Speaking for Himself
Grosman, Edward
SPEAKING FOR HIMSELF i d anc the Disdp)edi inns is silent on why Christians like himself orld. EDWARD GROSSMAN . :.., k,in 0 ' ..... ' . ..V'.-.."''..`:...4,- ........ —......— _...„)...
...The pagans could either become Moslems or die...
...However, Said—described in the media as a naturalized American —was now a valued back channel to the Palestine Liberation Organization for the Carter and Reagan State Departments...
...The inside dust cover photo is of a man gaunt from chemotherapy...
...Among these were Louis Massignon, a French Catholic, and Maxim Rodinson, a French Jewish Marxist...
...Furthermore, there were many Christians who this time around had compromised themselves with the Europeans...
...resupplied Israel, the Arabs sprang an oil embargo which had motorists fistfighting...
...The decolonization of the Middle East after World War II saw, everywhere but in Lebanon where it took longer, the scattering of this class...
...More than half a century later, in remission, Said writes these "experiences...have left no anger, some sorrow, and a surprisingly strong residual love...
...However, the idea that non-Moslems who remain in the East are best off inconspicuous helps account for his wish that Israel dissolve itself...
...It might be worth trying to put it in a nutshell...
...He'd constantly refer to his own biography...
...That youth was passed in a luxurious "cocoon...
...Being an Arab, even for a non-Muslim, means being a member of...an Islamicate world, or culture...
...Yet even if the Zionists had not won in 1948, the Jewish businesses of the Levant would eventually have been "nationalized" like Said's father's was, and like him these Jews would have felt they had to go...
...Such "constructs" were hatched by imperialistic Europeans and were now fed by Americans, the virtuosos of neo-imperialism, to keep the Moslem and especially the Arab world down...
...43...
...Also, these imperialists favored the local minorities instead of slaughtering them...
...Few of these cultivated, rich or formerly rich Sephardis went to rough-and-tumble Israel...
...They converted no known Moslem, but had some luck with the Orthodox, and made history by opening universities where teaching was in French or English and where, again, most students for a long time weren't Moslem...
...The same childhood demons would be his, as would the fallout of Christian birth in the Levant when the Ottoman Empire had vanished and the West was soon to pull out...
...Grtinfelder in Jerusalem regarding defects imagined by the go-getting, athletic, bullying dad...
...To be left with this after decades of fortitude, suffering, money expended, terrorism, politics, and writing...
...But for every Christian in politics there were thousands who steered clear, and tens of thousands who left for the West every year...
...Hilda's father, a Baptist minister in Nazareth, got his ordination in Texas, and Wadie's brother ditched a Jewish wife in the U.S...
...aid was born in Jerusalem in 1935, and has until now let it be understood that his first 12 years were spent there, i.e., that his parents only moved to Cairo when dispossessed by the Zionists in the first Arab-Israeli war...
...Not only here in what the Romans had dubbed Palestine but everywhere in what became known later as the Middle East or Levant the Arabs found pagans, Christians, and Jews...
...Whether in Cairo or Lebanon or summer camp in Maine or New England prep school, he wasn't at home...
...That lesson being the "irreconcilability between intellectual belief and passionate loyalty to tribe, sect, and country...
...The American Spectator December 1999/January 2000 York, to the U.N., where, a holster visible under his jacket, he read a speech written by Said...
...This," Said wrote in a 1993 essay when Malik was dead, is the most important point of all: Islam is something all Arabs share in, and is an integral part of our identity...
...History turned out not to have done what Said hoped—power remained in the West...
...9,....-3,..— 7^-o7.000.0 00-, (......0,551,..' 0" „, v-v-r-, /*, -. os, --I, ,:"J .. • ....1 . 1-..1...
...The burning of Wadie's store in 1952 and its final expropriation by the Nasser government in 1962 had nothing to do with his Palestinian origins...
...There was no "Orient," not in reality, wrote Said...
...from Vietnam, the dollar was sinking, the Arabs had planned, sprung, and fought the Yom Kippur War against the U.S.-supplied Israelis, and when the U.S...
