The Nowhere Man

This, according to Said, is the perfect model for the exile, the one who has been deposited on the nowhereland by the sewage system of imperial constructions. Said transcends the limits of his exilic condition by being strong: he is permanently out of place 8212; every land is foreign. The sense of loss, home is elsewhere, is marinated in love and memory. Said, the intellectual of permanent migration, never forgets to remind us that his argument, hisdisagreement, is rooted in the state of homelessness, in the remembrance of the displaced. Aesthete, literary critic, intellectual at large, cosmopolitan, Said is the most vocal Palestinian in exile, and it is as the keeper of Palestinian conscience that he positions himself in the marketplace of dissent: 8220;For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.8221;

Unafraid and compassionate, or strong and tender, Said, with so much self-righteous splendour, continues to repudiate every colonial 8212; or imperial 8212; misrepresentations. Both in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, Said8217;s seminal studies of western culture, what makes his argument energetic is his rejection of the colonial pretence, the imperial arrogance. For him, imagination is subordinated to sociology, and definitions, such as orientalism, to power. Adoredby the Anglo-American left and quoted ceaselessly by the so-called liberal-left intellectuals of our own Delhi, Said has that remarkable ability to make those intel- lectually redundant and rhetorically nauseating terms like post-colonialism and imperialism rather intimate. Still, Said is smarter than the members of his fan club, mostly caviar socialists of the West and peanut marxists of the East.

And he certainly believes that he is the smartest of the Palestinian cause junkies. The peace, as envisioned in Oslo accords, is an opportunistic covenant between bloody-minded Israelis and power-thirsty Palestinians. In Said8217;s view, the cause has been betrayed, the homeland has been sold out. So it is his responsibility as a proactive intellectual to redeem Palestine.

It is the obligation of the victim: the eternal return of the exile. His memoir Out of Place Granta/Penguin, 295pp, Acirc;pound;17.50 is the personal explanation of an intellectual position. An explanation of why 8211; and how 8211; his argument for thehomeless Palestinian is subordinated to his own personal history. He began remembering places and people past when he was diagnosed with leukemia. And when he leaves the last page of his book, already made famous by pre-publication allegations of childhood misrepresentations, he is only 21, a Princeton graduate.

This is a book of eternal departure, of solitude, of being nowhere while being everywhere: 8220;This memoir is on some level a reenactment of the experience of departure and separation as I feel the pressure of time hastening and running out. The fact that I live in New York with a sense of provisionality despite 37 years of residence here accentuates the disorientation that has accrued to me, rather than the advantages.8221; A privileged child born to wealthy parents. Said could never escape from a sense of disorientation or alienation. From Jerusalem to Cairo to New York, it has be-en a passage of permanent displacement, despite the best schools, despite overwhelming parental protection. Edward Said:the stranger with an intimate heritage.

The strangeness is there in the name itself. Why Edward? His father William A. Said formerly Wadie Ibrahim, an Anglophile, an Arab with a US citizenship, named his son after the Prince of Wales. But Said cannot get rid of the existential burden of being Edward. The burden of this memoir is Edward8217;s determination to depersonalise the intimate, even those intimate trivia that usually enhance memoirs, by overstating his case of I8217;m elsewhere8217;. Take this: 8220;The sheer gravity of my coming to the US in 1951 amazes me even today. I have only the most shadowy notion of what my life might have been had I not come to America8230; To this day I still feel that I am away from home, ludicrous as that may sound8230;8221; It sounds a bit ludicrous because Said is so self-consciously emphasising the 8220;sheer gravity8221; of his migratory process. Or this: 8220;It was also at this point that I felt that coming from a part of the world that seemed to be in a state of chaotic transformation becamethe symbol of what was out of place about me.8221;

The ca-use: he was denied a particular graduation honour. The distance between the place and the sense of out-of-place is so great that it seems Edward has taken the historical importance of being Edward Said very seriously. He tends to forget the difference between memories and thoughts.

But his memories are intimately interesting when he is portraying his parents. The best parts of Out of Place are the passages about his parents 8212; the aesthetic mother and the shadowy, disciplinarian father. The Said personality is defined by both. Father was power, authority, rationalistic discipline and repressed emotion. From father inherited the trait of 8220;never giving up8221;. Said has 8220;no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement8221;. From mother he inherited 8220;a profound interest in music and language as well as in the aesthetics of appearance8230; a virtually unquenchable, incredibly various cultivation of lonelinessas a form of freedom and of affliction8221;. One of the finest passages in this memoir is mother and son reading Hamlet together, she as Gertrude and Ophelia, Edward as Hamlet, Horatio and Claudius. 8220;She also played Polonius as if in implicit solidarity with my father, who often admonishingly quoted neither a borrower nor a lender be8217; to me8221;.

In a life of enlarged dissonances, this kind of tender harmony is a rarity. For, Edward Said, the child of Jerusalem, the boy of Cairo, the intellectual of New York, is determined to 8220;being not quite right and out of place8221;.

This is a necessary intellectual position because the right place has been denied him by an imperial or colonial 8212; it is all the same 8212; conspiracy. Still out-of-place is freedom. The freedom of Edward Said, the autonomy of the victim, allows him to seek 8220;the last sky,8221; the 8220;last frontier8221;. Sorry, the conspiracy of memory doesn8217;t make this intellectual position acceptable.