticism that the West stands for, good - we wat Naipaul to criticize those mad mullahs, vacant Islamic students, cliche-ridden revolutionaries. But does he write for and to them? Does he live among them, risk their direct retaliation, write in their presence so to speak, and does he like Socrates live through the consequences of of his criticism? Not at all. No dialogue. He snipes at them from the Atlantic Monthly where none of them can ever get back at him." Essay 17: Reflections on Exile But I am the exile Seal me with your eyes. Take me wherever you are - Take me whatever you are. Restore to me the colour of my face And the warmth of body The light of heart and eye, The salt of bread and rhythmn, The taste of earth... the Motherland. Shield me with your eyes. Take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrow. Take me as a verse from my tragedy; Take me as a toy, a brick from the house So that our children will remember to return. -Mahmoud Darwish Here is another poem by Darwish that speaks even more terribly and loudly and profoundly and beautifully of the condition and contradictions of exile that Said articulates: Who Am I, Without Exile? ------------------------ A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing makes me enter the gospels. Not a thing ... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. Nothing carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing and not promise. What will I do? What will I do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams to my reality: not dust and not fire. What will I do without roses from Samarkand? What will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar stones? Our weight has become light like our houses in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what will we do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... There’s nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you but me, the stranger massaging his stranger’s thigh: O stranger! what will we do with what is left to us of calm ... and of a snooze between two myths? And nothing carries us: not the road and not the house. Was this road always like this, from the start, or did our dreams find a mare on the hill among the Mongol horses and exchange us for it? And what will we do? What will we do without exile? This bears no comment at all. Essay 22: Foucault and the Imagination of Power "...there is some value in trying to understand why [Foucault] imagin[ed] power to be so irresistable and unopposable... Consider these four possibilities. You think about power 1. To imagine what you could do if you had power 2. To speculate about what you would imagine if you had power 3. To arrive at some assessment of what power you would need in order to vanquish present power 4. To postulate a range of things that cannot be imagined or commanded by any form of power that exists at present. It seems to me that Foucault was mainly attracted to the first and second possibilities, that is, to thinking about power from the standpoint of its actual realisation, not of opposition to it. The third and fourth possibilities are insurgent and utopian... In short, Foucault's imagination of power is largely with rather than against it... Essay 34: Identity, Authority, and Freedom "[There are] two images for inhabiting the academic and cultural space provided by school and university. On the one hand, we can be there in order to reign and hold sway. Here, in such a conception of academic space, the academic professional is king and potentate. In that form you sit surveying all before you with detachment and mastery. Your legitimacy is that this is your domain, which you can describe with authority as principally Western, or African, or Islamic, or American, or on and on. The other model is considerably more mobile, more playful, although no less serious. The image of the traveller depends not on power but on motion, on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, and understand a variety of disguises, masks and rhetorics. Travellers must suspend the claim of customary routine in order to live in new rhythms and rituals. Most of all, and most unlike the potentate who must guard only one place and defend its frontiers, the traveller crosses over, traverses territory, and abandons fixed positions, all the time. To do this with dedication and love as well as a realistic sense of the terrain is, I believe, a kind of academic freedom at its highest, since one of its main features is that you can leave authority and dogma to the potentate. You will have other things to enjoy than merely yourself and your domain, and those other things are far more impressive, far more worthy of study and respect than self-adulation and uncritical self-appreciation. To join the academic world is therefore to enter a ceaseless quest for knowledge and freedom Essay 37: Traveling Theory Reconsidered (Frantz Fanon) "Fanon makes clear what he has been intending all along: national consiousness is undoubtedly going to be captured by the colonial bourgeois elite, the nationalistic leaders, and far from guaranteeing real independence this will perpetuate colonialism in a a new form ("sterile formalism"). Thus, he says, if nationalism "is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words, into humanism, it leads up a blind alley". Borrowing from Aime Cesaire, Fanon suggests that the necessity is to "invent souls", not to reproduce the solutions and formulas either of colonialism or the "tribal" past. "The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men and women." A few sentences later he states that a national government (the only government ever known!) ought to cede its power back to the people, dissolve itself. "There is concurrence here between Fanon and Lukacs... The work of theory, criticism, demystification, deconsecration, and decentralization they imply is never finished. The point of theory thereore is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile." Essay 42: On Defiance and Taking Positions Here Said discusses the role of the intellectual: "The main issue for the intellectual today [seems to me to be] human suffering. Indeed the intellectual vocation essentially is somehow to alleviate human suffering and not to celebrate what in effect does not need celebrating, whether that's the state or the patria or any of these basically triumphalist agents in our society." "If something isn't said, then you can try by saying it to create an audience for it where perhaps one hadn't existed