Beyond Death

To me, and to many around the world, I suppose, Edward Said’s name will always be associated -- above allother things -- with beyond-ness … . He is (past tense can only be used with those of much humbler legacies)beyond death, as we’ve understood it, in the sense that the last tremor of his heart, normally coupled withcessation of life, or the beginning of the end of physical existence, failed in his case to introduce the nextstage, the utter nothingness. It is an attribute of great men and women that their physical demise does not,indeed can not, entail their end. In our contemporary world, few will earn such a privilege as Edward Saidhas.

He is beyond in the expansive reach of his intellect, from opera to Islam, from literature to philosophy, andquite a lot in between.

I shall focus here on one particular domain in Said that usually does not earn headlines in the western media:the deeply transforming effect of his philosophy of oppression and resistance. For Palestinians and all theoppressed in the developing, or not, world, Said has been a unique inspiration for ethical resistance, forstruggle against injustice, and for humanism translated to our respective languages and our idiosyncraticcultures and modes of thinking. Knowing ourselves, freeing our minds, taking pride in our culture as well assharing that of others were always to Said the keys to emancipation.

Although I was never fortunate enough to be an actual student of his, I learned quite a lot from him,nonetheless. Beyond Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, I learned mostly from his dignifying andhumanizing approach to the dehumanized. The following two personal anecdotes will reveal a part of thisspecial aspect of Said’s beyondness.

Remorse & Inspiration

Back in 1984, when I was president of what was then the Arab Club of Columbia University, I relentlesslysought ways to invite Edward Said to our events. He was, after all, our own, our pride, our celebrity, theunelected voice in the west of the voiceless Palestinians. I was aware of Said’s persistent refusal to speakat "Arab" events, as he loathed "speaking to the converted," as he once explained. I tried to steel amoment from his perpetually busy office schedule to convince him that our events had attracted 95% Americans,mostly students who could not exactly be described as in love with Palestine -- those familiar with Columbiawill know exactly what I am referring to -- but I could never get him to see me, or any of us, for thatmatter. 

And then -- you knew a ‘then’ was coming -- on one ordinary day I was leafleting the campus with aflier for an event we had planned, with a prominent Jewish American intellectual as keynote. I had a specialstyle of leafleting, by the way: I taped the fliers in geometric shapes on the beautifully spacious stepsleading to the Alma Mater, on the floors, and just about everywhere else where average students would notexpect to see any fliers. Edward Said happened to pass by with his early morning coffee and bagel. 

He saw me pacing, arranging my artwork with precision, symmetry and devotion, to attract the eyes that werenot trained to see anything related toPalestine. I had a glimpse of him approaching and skimming one of the neatly arranged fliers, but I continued with mywork as if I hadn’t. He came up to me and jokingly asked: "What are you doing at 6:30 am littering thesteps?" Quickly suppressing my overwhelming joy at having this nothing less than an aloof god speak to me, Inonchalantly answered: "Leafleting for an event." "Quite impressive," was his reaction to mycold-shoulder, which he had rarely experienced, especially coming from a Palestinian student. "Thanks toyour enormous help, professor, we are doing very well with our information campaign," was my second verbalmissile directed at him.

We both knew that he had done nothing whatsoever until then to help us in any way or form. But only untilthen. In an apparent moment of guilt, he extended to me a warm invitation to meet him in his office -- shrine!-- that very same day. Thrilled, proud and above all speechlessly vindicated, I immediately swallowed my prideand accepted.

He had genuinely thought that we were doing classic anti-Israel events that addressed Arabs and their closesupporters only. When he realized he was wrong, he had the courage to express it, in his own way. And fromthat moment on he played a decisive role in turning the tides atColumbia, promoting true debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, bringing into campus new perspectives andarguments that most students and faculty had not been exposed to.

Since then, Edward Said spoke at several of our events. In his typical charisma and distinguished intellect,Said always had a extraordinary blend of effects on our overcrowded audiences: electrifying, educating,charming, provoking, angering, engaging, and if an arrogant antagonist insisted on trying to nail him withfalse premises or warped argumentation (needless to say, such cases were far from rare at Columbia), he/shedeserved the VIP treatment that was invariably served to them by Said: intellectual crucifixion, in public!Only one other genius in my long experience in student activism possessed such potent weapons of logicaldevastation: Noam Chomsky.

An unintended result of a series of our highly successful events, inspired by Said, was the skyrocketing ofour organization’s stature. We even used to quip at our new image as "one of the major organizations oncampus," as other groups viewed us, not knowing that at best our highly committed and motivated membershiproster hardly ever reached the two-digit territory!! In retrospect, it wasn’t just Said’s prominence thathelped us, it was his spirit of resistance against all odds that profoundly inspired us, and, I must say,transformed some of us irreversibly. And I thought that only Lenin had the magic formula for transforming ahandful of committed activists into an able and consequential force of change.

Principles First

After years of excellent relations, a storm was bound to arrive in our relationship with the GrandPalestinian. At the height of the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993), some of the Zionistorganizations on campus (god, we had too many!) decided to invite the head of the Israeli "legal" systemin the occupied Palestinian territories, a decorated army General responsible for too many crimes to enumeratehere. The Arab student association and several other progressive student organizations decided to campaign toprevent this military leader, who had "blood on his hands," as our thorough research had revealed, fromspeaking atColumbia.

We had an intense internal debate on whether his speech would constitute incitement to violence,justification of racism, defence of murder committed by his army almost daily in Palestine, or … simply aninstant of free speech. We tried to persuade the organizers that such a speaker carried so much colonial andcriminal baggage on his shoulders that his words were inherently seditious. We drew analogies to a far-rightorganization inviting, for instance, a former SS General. Though they were not amused by the analogy, some ofthem admitted that it was "a logically legitimate comparison." Nevertheless, we miserably failed inselling them the idea of disinviting him.

