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作者: ontogeny (apolis) 看板: Anthro-R91
標題: Re: Said dies...
時間: Fri Sep 26 11:43:56 2003
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: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/obituaries/25CND-SAID.html
全文：
Krista Niles/The New York Times
The author Edward W. Said, pictured in 1998, has died.
Edward Said, Leading Advocate of Palestinians, Dies at 67
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: September 25, 2003 The New York Times
Edward Said, a polymath scholar and literary critic at Columbia University who
was the most prominent advocate in the United States of the cause of
Palestinian independence, died in New York City today. He was 67.
The cause of death was leukemia, which Mr. Said had been battling for several
years.
Mr. Said, who was born in Jerusalem during the British mandate in Palestine and
emigrated to the United States when he was a teenager, spent a long and
productive career as a professor of comparative literature at Columbia and was
the author of several widely discussed books.
He was an exemplar of American multiculturalism, at home both in Arabic and
English, but, as he once put it, "a man who lived two quite separate lives,"
one as an American university professor, the other as a fierce critic of
American and Israeli policies and an equally fierce proponent of the
Palestinian cause.
Though a defender of Islamic civilization, Mr. Said was an Episcopalian married
to a Quaker. He was also an excellent pianist who for several years was the
music critic for The Nation.
From 1977 to 1991, he was as an unaffiliated member of the Palestine National
Conference, a parliament-in-exile. Most of the conference's members belong to
one or another of the main Palestinian organizations, most importantly the
Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasir Arafat, but some were members of
smaller organizations believed responsible for terrorist operations against
Israelis and Americans, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine.
"The situation of the Palestinian is that of a victim," Mr. Said told Dinitia
Smith in New York magazine in 1989, making the kind of statement that put him
at the center of the roiling debate about the Middle East.
"They're the dispossessed, and what they do by way of violence and terrorism is
understandable," he said. " But what the Israelis do, in killing Palestinians
on a much larger scale, is a continuation of the horrific and unjust
dispossession of the Palestinian people."
He added: "'I totally repudiate terrorism in all its forms. Not just
Palestinian terrorism - I'm also against Israeli terrorism, the bombing of
refugee camps."
Mr. Said was a widely recognized figure in New York, a frequent participant in
debates on the Middle East, and an outspoken advocate of a Palestinian
homeland. For many years he was an ardent supporter of Mr. Arafat, whom he
called "the leader of a genuinely national and popular movement, with a clearly
legitimate goal of self-determination for his people."
But Mr. Said became a bitter critic of Mr. Arafat after the 1993 Oslo accords
between Israel and the P.L.O., believing that the agreement gave the
Palestinians too little territory and too little control over it.
In the years after Oslo, he argued that separate Palestinian and Jewish states
would always be unworkable and, while he recognized that emotions on both sides
were against it, he advocated a single binational state as the best ultimate
solution.
"I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has
thrust us together, and sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights
for each citizen," he wrote in a 1999 essay in The New York Times. "There can
be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve
that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as
such."
Among the criticisms leveled against Mr. Said by Jews and others was his
failure to condemn specific acts of terrorism by Palestinian groups, including
some that served alongside him on the Palestine National Council.
One such person, for example, was Abu Abbas, a member of the P.L.O. executive
committee who is believed responsible for the hijacking of the Italian cruise
ship Achille Lauro and the murder of a wheelchair-bound American passenger,
Leon Klinghoffer.
In his interview with New York, Mr. Said called Abu Abbas "a degenerate," but
he then argued that important Israeli leaders, like former prime ministers
Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, had been terrorists responsible for the
killing of women and children.
-------
(Page 2 of 4)
Among the political views of Mr. Said that were cited by his defenders was his
unambiguous condemnation of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran for his call on
his followers to assassinate the writer Salman Rushdie.
Mr. Said, while opposing the American-led Persian Gulf War in 1991, called the
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein "an appalling and dreadful despot," and he made
similar statements at times about the Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. But Mr.
Said was throughout his long career far more critical of the West and of Israel
and their attitudes and practices in the Arab world than he was of the Arabs or
their leaders.
While Israel and its supporters saw the crux of the Middle East conflict as the
Arabs' unwillingness to accept the existence of Israel and the constant Arabic
threat to Israeli security, Mr. Said saw matters in terms of Zionist atrocity
and Palestinian victimhood.
