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 -------------------------------------------------------------------- =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 --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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