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Edward Said: Profile of an intellectual
Sayeed Ahmad
A boy was born in Jerusalem among four sisters, to a well-known Christian business family, in November 1935. His father’s name was Wadi Ibrahim who was a great admirer of America and had a keen desire to be citizen of that country. He had joined the US Army and served during World War I. Edward Said was born when his father was 40 years old and his mother Hilda was 20. His early education was in Jerusalem and Egypt, but his father sent him to America’s Mount Hermon College before he completed high school. There he took time to adjust, always remembering his happy days at Victoria College in Cairo.
Edward’s mother was the greatest influence in the first twenty-five years of his life, his closest and most intimate companion. His deep interest in music and language as well as in the aesthetics of appearance, style and form, besides his potential for grief and happiness came from his mother. One of impressionable theatrical experiences came when in 1944 his mother announced that John Gieldgud was coining to Cairo to perform Hamlet at the Opera H use. She had four or six sessions reading the play to Edward, emphasising the moral principles in the story such as ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ as a reminder how risky it was for him to be given money to use. When Edward saw the play at Opera House he was jolted out of his seat with Gielgud’s grand performance. When an Anglo-American classmate Tony Howard invited him to meet Gieldgud to his house he was dumbstruck. When Gieldgud shook his hand he felt he was being greeted by a god from Mount Olympus.
Edward Said as a young boy did not have a strong constitution. His feet arches were too high and he had to visit a paediatrician, he had stomach pains, and a nervous shudder, while he developed trachoma in his eyes for a while. In 1949, at the age of fourteen he went to see ‘Arms and The Man’ by Shaw at American University of Cairo’s Ewart Hall where he realised he was unable to see anything on the stage, till his friend Mostapha Hamdollah loaned him his glasses. He wore glasses after this for several years.
The Post-war Cairo brought major changes in the British institutions by the victorious Americans who changed the syllabus of the Cairo School for American children allowing the teaching of spoken Arabic for all children. His pretty Arabic teacher describing the adventures at a just opened amusement park in Gezira placed emphasis on the pronunciation of an airplane ride named ‘Saida’, after the newly formed Egyptian company. She repeated again and again the lurking Arab sounding quality in his name, which he had tried to scale down to the pronunciation ‘Sigheed’ to suit the western intonation. She emphatically looked him in the eye and said ‘you couldn’t have been on the best of rides if you haven’t tried Saida. Saida is the ride. Saida’s just great’. In other words she said ‘Stop pretending that you are Sigheed. You are Said as in Saida’. Edward got the point.
Edward’s serious interest in music continued throughout his years at the Cairo School for American Children (CSAC) and he attended many concerts along with his mother. He used to listen to records of all the great European Masters behind closed doors of his room. It was Beethoven who affected him the most. One of his greatest experiences in Cairo was in 1950-51 when he heard Clemans Krauss and Wilhelm Furtwangler with The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics. On the fifteenth birthday in 1950 Edward’s parents presented him with Perry Schools ‘Oxford Companion of Music’.
At the behest of his father, Edward left Cairo in 1951 for what he felt was his banishment from his home and country. The circumstances in Cairo after the British left had placed his father in a precarious business situation. His father’s health had also deteriorated and treatment in America was surely better, His mother however had not been given citizenship and she remained a ‘non-person’ for many many years. For her to get a passport she would have to reside in America which she refused to do. She was stricken with breast cancer in 1983 and operated upon in Beirut, where she had obtained a Lebanese passport in place of her Egyptian one.
She used to stay at a Condominium which she purchased in 1987, staying on a visitor’s visa. On the running out period of one of these visas she lost consciousness in March 1990. Edward’s sister Grace had to attend deportation hearings till the case was ultimately thrown out by the irate judge who scolded the Immigration and Naturalisation lawyer for trying to deport a comatose woman in her seventies.
Edward’s entry to New York did not register any excitement when he reached in July 1948, as both his mother and he started a long journey with cancer which would end their lives in the New World.