"In sheer numerical terms, in brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed,
there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism has done to
Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have done to Zionists," he
wrote in "The Question of Palestine" (1979).
Mr. Said's best-known and most influential book was "Orientalism," published in
1978, which was an amalgamation of his scholarly position and his political
views. In it, Mr. Said laid out a vision of history in which cultural power -
the power to define others - is inextricably linked with the political power to
dominate. The theory he outlined in "Orientalism" was that the Western view of
the East as sensual and corrupt, vicious, lazy, tyrannical and backward,
exemplified this power.
"The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of
domination of varying degrees of a complex hegemony," Mr. Said wrote in
Orientalism." The idea, which seemed to be anchored in Mr. Said's own sense of
belonging to a dispossessed people, was that the West invented the East as a
way of reinforcing the power of colonialism over the colonized. Influenced by
French thinkers like Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault and Claude Levi-Strauss, Mr.
Said was one of the first scholars to introduce such notions of culture and
power into the American academy.
In one of his later books, "Culture and Imperialism," Mr. Said argued that
19th-century and 20th-century British novelists - even so apparently
nonpolitical a writer as Jane Austen - provided a cultural legitimization for
colonialism.
Mr. Said maintained that writers like E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard
Kipling engaged in a "novelistic process, whose main purpose is not to raise
more questions, not to disturb or otherwise preoccupy attention, but to keep
the empire more or less in place."
Mr. Said's entire life's work drew on his experiences in both East and West.
Edward Said was born in Jerusalem on Nov. 1, 1935, and spent his childhood in a
well-to-do neighborhood of thick-walled stone houses that is now one of the
main Jewish districts of the city. His father, a prosperous businessman who had
lived in the United States, took the family to Cairo in 1947 after the United
Nations divided Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab halves.
The 12-year-old Edward went to the American School in Cairo, then to Victoria
College, an elite institution where among his classmates were the future King
Hussein of Jordan and the actor Omar Sharif.
In 1951 his parents sent him to the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. He
went on to Princeton University and then to graduate school at Harvard, where
he got his Ph.D. in English literature in 1964. The year before that, Mr. Said
became an assistant instructor in the English Department of Columbia, moving up
to full professor in 1970.
In 1977 he was appointed to an endowed chair, becoming the Parr Professor of
English and Comparative Literature and later the Old Dominion Foundation
Professor in the Humanities, a position he held until he was named a university
professor, the highest academic position at Columbia.
Mr. Said's first book was "Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography," in
which he began to explore some of the themes that led to his theories about
culture and imperialism.
His second book, "Beginnings," was an examination of literary inspiration, the
way a writer lives out what Mr. Said called the "new and the customary."
-----
(Page 3 of 4)
The book, praised by Richard Kuczkowski in The Library Journal as "an ingenious
exploration of the meaning of modernism," won Columbia's Lionel Trilling Award
in 1976. His next book was "Orientalism" with its theory that the Orient and
especially the Arab world have been created by the Western imagination, as a
series of demeaning, reductive stereotypes.
John Leonard, reviewing the book in The New York Times praised the book as "not
merely persuasive, but conclusive."
"Orientalism" established Mr. Said as a figure of enormous influence in
American and European universities, a hero to many, especially younger faculty
and graduate students on the left for whom "Orientalism" was a kind of
intellectual credo, the founding document of the field that came to be called
post-colonial studies.
Central to Mr. Said's argument was the notion that there was in essence no
objective, neutral scholarship on Asia and especially on the Arab world. The
very Western study of the East, in his view, was bound up in the systematic
prejudices about the non-Western world that turned it into a set of cliches.
Since the Enlightenment, Mr. Said wrote, "Every European, in what he could say
about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally
ethnocentric."
This view did not go unchallenged, even among specialists on the Middle East
who acknowledged that there was much in the book that was true but who rejected
many of its assertions as overdrawn, hyperbolic, and over-simplistic.
