Benefizabend: Licht für Gaza, Samstag,
7. Februar 2009, Austria Center Vienna, 1120 Wien, Bruno-Kreisky-Platz 1
Nähere
Informationen : www.4gaza.at
Edward
Said: The last interview, Wednesday, 11 February 2009 7.00 P.M., Amerling Haus
Stiftgasse
8, 1070 Vienna
Documentary film by Mike Dibb
English, Charles Glass, interviewer (approx. 3 hours)
Edward Said, controversial
literary critic and bold advocate of the Palestinian cause in America (Excerpts
from the obituary written by Malise Ruthven, The Guardian, 26 September 2003)
Edward Said, who died at the age of 67, was one of the leading literary critics
of the last quarter of the 20th century. As professor of English and comparative
literature at Columbia University, New York, he was widely regarded as the outstanding
representative of the post-structuralist left in America. Above all, he was the
most articulate and visible advocate of the Palestinian cause in the United States,
where it earned him many enemies.
The broadness of Said's approach to
literature and his other great love, classical music, eludes easy categorisation.
His most influential book, Orientalism (1978), is credited with helping to change
the direction of several disciplines by exposing an unholy alliance between the
enlightenment and colonialism.
Said's influence, however, was far from
being confined to the worlds of academic and scholarly discourse. An intellectual
superstar in America, he distinguished himself as an opera critic, pianist, television
celebrity, politician, media expert, popular essayist and public lecturer.
Latterly,
he was one of the most trenchant critics of the Oslo peace process and the Palestinian
leadership of Yasser Arafat. He was dubbed "professor of terror" by the rightwing
American magazine Commentary; in 1999, when he was struggling against leukaemia,
the same magazine accused him of falsifying his status as a Palestinian refugee
to enhance his advocacy of the Palestinian cause, and of falsely claiming to have
been at school in Jerusalem before completing his education in the United States.
The hostility Said encountered from pro-Israeli circles in New York was predictable,
given his trenchant attacks on Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians
and his outspoken condemnations of US policies in the Middle East. From the other
side of the conflict, however, he encountered opposition from Palestinians who
accused him of sacrificing Palestinian rights by making unwarranted concessions
to Zionism.
As early as 1977, when few Palestinians were prepared to concede
that Jews had historic claims to Palestine, he said: "I don't deny their claims,
but their claim always entails Palestinian dispossession." More than any other
Palestinian writer, he qualified his anti-colonial critique of Israel, explaining
its complex entanglements and the problematic character of its origins in the
persecution of European Jews, and the overwhelming impact of the Zionist idea
on the European conscience.
Said recognised that Israel's exemption from
the normal criteria by which nations are measured owed everything to the Holocaust.
But while recognising its unique significance, he did not see why its legacy of
trauma and horror should be exploited to deprive the Palestinians, a people who
were "absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity",
of their rights.
"The question to be asked," he wrote in the Politics
Of Dispossession (1994), "is how long can the history of anti-semitism and the
Holocaust be used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments and sanctions against
it for its behaviour towards the Palestinians, arguments and sanctions that were
used against other repressive governments, such as South Africa? How long are
we going to deny that the cries of the people of Gaza... are directly connected
to the policies of the Israeli government and not to the cries of the victims
of Nazism?"
Edward Said was born in Jerusalem into a prosperous Palestinian
family. His father Wadie, a Christian, had emigrated to the U.S. before the First
World War. He volunteered for service in France and returned to the Middle East
as a respectable Protestant businessman – with American citizenship – before making
an arranged marriage to the daughter of a Baptist minister from Nazareth.
In
his final years, Edward Said's health grew ever more fragile, and, though passionately
concerned with the unfolding Palestinian disaster in the wake of 9/11 and the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he took a conscious decision to withdraw from
political controversy and channel his energies into music. The West-Eastern Divan
Orchestra he founded with the Israeli citizen Daniel Barenboim in 1999 grew out
of the friendship he forged with the musician who shares his belief that art -
and, in particular, the music of Wagner - transcends political ideology. With
Said's assistance, Barenboim gave master classes for Palestinian students in the
occupied West Bank, infuriating the Israeli right.
The orchestra may prove
a fitting legacy for an intellectual whose work illuminated our crisis-ridden
world by embracing its contradictions and celebrating its complexities.
In
1970, he married Mariam Cortas, by whom he had a son and a daughter.
University
of Exeter Professor of History Ilan Pappe, a friend of Edward's and The Palestine
Center, summarized it best when he wrote for the first anniversary of Edward's
passing about the various Edwards we knew. And I quote, "He was the literal critic,
a cultural philosopher, the voice of Palestine and compass of humanism."
Edward
Wadie Said, writer and academic, born 1 November 1935; died 25 September 2003.
Donations welcome.
Women in Black (Vienna) (www.fraueninschwarz.at
) in co-operation with Kulturzentrum Spittelberg, www.amerlinghaus.at
