Edward Said: The Undying Legacy of an Exceptional Thinker

By Youssef El Kaidi

Edward Said rose to prominence and came to international fame following his ground-breaking
contributions in the field of postcolonial studies. He is deservedly recognized as the father of
postcolonialism with theories that still exert influence on scholars around the world.

Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Edward Said soon moved with his family to Cairo where he started school
at Gizera Preparatory School. Later, he joined St George’s American School where he spent his early
formative years. In 1949, Said enrolled at the then notorious Victoria College to be dismissed from it
only two years later for misbehaviour. During the Cairo stage of his life, Said demonstrated his
multitalented personality and his great mastery of several languages. He was especially fluent in
English, French, and Arabic. However, he was also a troublemaker and he was repeatedly reported by
his teachers for his “misbehaviour, loitering, carelessness, or fidgeting” as he recalls in his memoir
Out of Place.

In Cairo, Said constantly carried the discomfort of double-consciousness and conflicting identities,
being Edward, a Western name his parents gave him after the Prince of Wales, and Said, which is an
Arabic name that runs in his family. He was also an Arab but Christian, a Palestinian-American who
lived neither in America nor in Palestine but in Cairo, Egypt, a native Arabic speaker whose English
seemed better than his Arabic, etc. In fact, Said has always retained this unsettled sense of identity
conflict all his life and it had a very clear imprint on his writings.

At the age of 15, he moved to the United States to attend elite boarding school in Massachusetts called
Mount Hermon School where he developed diverse academic and personal interests. By his graduation
from this School, he had won several awards in swimming and tennis, he had done brilliantly in his
academic work, and he had become a distinguished pianist. Later, he attended Princeton University
where he studied the humanities until his graduation in 1957. Social atmosphere at Princeton
University was poisonous and anti-intellectualism. Said felt especially uncomfortable with Princeton
students’ and teachers’ endless drinking, pipe-smoking, partying, etc. His only antidote during this
tumultuous stage of his academic life was his isolation and thorough immersion in writing and
reading. After obtaining his doctorate in literature from Harvard University, he joined the faculty at
Columbia University, where he worked as a lecturer in English and comparative literature for the rest
of his life. On September 23, 2003, Said succumbed to leukaemia, leaving behind a treasured legacy of
intellectual contributions.

In 1966, Said published his first book on Joseph Conrad entitled Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of
Autobiography but it was mostly pure literary analysis of the cultural dynamics of Conrad’s narrative
style in his short stories. This book, though not as famous as later ones, signalled the beginnings of his
ground-breaking book of Orientalism. In fact, it was Orientalism that made Said such an
internationally well-known erudite thinker. His two early books Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of
Autobiography and Beginnings: Intention and Method received meagre academic interest, at least if
compared to Orientalism.

As a Palestinian who had witnessed the implications of Israeli occupation on Palestinians since 1947,
especially the waves of thousands of land-robbed Arabs, Edward Said was profoundly touched by the
experience of colonialism and occupation. Said’s interest in the analysis and deconstruction of colonial
discourse and the politics and poetics of power would upsurge after the humiliating defeat of the Arab
states in the Arabo-Israeli war of 1967. This defeat marked Said’s sudden change from a pure literary
figure to a political activist and an ardent pro-Palestinian advocate.

The publication of Said’s seminal book Orientalism in 1978 opened the floodgate for a number of
other theorists and theories to flourish in various disciplines and academic circles, building on his
theoretical foundations on identity, culture, discourse, representation, difference, race, and colonial
resistance. However, the bulk of Said’s academic contributions were in the field of postcolonialism, so
much so that some critics consider him the founder of the field. Ali Behdad, for instance, believes that
Said was the founder of postcolonial discursivity, and so do Aijaz Ahmad, Mustapha Marrouchi and
many other critics and cultural theorists. It was only after the publication of Orientalism that
postcolonialism gained its momentum. The field, however, needs also to be seen as building upon the
contributions of earlier activists, thinkers, and freedom fighters such as Amílcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire,
Frantz Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, Patrice Lumumba, Albert Memmi,
Mohamed Ben Abdelkaim El Khattabi, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and many others who initiated the
intellectual and armed struggle to achieve mental and territorial decolonization.