...We trust Said on such things, because his style in Out of Place is relatively down-to-earth...
...Plausible too is the idea that Said has virtually never felt he quite belonged...
...Much of the personal investment in this study," he told readers in the first edition of Orientalism, "derives from my awareness of being an 'Oriental' as a child growing up...
...Nobody should hold this against Said...
...True, any "state" of his own Arafat declares with Israeli consent in the West Bank and Gaza will resemble nothing so much as a glorified reservation, smaller than what the Navahos have...
...First to be dispossessed were its Jews, officially to make good for what the Zionists had done to the Palestinians...
...Nor was there any "East" or "West...
...Most went to the U.S., and, like Ralph Nader's people, stayed...
...Many of the first Arab nationalists were Christians—for example, the 19o5 book, Le reveil de la nation Arabe, was by Neguib Azourv, Christian, Jerusalemite, pioneer anti-Zionist, French agent...
...What does Islamicate mean...
...Is Said referring to his parents...
...Thus Edward and his sisters were legally Americans from birth...
...We're speaking mainly of the Orthodox, who, although their priests celebrated mass in Greek, were otherwise Arabized...
...In that antebellum Lebanon where Said came on prep-school and later Princeton vacations, "we lived a pseudoidyllic life" of tennis, music, and chaste romances...
...A native Christian might be as worried as a Moslem by European Jewish settlers barging into his tiny country...
...Non-whites had just expelled the U.S...
...It was at such places that the concept of national liberation was imported...
...My troublesome identity as an American [contained] another Arab identity from which I derived no strength...
...Here are some collectibles remembered from youth in Cairo: Marbles, including the much-prized agates, penknives (prized but outlawed), Ping-Pong racquets, wristbands, Dinky Toys (I still own the red Humber sedan I won in some preposterously lucky bet over the meaning of "Greenwich Mean Time," often heard on the BBC and little understood in those days), pocket combs, little vials of locally produced Chabrawichi cologne, rubber bands and key chains, new pencils with shiny caps and clips over their points, sharpeners and rubbers (the English word for American "eraser," which my father indefatigably admonished me to use), slingshots, little round wire- and paper-covered firework balls (also both prized and outlawed), various pornographic books, badly printed on the vilest, grimiest, most repellent-looking paper, written in a sub-English so graphic and vulgar as to actually dampen excitement, though we feigned it loudly and obscenely, and grainy fuzzy photographs of men and women copulating with embarrassed smirks on their faces...
...Well, Palestine and the state of being exiled from it have also been the making of a career, plus an identity...
...The East is a career," Benjamin Disraeli is quoted in the epigraph to Orientalism...
...If the embargo was brief, the quadrupled price of oil looked to be permanent—a tidal wave of money was crashing onto a few Arabs...
...Why no inverted commas around "Islam...
...However, nationalism posed dangers for Christian Arabs...
...Said lately has been promoting one "bi-national" state for Jews and Arabs with Jerusalem as capital — rather like Switzerland and Bern...
...The Conrad is implicitly political, the rest are openly so, for until now Said has always tied everything to politics...
...Visit any university library in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Israel...
...A very few came hack— Said's father wasone...
...Said appears to know what "bi-nationalism" implies— relegating the Jewish state to history—for as he told an interviewer recently: "Israel has to learn to live within an Islamic environment...
...A photo of chubby, dark-eyed, intelligent Edward resembles Franz Kafka, a Jewish boy with father problems of his own...
...Out ofPlace revises this...
...Brutal as that sounds, it's understandable for a man who fell out with Charles Malik as he did and who, in Out ofPlace, writes that Palestine was Eden, and Zionism the snake...
...Yet he repeated only certain bits...
...Most gobetweens for European companies in the Levant were to be Jews, Greeks, Armenians, or, like Said's father, Arab Christians...
...No one could bet on this continuing when Arabs formed their own nation-states...
...Copies of his books, starting with a thesis on fellow exile Joseph Conrad, will greet you, tattered, underlined, repeatedly lent out...
...Exciting," the New York Times judged...
...This was so even after the war started by the Arabs in 1948 against Israel was lost, bringing Palestinian refugees to Cairo, including Aunt Nabiha, who organized a private relief agency for her displaced countrymen...
