"Exile can create resentment and regret, but it can also form a keen opinion." This is what Edward Said felt after he identified himself as an "exile". He also pointed out that "the public role of intellectuals is that of outsiders, amateurs, and disturbers of the status quo."
This view is completely different from the definition of intellectuals that people usually think of, the real society regards educated professionals as intellectuals, and Sayid believes that experts and scholars in the system have been expelled from the camp of intellectuals because they play more of an advisory role than a skeptic to those in power.
Today, nationalist sentiment has become a new force in the world, and General de Gaulle once made an incisive statement: "When you think first of your love for your people, it is patriotism; when you first think of your hatred of the people of other countries, it is nationalism." Sayyid, on the other hand, is even more shocking, reminding us that "patriotic nationalism, collective thinking, and a sense of class, ethnicity, or gender privilege should be questioned."
You may not accept his views, but Sayyid's vanguard position as a highly influential cultural critique in the world today deserves our attention, and his "Orientalism", "Intellectuals", "Culture and Imperialism" and so on still influence left-wing intellectuals.
Said was born on November 1, 1935 in Jerusalem to an Arab Christian family, the son of a wealthy stationery merchant in the Arab world, who had acquired American citizenship before he was born as a result of joining the U.S. military during World War I. Said attended Western schools in Cairo, Egypt, during the British occupation and received a British education.
During World War II, 6-year-old Said fled with his father due to rumors that "the German army commanded by Rommel would first attack Alexandria and then Cairo". As a wealthy Palestinian living in Cairo, Said had never entered the world of ordinary Arabs, and their mansions were connected to the elegant residential areas of Western colonialists, and Said's spare time was playing tennis, cricket, swimming and piano. At the age of 16, he took the luxury cruise ship "New Amsterdam" to study in New York, leaving his homeland and becoming an American citizen. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University, Saeed taught English literature and comparative literature at Columbia University in 1963, where he was also a music critic, opera scholar, and pianist in addition to cultural criticism.
Strictly speaking, Said's self-positioning as an "exile" is not convincing. In Political Thought and Political Thinkers, the American scholar Judy Schola defines the term "exile" as "any person who has been forced, rather than voluntarily, to leave the country in which he has been living as a permanent resident." The successive political catastrophes of the 20th century have turned a large number of intellectuals who are unwilling to obey the totalitarian system and loyal to their hearts into "exiles." Once he leaves his homeland, no matter where these people end up, their relationship with the motherland is bound to become complicated.
But it is a fact that Said was born in Jerusalem, lived in Cairo and Lebanon as a child, and later lived in the United States, as a Palestinian but with a U.S. passport, the only son of a wealthy merchant who did not inherit half-written property... All of this, which makes his identity complex, is an outlier pieced together by different cultural backgrounds and elements, and no matter where he is, he has a sense of incompatibility.
"I have tried to advocate that individual intellectuals, regardless of their political affiliation, national background, or main allegiance, must adhere to the standard of truth about human suffering and persecution." In "On Intellectuals" (1994), Said quoted the famous American columnist Walter Lippmann as saying: "Experts and scholars in the bureau create public opinion with the aim of submitting to and encouraging a small group of high-ranking rulers and promoting special interests, but intellectuals should say "no"! He said that intellectuals did not have any worship of gods, prescribing what could be said and what could not be said. They are the spokesmen for the poor, the unrepresented, the powerless, and are guided by independence, freedom, and critical spirit.
He particularly emphasized the distinction between "exiled intellectuals" and "liberal intellectuals", whether genuine exiles or metaphorical exiles, whose greatest commonality with intellectuals was his marginalization and non-cooperation, with a "different response: the response was addressed to travelers, not to the powerful".
Like Said, the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Vissu Naipaul is a Third World immigrant, the "prodigal son" of India, the "exile" of Trinidad, the "outsider" of Britain, Naipaul abandoned the novel early and thus turned to a documentary narrative and interpretation of reality, and he stood on the steps of the West and looked down on the East with the courage of a moralist and the sharpness of a satirist, portraying a devastated "Third World". And at the point of "the third world", Naipaul encountered Sayyid. Naipaul's ideas were strongly criticized by Sayyid, who, in The Intellectual Catastrophe, judged Naipaul to be an enemy of the Muslim world.