before" Essay 46: The Clash of Definitions Said demolishes the "clash of civilizations" concept in this essay. What I find most touching and thought-provoking (and difficult, as well as comforting) about it is his contention that in music and literature borders are always being crossed and cultures are always meeting in a spirit of "reconcilation and harmony". This is also another reminder to me to read that book "They Came Before Columbus"... "And this sort of cooperative, collective enterprise is what one misses in the proclaimers of an undying clash between cultures: the lifelong dedication that has existed in all modern societies among scholars, artists, musicians, visionaries and prophets to try to come to terms with the Other, with that other society or culture that seems so foreign and so distant. One thinks of Joseph Needham and his lifelong study of China, or in France, of Louis Massignon, his pilgrimage within Islam. It seems to me that unless we emphasize and maximise the spirit of cooperation and humanistic exchange - and here I speak not simply of uninformed delight or of amateurish enthusiasm for the exotic, but rather of profound existential commitment and labour on behalf of the other - we are going to end up superficially and stridently banging the drum for "our" culture in opposition to all others." Later I shared this paragraph with my family and had to work through my understanding of it a little bit more. I tried to explain that what I like about this paragraph and the way Said expresses the same idea throughout the book that is troubling and difficult for me in a productive way, is that it not only refutes and indicts the obviously terrible and racist arguments of chauvinist nationalism and so on, it also speaks to the folks aligning ourselves against such things, and urges us not to give up on cross-cultural engagement just because it is difficult and can be problematic, can be another colonising, exploitative act. profound existential commitment and labour on behalf of the other... these arid, unwieldy words will keep coming back to me in my own efforts to cross over, traverse borders and boundaries, with humility and respect and delight. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 09, 2016
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Dec 31, 2016
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Nov 09, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0802779972
| 9780802779977
| 0802779972
| 4.09
| 4,848
| Nov 01, 2011
| Jul 17, 2012
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it was amazing
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Only in quotes: The dictator is faithful to his opinion and his opinion is faithful to him. He and his opinion wake up at the same instant; it never le Only in quotes: The dictator is faithful to his opinion and his opinion is faithful to him. He and his opinion wake up at the same instant; it never leaves his side through the hours of the day and it never leaves his side through the hours of his rule, which are the hours of his life. If the dictator falls sick, or goes on holiday, or is afflicted with senile dementia, he leaves his opinion in the keeping of loyal followers such as policemen, advisors, editors-in-chief, ministers of information, and former leftists who have seen the light after hesitation and cauterisation and being beaten unconscious and hung from the ceiling. The Palestinian Authority has turned into a huge NGO living off the financial assistance of the European countries, while Europe fails to realise that through its expenditures on the Palestinian Authority it simple finances and prolongs the Israeli military occupation. Israel occupies the country, Europe pays the cost of that occupation, and the Authority implements Israel’s conditions. Yes! From a liberation movement of stubborn persistence it has turned into a fat, flabby NGO at which they brandish the stick and the carrot and which out of fear of the first pants naively after the second, unaware that throughout history it is precisely the carrot that embodies the underhandedness of imperialism. No one swallows the stick, because they’re afraid of choking on it. Indeed, the stick may incite resistance, endurance and defiance, and make one search for the sources of one’s strength in order, at least, to defend oneself. It is the carrot that is the real threat. The carrot is smooth, soft, and tasty at one end; little by little, however, as one moves toward the other, it gets thicker, coarser, and woodier. The imperialist carrot is in fact the real stick. A Brazilian journalist once asked me, "To what do you attribute the West's 'misunderstanding' of Islam?" My answer was, "If a 'misunderstanding' serves the interests of certain people and helps them realise their goals, those people will decide to misunderstand. In such cases, the misunderstanding isn't an accident that can be corrected through knowledge, dialogue, or better information. It's a deliberate choice." When the politicians of the West decide that Islam is a religion based on violence and murder, they adopt the definition used by Islam's own extremists. While claiming to fight it, the politicians of the West generalise the extremist definition. They encourage the naive to believe the extremists' theories. Today, in our own countries, numerous groups of Muslims also practice a deliberate 'misunderstanding' of Islam. Interpretations A poet sits in a coffee shop, writing: the old lady thinks he is writing a letter to his mother, the young woman thinks he is writing a letter to his girlfriend, the child thinks he is drawing, the businessman thinks he is considering a deal, the tourist thinks he is writing a postcard, the employee thinks he is calculating his debts, the secret policeman walks slowly, toward him. Suddenly I feel a dryness in my throat. As though I'd swallowed dust. No hand has throttled me but I feel as though a hand had throttled me. It's the Wall. The Wall, which separates Jerusalem from Ramallah and from all the lands of the Bank. The Wall wasn't here last time. No news bulletin, statement of condemnation, official data as to its length, breadth, and height, or even photograph or television image, can convey its ugliness when seen by the eye. It's enough to see a person, any person, of flesh and blood walking next to the Wall to feel upset. That person doesn't have to be Palestinian, tired, wounded, an old man, a child, or in any way distressed to feel upset. Just seeing a person and this