...1 Said is famous enough...
...This is why Christians getting into nationalist politics, first against the Turks, later the British and French, tried to imagine a secular government without offending Moslem feelings...
...No other literature professor enjoys his name recognition stateside or internationally...
...That kind of money talked loudly...
...Holder of Columbia University's richest endowed chair, guest lecturer at Harvard and on the BBC, president of the deconstructionist, structuralist, multiculturalist, neo-Marxist, gay, and feminist Modern Language Association, ex-ghostwriter for Yasir Arafat, music critic for the Nation, op-ed contributor, Said has made a unique career which his leukemia hasn't stopped...
...The U.S...
...The heart of Arabism was obviously Islam and the Koran...
...42 December I999/ January 2000 - The American Spectator Born Orthodox, converted to Roman Catholicism, this Lebanese patriot and relation of Said's was to be his country's ambassador to Washington...
...Everything suggests that if history had gone differently, Said would have ended up a teacher of literature in the U.S...
...We learn that in 1929 his father Wadie settled in Egypt, to which he brought his half-Palestinian, half-Lebanese child-bride Hilda three years later...
...Power did appear to be heading back East, and notwithstanding its jargon, his book was timely and somehow relevant...
...Nor was this the only Yan1 Out of Place: A Memoir, Knopf, 295 pages, $26.95...
...The father preferred to be known as "William...
...It had gotten Arafat invited to New EDWARD GROSSMAN divides his time between Israel and California...
...Is sharing Islam and being a member of an Islamicate world a blessing, a fact, an inevitability, or the better part of valor for the area's minorities...
...Apparently, "belief" is Said's poor term for "honesty" or "integrity...
...Hence his title, Out of Place...
...Some had managed quite differently...
...Nevertheless, there's no grounds for believing that, if they had been spared Zionism and Israel, the Christians of Palestine wouldn't have left, wouldn't have voluntarily exiled themselves, at the same rate as other Middle Eastern Christians did and continue to do...
...Nevertheless, there is a historical and political context to his life going back farther than he does...
...Yet their Moslem lords and neighbors would never behave quite so frightfully as the proto-racist Crusaders did 40 December r999/January 2000 The American Spectator toward Moslems, Jews, and local, darker-skinned, Eastern-rite Christians alike when they occupied the Holy Land for a while...
...he sliver of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River was conquered by Arabs from the desert roughly 1,400 years ago...
...Gorgeous, secular, presumably democratic Lebanon had only a few years to go before civil war along religious lines blew the place and the idea of such a place into oblivion...
...On the other hand, call them intolerant, but neither Palestinians nor Israelis wish to live under one roof, and this goes for the most dovish of Tel Aviv doves...
...What also seems likely is that without his imagined loss, without the hurt he took upon himself, he wouldn't have become famous...
...A patent of nobility, a Gentile bloodline, a military record, have all been helpful at one time or another, so were cooked up by not only the woman posing as Czar Nicholas II's daughter but by the following naturalized Jews: the nineteenth-century investor and climber August Belmont, the director Josef von Sternberg, the tycoon Menachem Riklis, the diplomat Madeleine Albright...
...And yet, here and there, abruptly, Said will claim that his youth, and therefore his life, was determined by "the loss of Palestine...where it had all started...
...His onetime mentor had been too passionately loyal and not sufficiently honest...
...Any of his sisters...
...He doesn't try to imagine how life would have unfolded if Theodore Herzl never had that idea for a Jewish state, or if Arabs had deleted Israel in the cradle...
...To his wife, a Lebanese Quaker...
...Oddly, he sometimes put inverted commas around "Orient," "East," and "West," sometimes forgot or refrained...
...Modernity not barbarism distinguishes the Europeans...
...They didn't rob the Easterner, the Moslem, the Arab, of his "narrative...
...As the "center of power" shifted "back to the East again" for the first time since the Ottoman Turks retreated from Vienna, it was Said's hope that more young Western scholars, diplomats, and reporters would take a cue from Massignon and Rodinson...
