Rebel With A Clause

But the trouble with, and probably part of the attraction of, Orientalism as radical politics is that it was so purely a theory. It involved no political action of even the most nominal kind; and its origin and primary location was in the university, which is by its very nature a conservative institution designed to reduce the most revolutionary-seeming ideas into fresh grist for academic mills. The suggestion later advanced by Said, that the academic from the Orient was creating an 'insurgency at the very heart of the Western centre' by wielding 'weapons of scholarship once reserved exclusively for the European' always seemed a bit optimistic since the academic is almost always a cautious bourgeois, inclined to political activity only when his tenure is at stake.

It seems now that Said didn't anticipate the academic Gold Rush that followed Orientalism; that he meant it to be a more personal book. Said hinted as much when he wrote, "In many ways, my study of Orientalism's been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination's been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals."

To read Said's memoir, Out of Place, is to know how he came to acquire his special perspective on this domination; it's also to understand the excesses of Orientalism. The idea, for example, that Said with his American passport, Ivy League colleges and childhood visits to the Savoy, could be an 'Oriental subject'. For it's here that Said inventories in almost exhausting measure those traces that he generalised upon in Orientalism: the traces that are really injuries inflicted in the classrooms of a colonial childhood where Said felt "judged in a fundamental way as debased human material".

The memoir deals, often repetitively, with the British-style public schools Said went to in Palestine and Egypt, the humiliations he suffered, the sexual, social, and intellectual inadequacies he came to feel. He has little to say about British attitudes towards Arabs in general. He confesses that he was shielded from the politics of the time by the privileged circumstances of his parents. The absence of a background other than that afforded by families and schools likens Out of Place to recriminatory American memoirs of personal unhappiness and victimhood.

This is a shame since what Said really describes - without naming it - is a colonialism of the mind and soul; always more insidious and lasting than the one that exacted unjust revenues and stifled political activity. "We were," as he writes, "inferiors pitted against a wounded colonial power that was dangerous and capable of inflicting harm on us, even as we seemed compelled to study its language and its culture as the dominant one in Egypt." A native elite such as he belonged to was especially exposed to this kind of intellectual bullying. It was among them that colonialism found its first friendly collaborators: people who, overawed by the hyper-masculine ideals of a triumphant empire, began to hold in contempt, along with the British, fellow natives.

In resisting its cruder manifestations, such as public school brutality, Said found himself allies among fellow Arabs: they surreptitiously spoke Arabic among themselves under pain of severe punishment. (Said calls it a "proudly insurrectionary gesture": the startling idea of the academic as an insurgent may have had its source here.)

But when incarnated in one's own parents the same ideals could cause a much greater trauma. Said's father, a stern, domineering businessman with impossibly high standards, made Said always think of himself as a will-less child, "nearly devoid of any character at all". His mother's affection, though often abundant, was only fitfully extended.

The consequences of this insecure childhood were for Said, at least in retrospect, relatively happy. He began a rewarding relationship with books and music; and began breaking out of the "ersatz life" of his colonial parents. Along with the growing self-awareness came a sense of the enemy, something that the expatriate living in the void of the metropolis almost comes to possess as a moral centre. In Said's case, the enemy was the "hypocrisy of a power whose authority depended absolutely on its ideological self-image as a moral agent...with unimpeachable intentions." While still at prep school in the US, he began the "lifelong struggle" to "demystify" this power, vowing at a difficult time in his early life to beat "them" at their own game. It is the great colonial ambition, often self-defeating; and Said's book, Orientalism, now seems a working out of a private rage for justice.

The old confusions about identity settled, his recent work aims at fresher, rather flattering, self-definitions. It is unmistakably Said who is the intellectual from the Orient in the western metropolis, someone who stands outside all 'isms' and traditions; whose very presence is a "sign of adversial internationalisation in an age of continuing imperial structures".

The grand-sounding words may not sit well with the self-pity that's the most striking feature of Out of Place; but they're both of a piece. We're given to believe that serenity has long been taken beyond Said's grasp by his peculiar experience of the world as a perennially unsettled person: a Palestinian in Egypt, an Arab in America. "I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents," writes he, adding, "I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance". But who attaches significance to the 'solid self' anymore? It's a characteristic flourish from Said, part of his simultaneous claims to Oriental subjecthood and metropolitan transcendence; and it takes us beyond the too obvious self-pity, to the passionate self-cherishing and self-vindication that lie at the heart of his work.