Stockholm, 1991
I first met Edward Said in Stockholm in 1991 at the Conference of Intellectuals arranged by SIDA. We were housed in Vor Gard Conference Centre of repute. I saw him in the dining room. He had just arrived from America. He met me very warmly and was happy to learn that I was a delegate from Bangladesh. We took to each other immediately. He wanted to know about the people of Bangladesh of whom he had heard so much. He wished he could have the opportunity to visit our country. In fact Prof Fakhrul Alam of the English Department of Dhaka University urged me to invite Edward Said to come the to Dhaka. But he was busy with his other assignments and promised to come some time next.
As we sat over dinner we had a lot of time to exchange views. I was 1ooking forward eagerly to hear his lecture at the famous Stockholm Town Hall.
When the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded, I had read his book on ‘Orientalism’ many years before and admired him for his brilliant discourse and analysis of existing theories on eastern cultures. He was able to confront Western civilizations vis-a-vis oriental. His writing had given a stature to the eastern nations who had long suffered from the prejudices and biases meted out by western scholars.
It was such a pleasure to meet this great man who was congenial and lively. Over the next seven days we became friends and met morning and evening, at meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I had first heard of Edward, Said during my stay in New York in 1976. I was staying with a friend Gautum Das Gupta, Editor and Publisher of the Prforming Arts Journal In New York who was a friend of Edward Said. We attended a meeting at Columbia University, where Edward Said was to come, but for some reason he did not attend. It was to be another time that we met.
Now that I was meeting him in Stockholm we had ample time to discuss many subjects over a wide range. We talked of liberation movements in many parts of the world, especially the Palestinian cause and Bangladesh’s national identity movement. We talked of films, sports, music, drama and the weather.
When I presented him with a Dhaka Muslin scarf (orna) for his wife, explaining the intrinsic value of this handloom fabric, I could see the appreciation in his eyes. He told me he would convey the historic background of this woven textile to his wife. It was such a satisfaction for me to give this gift to a man steeped in culture.
On the day of Edward Said’s lecture at Stockholm Town Hall, the assembled crowd was waiting with bated breath. We all knew we were going to hear the words of not only a literary scholar, but the foremost Arab intellectual of our time. He was proud to be Arab and proud to be Palestinian. English was his academic specialty as well as music and culture. He spoke in a beautiful voice and raised the moral issues of the Palestinian cause with depth of feeling. There was pin-drop silence among the listeners.
After the event we returned to our lodge and I went forward to congratulate him. I said Edward, “It was a marvelous piece of oratory. Your words will be written in golden letters in the history books”. He smiled humbly and rose to clasp my hands. He asked me to sit down and celebrate. We did till the wee hours of the night. We were in a glorious mood. I mentioned I would be visiting Morocco the next month. He wanted to know which cities I would be visiting and I mentioned Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakesh and Fez. He corrected my pronunciation saying the local inhabitants pronounced it not as Fez but as Fars. What a meticulous person he was! Again he stated that he had friends in Fars whom I must meet. We had struck a friendship that I greatly value to this day.
If trials and tribulations are the building blocks of character, then Edward Said had his share of those. His ‘homelessness’ as a Palestinian remained an unreconcilable state of his mind and he spent his life traveling back and forth between two worlds. He was also saddled with the depressing condition’ that both his parents became victims of cancer, and finally his own body became engulfed in the terminal disease. When I met him in Sweden in’1991 he had already contracted the illness since a year earlier.
In fact it was at a seminar Said had convened of Palestinian intellectuals ahead of the Madrid Peace Conference that he got news of his blood report from his wife Mariam in New York. He was diagnosed for chronic lymphocytic leukemia. His realisation that his life was shorter than he had thought it was going to be required certain adjustments. In 1992 he went with his wife and children. to Palestine, after a gap of forty-five years. At this time Dr. Rai told him he may need chemotherapy and when he began taking it in 1994. Said became aware that he was entering the final stage of his life. His autobiography was started in May 1994. He explains in his auto-biography —Out of Place —- “As I grew weaker the, number of infections and bouts of side effects increased, the more this book was my way of constructing something in prose, while in my physical and emotional life. I grappled with anxieties and pains of degeneration.” Later on he says, ‘I’ve thought in fact that this book in some fundamental way is all about sleeplessness, all about the silence of wakefulness, the need for conscious recollection and articulation.”