...If events in the great world outside seldom get mentioned, well, it's not because Edward was kept ignorant, which mostly he was, but rather because the adult trying to understand himself senses what is more important...
...Palestine was a special case...
...His life story, his exile, gave him authority...
...Brief "sojourns" in Palestine to visit "the extended clan" seem to have been yearly at most...
...owhere in his attempt to understand himself does Said ponder Christian migration from East to West...
...Last in his trilogy was Covering Islam...
...And whether in his heart he realizes that the key to understanding himself belongs in the history of Christianity no less than with Dr...
...Even the Copts of Egypt, who in 2,000 years never bothered making a diaspora, have in the last few years been going to Jersey City, to Los Angeles, in fear of the less tolerant side of Islam...
...But the Christians and Jews might go on with their religions, quietly, as dhimmi, second-class citizens in Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam...
...They come not with the sword but the vaccine, the steam engine, the commercial treaty...
...Not all its members could live so grandly as described in Out of Place...
...Palestine is Said's own paradise lost...
...The sultan was Defender of the Faith, but the dhimmi communities got leeway, especially if protected by Europeans...
...citizen, and returned in 1920 to British mandatory Palestine when implored by his mother...
...Would he then have lived in Jerusalem...
...The 1992 edition adds: "[It was] written out of an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration—only a few years before I wrote Orientalism, Golda Meir made her notorious and deeply Orientalist comment about there being no Palestinian people...
...But the nakhba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, left the Said household quite untouched...
...Born and schooled in Jerusalem under Turkish rule, he had emigrated to the U.S., served in the military in World War I, become a U.S...
...Not only did he believe the West existed —he believed its civilization was superior...
...Fortunes were made that way even before a serious use was discovered for oil...
...He invented himself with relative unselfishness, freely and loyally taking on the wounds of his unluckier countrymen as his own, and not just in order to shinny up the greasy pole of fame...
...And with the traders came missionaries, including Protestants from the U.S...
...Maybe they call themselves "post-Zionists," yet undoing Israel and fading quietly into the neighborhood is not The American Spectator • December .r999/ January z000 what they dream of...
...Five hundred years go by...
...His brief stay reintroduces the West into the Middle East for a century-and-a-half during which local Christians have an experience unlike that during the Crusades...
...Fleshing the story out had to wait, he says in his new book, until "I received what seemed to be a fatal medical diagnosis...
...He demonstrated that any study by Westerners of the Orient's culture, history, society, religion, or current problems is pseudo-scientific, an ongoing rape of the weaker, darker-skinned native by the more powerful white man...
...Nevertheless, his reputation grew...
...The man finally "turned himself...into the symbol...of everything most prejudicial, conflicted, and incompatible with the Arab and largely Islamic Middle East," disgracefully backing the MaroniteIsraeli compact against the PLO...
...People on the Israeli and American-Jewish side" waging a "non-violent mass struggle" with disappointed Palestinians can bring it about...
...The richer class of Christian and other minority go-betweens to which Said's father belonged had its own particular fate...
...Outside the New Left, these other books weren't universally praised...
...Edward Said's chief motive in his new book seems higher—to understand himself...
...There is also a caning in the British school for wogs, and consultations with a Dr...
...Economic hard times pushed them to go, the New World pulled them to come, and pushing them out also was and is the unease of a rather suspect minority...
...Napoleon lands in Egypt, a weak province of the weakened Ottoman Empire...
...They chose France, England, the U.S., to which, like Wadie Said, they had long been sending rainy-day money...
...I know that I may be speaking only for myself when I say that as an Arab Christian I have never felt myself to be a member of an aggrieved or marginal minority...
...Life for both "Peoples of the Book" would have ups and downs...
...It [was] the great negative intellectual lesson of my life," declares Said...
...Meaning, in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, liberation from the Turks...
...anyway...
...The general movement goes on...
...The idea that a man who has succeeded enviably in the world did it battling fear and shame, that he hasn't won that battle and never will, comes across plausibly and disarmingly...
...He can't ignore Christian fears, however, since after Egypt his parents became year-rounders in Lebanon...