"It is a pity that it is so pretentiously written, so drenched in jargon, for
there is much in this book that is superb as well as intellectually exciting,"
wrote the British historian J. H. Plumb in The New York Times Book Review. But
Mr. Plumb and others contended that Mr. Said made no effort to actually examine
the real, historical relations between West and East, or to sort out what was
true "in the Western representation" of the East from what was false and
caricatural.
They argued that Mr. Said's assumption was that the Orientalists simply
invented the East to satisfy the requirements of cultural superiority and
Western imperialism and he ignored the vast body of scholarship that grappled
with the East on its own terms.
"The tragedy of Mr. Said's `Orientalism', '` wrote Bernard Lewis, a leading
scholar of the Middle East who is criticized in Mr. Said's book, "is that it
takes a genuine problem of real importance and reduces it to the level of
political polemic and personal abuse."
During his years at Columbia, Mr. Said also came to play a more active role as
a spokesman for the Palestinian cause, becoming a member of the Palestine
National Council in 1977 and helping, in 1988, to draft a new Palestinian
constitution.
Though seen by most American supporters of Israel as a radical, many
Palestinians identified him as a moderate, a figure who reportedly urged Mr.
Arafat to help break the Middle East impasse by acknowledging Israel's right to
exist. In interviews, he identified himself as a kind of perpetual outsider, a
man influenced by two cultures, the Arabic and the American, but belonging
fully to neither.
"I've never felt that I belonged exclusively to one country, nor have I been
able to identify `patriotically' with any other than losing causes," Mr. Said
wrote in The Nation in 1991. As Mr. Said became more prominent, defending
Palestinians in written statements and in interviews, as victims of Israeli
brutality, he came under attack from supporters of Israel who accused him of
supporting terrorism. He was at one point reportedly put on a "hit list" by the
Jewish Defense League.
It was in its way an acknowledgement of Mr. Said's importance that an Israeli
scholar, Justus Reid Weiner, spent some three years researching his early life
in order to show that Mr. Said had falsified his biography. In an article in
Commentary magazine in 1999, Mr. Weiner argued that Mr. Said had cultivated a
moving personal story of a Palestinian childhood brought to an abrupt and
tragic end by the creation of Israel in 1947, when, in fact, according to Mr.
Weiner, Mr. Said's childhood home was Cairo.
-----
(Page 4 of 4)
Interviewed by a reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Said replied that he had
never denied that he had grown up in Cairo as well as Jerusalem. "I don't think
it's that important in any case," Mr. Said said. "I never have represented my
case as the issue to be treated. I've represented the case of my people, which
is something quite different."
Another, earlier article in Commentary, entitled "Professor of Terror,"
elicited a spirited response, with both Jews and non-Jews coming to Mr. Said's
defense. "To portray Said as a devotee of terrorist politics is a gross
distortion of his life's work as a scholar and militant," wrote Richard A.
Falk, a political scientist at Princeton.
In 1991, Mr. Said, who learned during a routine visit to his doctor that he had
leukemia, quietly stepped down from the Palestine National Council. But when
Israel and the P.L.O. signed a peace agreement in 1994, Mr. Said spoke out
angrily against the leadership of Mr. Arafat, not only, in his view, for giving
away too much to Israel but also for the corruption and tyrannical nature of
his rule.
"He's sold his people into enslavement," Mr. Said said of Mr. Arafat in 1994.
Speaking of the P.L.O., he said, "They're a leadership without credibility and
without moral authority, and I don't know any Palestinian today who considers
the P.L.O. in its current form anything but an organization of losers and
has-beens."
In his last years, Mr. Said's literary production became more and more
political. In 1979 he published "The Question of Palestine" and two years after
that, "Covering Islam" in which he tried to show how Westerners depicted Arabs
as "synonymous with trouble - rootless, mindless, gratuitous trouble."
Mr. Said's last book was "The Politics of Dispossession," which extended his
criticism of Western attitudes toward the Palestinians but also portrayed the
Palestinian leadership as profligate and corrupt.
Reviewing that book in The New York Times, David Shipler wrote: "Reading Mr.
Said is like being yelled at for hours on end, and it takes a good and willing
ear to appreciate his calmer passages of insight, to hear the essential
melodies that run beneath the discordant onslaughts."
Mr. Said's first marriage, to Maire Jaanus, ended in divorce. He is survived by
his wife, Mariam Cortas, a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla.
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