History is between two intellectuals, but neither of them has made concessions to tolerance. Their intolerance is precisely the intolerance of the West to the East, and it is also the intolerance of the East to the West.
"Orientalism" in Orientalism
In 1978, Said's third book, Orientalism, was published, which provides a nuanced analysis of how the world was formed and controlled by people—who possessed it and who was fooled and ostracized by it. He pointed out that Orientalism was a product of Western construction, aimed at establishing a clear distinction between East and West, thus highlighting the superiority of Western culture, and that this form of thought was politically useful when France and Britain wanted to colonize Eastern countries such as Algeria, Egypt, and India.
This reckoning with Western-centrism was apparently influenced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault to dissect Orientalism as a discourse to unearth the shadow of power behind knowledge, but its distinctiveness makes the book controversial. Although Said was reluctant to see the clown appear, he was still eager to preserve cultural space within the political realm. He tries to remind us that most people agree with the idea that culture should be independent of politics. In any case, Orientalism has attracted Saeed's attention, and it is currently available in 36 languages and has become the classic and theoretical basis for postcolonial discourse.
Whether Sayyid is biased or not is another question. But his reminder deserves our vigilance: although the old global colonial system has basically ended and the colonialist activity of territorial conquest by force has ceased, the post-colonial activity of ideological conquest of the Third World through cultural hegemony in order to seize resources and economic, political, cultural and ideological enslavement has continued unabated.
In addition to cultural criticism, Sayyid is also a tennis enthusiast, and at the same time, Said is also a musically accomplished pianist. His most enamored pianist was Glenn Gould of Canada: "As far as almost all other music performers of this century are concerned, Gould is the exception. He is a talented and skilled pianist (even in a world full of talented and skilled pianists), and his unique voice, eye-catching style, rhythmic creativity, and, above all, the quality of concentration seem to extend far beyond the act of performance. Of his eighty recordings, Gould's piano tone is known as soon as he hears it, only one."
In 1991, Said published The Interpretation of Music, a serious and soulful account of the history of music since Beethoven. Speaking of Brahms, he finds himself "interpreting his music into an unfathomable or ineffable form of music—a shift from his music to mine; I think anyone who listens, plays, thinks about music is making himself fit into music." ”
In his daily life, Sayyid occasionally shows the characteristics of an outsider: "I understand that no matter what I do, I will be an outsider." ”
Said has been summarized as "I am fighting alone for the Palestinian cause", and has written books such as "The Question of Palestine", "Reporting on Islam", "Condemning the Victims", and edited a magazine "Middle East Studies". Said had long been a member of the Palestinian National Assembly but later broke with Arafat over the 1993 Oslo Accords.
The place he wants to defend— Palestine, and the country he intends to fight— Israel, as the spiritual representative of the relatively weak side of the two peoples, Said's background world is indeed filled with a wealth of historical facts about human suffering and persecution.
Following Israel's withdrawal from the occupied areas of Southern Lebanon for many years, a photograph was published in the newspaper of "Edward Said throwing stones at Israeli soldiers crossing the Lebanese border". In this regard, the American judge Richard Posner commented humorously: "Sayyid did not take any risks, and Israeli soldiers would not return fire on him." ”
Sayyid sincerely followed the example of his predecessors, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell was also frequently imprisoned, and even at the age of 88, he desperately wanted to get himself arrested for violating civil law while protesting nuclear weapons, and he successfully did it. Jean-Paul Sartre tried equally hard to get himself arrested, but was unsuccessful because the government of Charles de Gaulle at the time refused to take Sartre's side. De Gaulle's culture minister, André Malraux, wisely said: "It is better for Sartre to shout 'Long live the terrorists' in the Place de la Concorde than to arrest him and cause trouble for ourselves." ”
No one in this world can politicize everything, and although Said is often questioned for it, he has done a good job.
Rimbaud
![More than forty years later, Sayyid's Orientalism still speaks to the present[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)