When Edward Said passed away I was struck with deep sadness. I had not fully realised the magnitude of the illness he was undergoing when we met in Sweden in 1991. He appeared so composed and so ready to spend time with me, learning about Bangladesh, a country which had fought and got its land and identity. He would look deeply into my eyes and I could sense his conviction in nationhood and independence.
After his departure from Egypt and Victoria College, now named Victory College, Said continued his schooling in the United States. This meant eleven years of undergraduate and graduate degrees. He missed his mother acutely and she suffered from his absence but they kept up a correspondence of anguished letters. Edward recalls that he always felt a sense of that he would rather be somewhere else, not in America, because “here was not being where I/we had wanted to be, here being defined as a place of exile, removal, unwilling dislocation”. This pain continued each time Said returned to visit his mother. They would go to listen to Beethoven symphonies together, whose music meant the most to them. Each time he departed for the US it appeared like a leave taking ceremony. Edward realised that as he was ‘her only son he had to fulfill his mother’s self-articulation and self-expression. From 1951 till her death in 1990 his mother suffered pangs or separation ‘from Said even though they lived together off and on in different continents.
Said was always amazed at his going to the United States. He wondered what his life would have been had he not gone to America. He continued to feel that he was away from home, and though he had no illusions about life in the Arab world, or that. he would have benefited by living and staying in Europe, lie felt pangs of regret for leaving his native country. Even after living thirty-seven years in New York he felt his residence there, had more disadvantages.
After his arrival in New York his parents took him by taxi cab to Mount Hermon College. He was shown his room and his mother helped him to unpack and make his bed. They then rapidly departed leaving him with a lump in his throat. He had to endure a whole academic year there. Moreover the routine was not only rigorous and unrelieved ‘by the urban entertainment he had enjoyed in Cairo. Edward however had no reason, to complain, as his father spared no’ expenses to keep his son happy: While in London his parents had put him, up at the Savoy Hotel and took him to fancy theatres, concerts every night. His experiences with The American system made it clear to’ him that it was a power that depended entirehy on the ideological self-image ‘as’ a moral agent to the world, acting in good ‘faith and with unimpeachable intentions. Slowly, “Edward” of the past was forming a new identity of another personality.
After good academic performance at Mount Herman, Edward applied to both Princeton and Harvard Universities and was accepted by both. During’ his last weeks at
Hermon he had a realisation that despite his academic brilliance, his ability as a pianist of distinction and had important matches in tennis there was something missing Though he was known as man with a powethil brain and unusual past, but he felt he was not completely integrated into the school’s corporate life. He realised he was to remain an outsider, no matter what his achievements. It was at this point of his graduation from’. Mount Hermon’ School that Edward became conscious that the school was ‘white’, and he belonged to the Chaotic Arab world in transformation. He realised he was out of place, marginal, non-American and alienated, even though it was at this time that the Arab world began to play a greater role in American life:
His desire ‘to return to Cairo, which he had left two years ago was still overwhelmingly.
At Princeton University Edward met a girl seven years his senior whom he fell in love with, but his parents were unhappy with this choice. He remained attached to her for two more years. When he graduated in 1957 from Princeton, he planned to spend the next year in Egypt before going to Harvard for graduate Their relationship continued as Eva went to Alexandria to live with a widowed —-ster. Separated by distances and the realisation that he could not marry her at this stage, they drifted apart, Eva proceeding to Rome to study art history. A few years alter Eva got married to a cousin, when Edward also had decided to marry a girl. It was his first marriage, a short-lived and unhappy one.
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