File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1999/postcolonial.9907, message 34


Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 00:31:29 -0600 (MDT)
From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: E. Said's speech at AUB  



July 7, 1999

The Daily Star on line

'Peace process' deepens system of apartheid=A0

by Gareth Smyth

=09More refugees were leaving Kosovo. Abdullah Ocalan was sentenced to
death. CNN flitted from one crisis to another, applying labels like
"separatist" and "fundamentalist" as if naming primary colors. World
attention switched from one troublesome lot of natives to another.

=09And Edward Said arrived in Beirut to address a conference.  His
audience - maybe 1,000 - at the American University of Beirut last Thursday
were of all ages and very pleased to see him. The atmosphere was almost like
a carnival, but what Said said was anything but. He was clear, wide-ranging
- and also unsettling. It is the role of the intellectual, said Said, to
deconstruct identities, to take apart the words we use to describe ourselves
and others.

=09There are easy cases. An Irishman once told me not to drink
"Protestant whiskey;" I have heard Israel/Palestine called "Muslim land" and
"Jewish land" (as if either a beverage or soil could have a religion). Said
deconstructed less straightforward examples in his seminal book,
"Orientalism," - especially the "we" and "they" of Lord Cromer and Henry
Kissinger. On Thursday, he confronted the really hard cases where
conflicting identities produce and are reinforced by what he called "two
opposing memories and narratives out of which the notion of coexistence has
been driven completely." Across these "embattled landscapes" - he mentioned
Deir Yassin and Damour among others - two identities produce two
contradictory stories. One is of loss, of destruction; the other is of
reconstruction, even of liberation.

=09The outcome, the "solution," has often been partition. Said reeled
off a string of examples - India and Pakistan, Ireland, Cyprus,
Israel/Palestine.  But the model, he argued, has been singularly
unsuccessful in its aim of creating cohesion and harmony.

=09It is time for change, he suggested, delving into the work of the
Italian Marxist leader, Antonio Gramsci, whom most of us had forgotten.
Gramsci's terminology is one of contestation, but it is one of change, of
shifting historical blocs. He understood identities as social, not eternal,
phenomena. "Let us have many histories," said Said. This is a world, now
more than ever, "of migration and mixture =85 which cannot be reduced to one
geography or one identity." The way forward, he argued, is not in
geographical spaces of clear-cut identities. It is rather to establish a
secular citizenship that recognizes the diversity of identities.

=09This is a brave argument for a Palestinian, even for one ensconced
at Columbia University. Said wrote - in "After the Last Sky" - of violence
"exacerbating our self-awareness as a community set apart from others."
Said's courage lies in the implication of his argument for his own people.
The meaningful struggle - and Said stated this bluntly at AUB - is not of
the Palestinian Authority for a "Palestinian homeland" but the struggle of
the Palestinians within Israel for full rights of citizenship. This is a
struggle with implications for the whole of the region. True citizenship by
its nature transcends identity.

=09This is radical. For Said, the problem with the "peace process" is
not that it gives insufficient rights or powers to the "Palestinians."=A0 The
problem is its very premise, the notion of partition. At best this can
produce only a "latter-day apartheid" in an area where complex identities
have inter-related for millennia. Israel was first described as an apartheid
state, I think, by the Israeli academic Uri Davies in 1987. Under Pretoria's
plan for "bantustans," blacks gave up South African citizenship in return
for flags and other trappings of "self-rule" in destitute "homelands."

=09Cynics will say that in rejecting the basis of Oslo, Said is outside
practical politics. Politicians on each side of the divide - the weaker as
well as the stronger - benefit from reinforcing the identities that
reproduce the division. It suits them to have a readily culpable enemy. But
there are examples to the contrary: Nelson Mandela towers over our time, and
of course the ANC absolutely rejected the "grand apartheid" of the
bantustans. The Iraqi opposition, undervalued by a U.S. administration still
waiting for a Sunni general on a white horse, keeps alive the notion of an
Iraq based on the rule of law. Even Northern Ireland, Britain's longest
colonial "problem," has begun to move beyond the zero-sum of "opposing
memories and narratives."

=09And Said, in turn, would repeat that the examples of partition are
not auspicious. India and Pakistan, after all, hover on the brink of a major
war. Partition - especially based on injustice - cannot produce peace.  Said
has chosen to remain apart from politics. Indeed, he argued at AUB that this
is the duty of the intellectual, who should influence the wider agenda, and
highlight movements that reflect or encourage diversity and uncover the
narratives - of women, especially - under the froth of simplicity.

=09This is the real reason why Said is so unsettling. When he stresses
the importance of dialogue with ordinary Israelis (he is delighted when his
work is translated into Hebrew), he opens up the humanity of "the Other."
And he speaks of "deconstructing" the identity of his own people - the
Palestinians - as they struggle so hard to keep alive their identity. But
this is not the weakness of Edward Said. It is the measure of his
achievement.

Gareth Smyth wrote this article for The Daily Star

DS: 07/07/99

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=09=09=09=09=09George E. Irani
=09=09=09=09=09Laurie King-Irani
=09=09=09=09=09850 N. Randolph Street
=09=09=09=09=09# 907
=09=09=09=09=09Arlington, VA 22203
=09=09=09=09=09Phone and Fax: (703) 465-1143




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