Postcolonialism interrogates power relations and reconceptualises historical events, which have long
been viewed by the perspective of hegemonic powers. In the 19th century, European powers, Britain
and France in particular, believing in their racial and cultural superiority, expanded their empires over
ninety-percent of the entire land surface of the globe. In fact, colonial and imperial endeavours were
highly supported by anthropological research that legitimized colonialism on the basis that Western
culture is superior and the rest of the world is inferior and incapable. Such distorted representations of
cultural alterity in Western colonial discourse were used to justify the atrocities perpetrated by
colonialism in various parts of the world. Postcolonialism, thus, seeks to redress the balance between
the oppressor and the oppressed by giving voice to those who have been kept permanently voiceless
under the oppressive rule of colonial administration. Postcolonialism said otherwise is an attempt at
writing “history from below” by elaborating a historical narrative that accounts for history from the
perspective of the subordinated classes, the disenfranchised, the non-conformists and the oppressed in
general, or what the Indian postcolonial feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls the subaltern
classes.

Postcolonial literary criticism investigates the politics and poetics of representation in colonial and
postcolonial texts whether written by the colonizer or by the colonized. It was Edward Said who first
laid the cornerstone for postcolonial literary criticism by investigating a number of Orientalist texts by
prominent European scholars, including poets, philosophers, anthropologists, travel writers, historians,
political theorists, and politicians. Said’s main finding was that Western representations of the Orient
are deeply fraught with distortions and misrepresentations. Even those who have attempted to
empathize with the Orient, such as Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence, are nonetheless complicit with
the dynamics of colonial discourse and Western power. Their Eurocentric ideas rise above their claims
of objectivity, humanism, and good intentions.

Said argued that the body of knowledge produced by the West about the East was deeply flawed. The
Orient was repeatedly rendered “the primitive Other,” whose people are irrational, mysterious, weak,
depraved, and backward. This set of fabricated clichés served only in paving the way for Western
colonial encroachments over the East and the ensuant cultural displacement, economic exploitation
and military aggression. The stereotypes and distorted representations produced by Orientalism were
meant to give a pretext for colonial intervention and also convince the colonized subjects of their
subordinate rank relative to the colonizers. In postcolonial criticism, this is called “the colonization of
the mind” and it involves epistemic authority exercised by the power of the word rather than the
sword. More accurately, the colonization of the mind is manifested by the colonized subject’s
acquiescence and malleableness in the face of hegemonic domination.

Said’s Orientalism, though acclaimed by his admirers, brought him a lot of criticism. Said was
particularly criticized for his essentializations of many key concepts in his work of Orientalism, such
as dealing with “the West” and “the East” as autonomous and homogeneous spheres. In fact, “there are
many Wests, some antagonistic some not,”1 as Said himself later admitted, and there are many Easts
and, therefore, these concepts should not be dealt with en bloc. Colonial discourse, which is
consistently homogenous for Said, is characterized by ambivalence, contradiction and heterogeneity.
In colonial discursivity, the colonial subject was at once the object of desire and derision, acceptance
and disavowal, fear and attraction. Hence, colonial discourse “speaks in a tongue that is forked not
false,”2 as Bhabha states in The Location of Culture.

Edward Said was also criticized for silencing the subjects he claimed to defend. The colonized
subjects in Said’s Orientalism are seen as submissive and passive, exhibiting no resistance to
colonialism whatsoever. Said sought to rectify this oversight in his book Culture and Imperialism,
where he studied the themes of culture and resistance and how the colonized people produced their
multiple forms of cultural, political and ideological resistance and opposition. In his introduction to
Culture and Imperialism, he states in this regard that “[n]ever was it the case that the imperial
encounter pitted an active Western intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native; there was
always some form of active resistance.”3 In a chapter entitled Themes of Resistance, Said investigates
the various forms of ideological resistance invented by the natives to reconstitute their contaminated
collective identity and rebuild their nationalist shattered community against outside domination.

In summary, Edward Said remains one of the most controversial scholars to the current day.
Postcolonialism, which is the offspring of his book Orientalism, is highly disturbing to power,
inequality, and injustice as well as to those benefiting from them. Bernard Lewis, Albert Hourani,
Nikki Kiddie, Ibn Warraq, Simon Leys, among many others, accused Said of attacking the West on
unreasonable grounds while cherishing the privileges the West provides. Some Pro-Israeli critics
indicted Said of teaching, preaching, and endorsing terrorism after his support of the Palestinians. Yet
through his books such as Orientalism, the Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, and Culture and
Imperialism, Said did indeed speak truth to power. He confronted orthodoxy and dogma, he could not
easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and his main raison d’étre was to represent all
those people and issues who are forgotten or swept under the rug.

1
Quoted in: Mustapha Marrouchi, Edward Said at the Limits (New York: State University of New York Press,
2004), p. 6.
2
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 85.
3
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. xii.