wall in the same frame is enough to send a shudder down one's spine. It's enough to see a cat prancing in its shadow or a nearby tree moved by the breeze or an empty can discarded at its foot to feel that nature - the air, winds, plants, weather - has been subjected to a cruel and disfiguring intervention. A thing of cement that winds its way among the houses, topped by army towers at irregular intervals. Reports, articles, speeches by politicians and campaigners for solidarity with the Palestinian people all speak of its disfigurement of the land. What I see, over and above that, is its disfigurement of the sky. Yes! This wall disfigures the sky itself. It disfigures the clouds that pass above it. It disfigures the rain the falls upon it. It disfigures the moonlight that touches it and the rays of sun that fall next to it. The issue, however, certainly isn't only one of aesthetics.. The Wall is surrounded by lies, some of which have been passed off on our worthless media, which repeats them idiotically. Lies such as that the Wall is a 'security' wall. The Wall has nothing to do with security. On the contrary, it is the wall of the great historic theft, the theft of more land and trees and water, the wall of the displacement of Palestinians following the exhaustion of their resources through their separation from their lands, crops and water basins. It is built on land belonging to the Bank and if it were for security it would have been built along the 1967 borders. It is the wall of the emptying of the Bank of the greater part of its inhabitants through it inhibition of industry, agriculture, education, and geographical and social contact among people. It is the wall of the Silent Transfer. This wall put houses in prison. Prisons the world over are designed for individual criminals who, justly or unjustly, have been found guilty. This wall has been designed to imprison an entire human community. To imprison a morning greeting between neighbours. To imprison a grandfather's dancing at his grandson's wedding. To imprison the handshakes exchanged at a ceremony of mourning for the death of a relative. To imprison the hand of a mother and prevent it from holding her daughter's when she gives birth. To separate the olive tree from the one who planted it, the student from his school, the patient from his doctor, the believer from his prayers at the mosque. It imprisons dates between teenagers. The Wall makes you long for colours. It makes you feel that you are living in a stage set, not in real life. It imprisons time inside place. The Wall is a word that has no definition except in the dictionary of death. It is the fear felt by our children and the fear felt by the others' state, for the Wall is the fear of both its sides. This is what makes it so satanic. International resolutions, court cases, the voices of Israeli peace advocates and of Israelis who believe in the right of the Palestinian people to freedom and self-determination will never bring this wall down, I tell myself. At the same time, I am confident that it will disappear one day by some other means. This wall will be demolished by our refusal to become used to it. It will be demolished by our astonishment at its existence. This wall will fall one day but now, in this moment of sorrow of mine, I see it as strong and immortal. The only things stronger than this wall are the birds, the flies, and the dust of the road. Then I tell myself, this is the Lesser Wall. The Greater Wall is the Occupation. Isn't the Occupation a wall too? I tell myself that I have lost all feeling. I tell myself, if nothing makes me cry any more, perhaps I would do better to laugh. And laughter would be easy: the victims of the ghettoes of the West reintroducing them in the East! In the third millenium, the Jews putting themselves into a ghetto again! And of their own free will, this time. Some of Israel's more intelligent politicians have said the same but no one has paid any attention. In the internal struggle over Israeli decision-making, the less intelligent side always wins - the side that sees the solution to all problems in 'absolute force.' And in the debate between the civilian and the military minds of the Jewish State, the military always wins. This is the khaki state that throughout history has disliked colours. It is not enough that the Wall has no colour; it also spoils all the colours around it. It spoils the embroidered dress of a peasant woman who waits four hours in front of one of its gates or beneath one of its towers. It spoils the school uniform of a small girl waiting impatiently for permission to get to her first class. The Wall tempts its victims to jump it, if only in their dreams. It tempts the strong and sturdy to wish that God had made them flying birds or climbing creepers. It tempts one to infiltrate and penetrate it, as in a cartoon fantasy. It tempts one to think of rock crushers, drills and explosives. It tempts one to make an unparalleled victory of the simple ability to move. Our problem with the Jew, here, in this 'Jewish State' as they insist on calling it, is that all three or four generations of Palestinians have seen of him is his helmet. They've seen the Jew only in khaki, with his finger on the rifle's trigger. They've seen him only as a sniper in a window, an officer in a tank, a conscript at a checkpoint, a guard, clacking his metal heels past the doors to prison cells or along the long corridors that separate them, or a heavy hand in the interrogation rooms, where Israeli law allows the use of what they call 'moderate physical force'(!) to extract confessions. Many western journalists who maintain a studied and malign blindness to the Occupation have asked me whether the Palestinian people are really ready to coexist with the Jews and I reply that we coexisted with them for hundreds of years in Palestine, the Arab countries, and Andalusia, and that it is Europe, which reproves us and holds us to account, that couldn't coexist with them and sent them mercilessly to the Holocaust. What is asked of us today, however, and has been ever since their military occupation of our land, is to coexist with their tanks in our bedrooms! Show me one person in this world, I say to them, who can live with a tank in his bedroom. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 04, 2017
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Feb 17, 2017
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Oct 16, 2015
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