We shifted to Plan B. We asked for equal representation on the panel of our side, "the other side" --as they’ve often superciliously demanded in our events. We were rebuffed, mercilessly, I should add. Whyshould they feel any pressure from a tiny coalition of student groups who could not remotely measure up to theimmense power they held and projected on campus? At that point, we were almost obsessed with trying to answerthat question in a way that would surprise them, if not teach them a badly needed lesson in humility and moralconsistency.

We consulted with our treasured gurus, Said, Chomsky, and the not-so-famous then, Norman Finkelstein. We hadno idea at the time that the three were first-amendment aficionados!  They replied in unexpected unison:no matter how criminal this general might be -- they all agreed he was -- his talk atColumbiacould only be construed as a practice of freedom of speech, which we, the patent victims of censorship, oughtto defend and promote. It was a cold shower to all of us, demoralizing and shaking. How could they not see theother side, how such a speech would in all certainty amplify the already hateful atmosphere around us oncampus, how it could breathe new life into the alarming death threats that some of us had received. To them,the principle came first, above all other things, beyond emotion and transient indignation.

Said even threatened to publicly criticize us if we pursued any path of censorship against the bloodygeneral.

Of course we were compelled to change our tactics to accommodate that advice/obligation. We decided to picketoutside theLawSchoolauditorium, where the General was to speak, then walk into the hall, listen to him and finally challenge himhead-on. But we decided to do it with style. We carefully hid our Palestinian flags and anti-occupationbanners under our clothes and went into the hall after it was all full -- yes, it was revoltingly full! -- andstood at the top level, all around the auditorium, awaiting the right moment to unfold them. It was anon-violent form of protest, we thought, that could not be remotely discerned as censorship. We had no plan,though, so we improvised.

When the General was finally introduced, he stood up and, fitting the image of a colonial Viceroy, walked tothe podium with deliberation, flanked by two massive bodyguards. We impulsively opened our banners and heldthem high.

What would Said think of us now? I wondered.

He would be angry, but proud, I immediately convinced myself.

The General was particularly stung by the sight of the large flag in my hands which at the time wasentirely banned in the occupied West Bank andGaza, partially due to his rulings. The very use of the combination of its colors, red, black, green and white,was enough to guarantee the perpetrator a tough military sentence. I was of course conscious of that. Henervously stepped back and whispered with the MC, a gentle rabbi who was more accommodating than the entireleadership of the Zionist groups on campus. Interpreting the General’s retreat from the podium as a sweetlittle victory for us, we broke into chants. He was visibly fuming.

In a daunting development, however, a small army of the notoriously insensitiveNew York CityPolice was in the hall and surrounding each one of us in a flying moment -- you would wish they reacted tocrime with such lightening efficiency! I openly dared the MC to have us arrested thereby risking a definitebreakdown in our mutual attempts at reconciliation. That desperate tactic to avoid arrest -- which could meandeportation of all of us who were foreign students -- surprisingly succeeded. He asked the police to stand by.

After several rounds of the rabbi’s polite pleas for quiet, which included promises to give us the floor afterthe speech, and our unyielding, yet orderly, chanting, amidst a state of collective shock that had struck theaudience -- after all, it wasn’t everyday that someone could so audaciously challenge such an omnipotentalliance of Zionist groups at Columbia -- the MC decided to negotiate with me to end the standoff. Since I hadno mandate to speak on behalf of the group, I looked from afar at my colleagues, and they instantly gave me agreen light. They trusted me to reach a good compromise.

What would Edward Said advise me to do in such a predicament? I asked myself.

We met in the middle; the rabbi went up a few steps, I went down a few. I had every intention to stall, butat the same time I had to maintain my honesty and sense of responsibility in my negotiations with him. I didrespect his integrity and occasional flurry of humanism. Ten minutes into our respectful dialogue, we reachedan agreement.

The rabbi went to the small stage to inform his guest of the agreement. I crossed the hall to share with mycolleagues the details.

And then, I held up my flag and went down to the podium. The rabbi announced the agreement on the microphone:"A representative of the protesting groups will speak for five minutes and then ask his group to walk out.Then, our distinguished speaker will finally get to deliver his speech, uninterrupted." The audience was nowentering into clinical shock.

Unable to hide my glee, I slowly mounted the stage and stood behind the podium to give my five-minutespeech, basically trying to convince as many people as possible to walk out with us to protest the speaker’scriminal record. Suddenly, the General got up and shouted: "I shall not accept this humiliation, standingnext to a Palestinian carrying a flag." He carried his briefcase and walked out with his guards. Consciousof the meaning of this windfall, we feverishly started chanting. Some in the audience cried, some just leftwith their heads down. We, on the other hand, felt that our heads were going to hit the ceiling.

Said must be proud, I thought. I was dead wrong.

When the news reached him, he ranted and raved. He immediately accused us of hurting our own cause, and hemade well on his promise, he spoke out publicly against us. When I met him after that, he had cooled down, andwe had a rational debate. He did admit that our act was "courageous," "effective" and "seeminglyunavoidable," but wrong, nonetheless.

I could live with that.

Despite his unapproachable aura, he was there when we needed insightful advice. Even when he wasn’t with us,we summoned him in our minds when we needed a voice of reason and humanness to guide us. Now that he isphysically gone, his voice, his words, his unfulfilled dream will literally live on, educating, enraging,provoking, enchanting and ultimately freeing us.

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian doctoral student of philosophy (ethics) at Tel Aviv University and a political analyst. His article "9.11 Putting the Moment on Human Terms" was chosen amongthe "Best of 2002" by the Guardian. His articles have appeared in the Hartford Courant, Al-Ahram and Z-Magazine, among others.