...Orientalism was followed by The Question of Palestine, showing Zionism to be orientalism in action...
...His father confronts him with unstained pajamas, evidence the kid masturbates in lieu of having wet dreams as he should...
...Freud, only Edward Said knows...
...Neither they nor their children were identified as Palestinians by the Egyptians, but rather as Syrians or "Levantine creatures...
...Only during visits to Jerusalem was he easy, he says, but these were fleeting...
...Said's father went to America when there was hardly a Zionist in the Land of Israel...
...SPEAKING FOR HIMSELF i d anc the Disdp)edi inns is silent on why Christians like himself orld...
...All, however, were living on borrowed time, for when the British and French packed up, this unorganized grouping of minorities in Alexandria and Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus, would be on its own...
...We're not told...
...To comprehend why it made Said famous beyond academia, we have to remember when Orientalism was published, that is, the mid-do's...
...Said began with Disraeli, Flaubert, and Renan and worked up to the present...
...Before and after splitting with Arafat over the PLO's deal with Israel, and before and after falling ill, Said continued working...
...For whether Palestine became a Moslem Arab state with its own flag, or whether—and this is likelier— it reverted to Syria, chances are it would have been as uncomfortable a place for his kind to live as the rest of Dar al-Islam has become...
...39 kee connection...
...Written after the Khomeini revolution and before the death sentence on Salman Rushdie, it had the media fomenting hatred of "Islam," another "construct...
...Raising any number of questions...
...7–bn...
...Furthermore, it turns out Edward was born in Jerusalem because Wadie had no faith in Egyptian lying-in hospitals, that a Jewish midwife delivered the baby, and that while many of the aunts, uncles, and cousins resided in Palestine until 1948, the nuclear Saids — four girls came after Edward always made their home in Cairo and took summer vacations not in cool Jerusalem, a town Wadie hated, but a Christian village in Lebanon...
...It was simply that the mob resented foreigners like him and the post-colonial government coveted his business...
...nov __,„,,,,,,d eqt '......04._4" Crki'P..ji•-tiskille0.-5:17y,...1,,,C) C74:0•-:r1 t'if441 .4/*'1" 1 . ••••"'''Artat t t-tf — evo ^id s- 4-3ped 38 December 1999/January 2000 • The American Spectator man writes his autobiography to justify himself, or show off, or earn money if he's famous, or bear witness, or kill time...
...A life where, for a time, none other than Charles Malik was a hero...
...Both respected Islam, sympathized with Arab nationalism, deplored Zionism...
...Founder of the Middle East's largest office equipment business, Wadie underwrote life on Gezira Island in the Nile, the servants, the cars, the private schools, the Anglican confirmations, the first-class staterooms, the only son's piano lessons (Mozart, Beethoven...
...How is "speaking only for myself" to be read...
...Utopian isn't the word for this plan...
...Wadie and Hilda didn't especially consider themselves Palestinians...
...The Levant has been seeing its Christians emigrate for more than a century...
...Yet the field wasn't beyond redemption...
...is the land of the self-made, yes, the self-invented man, the one showing up in Hollywood from Kansas City or in Manhattan from the Old World...
...So most of his son's memoir is in the psychoanalytic mode...
...Compared with their lies, the gap between the facts of Said's life and the version he cultivated for so long is easily forgiven...
...Young Edward was sheltered—and beaten...
...What I cannot completely forgive, though, is that the contest over my body...instilled a deep sense of generalized fear...which I have spent most of my life trying to overcome...
...Whether he has truly helped the Palestinians is unclear...
...It dredges up childhood, parents, schooldays, and finds in them, not in politics or history, the roots of lifelong weaknesses and strengths, of character and therefore destiny...
...Little of this fame would have been his if not for a book entitled Orientalism...
...Do all other Arab Christians, even those with a Palestinian background and loyalties complicating the issue, feel themselves aggrieved...
...Their record vis-a-vis the Crusaders helped these Eastern Christians after the Western Christians were beaten and during the next centuries under two Moslem empires, first the Mamluk, later the Turkish Ottoman...
...This is unconvincing...
Vol. 32 • December 1999 • No. 12
