adminIN 2005 Ali Mazrui isolated Edward Said and Valentin Mudimbe for praise and recognition as “whistleblowers against ideologies of otherness” in the world.
By that description, Mazrui meant the critical and vigorous way in which both scholars of the Global South, one Asian and another African, confronted the Euro-American stereotypes of Asians and blacks in their works.
Similar to another titanic African thinker, Chinua Achebe who dismissed the Eurocentric idea of art for art’s sake and declared in 1965 that novelists are teachers who conscientised society, Edward Said understood the novel in the Global South to be the “beginnings” of political thinking and the struggle for social justice in a world shaped by imperialism and coloniality.
Not only was he a true philosopher of the Global South, but as a literary critic, political analyst and public intellectual Edward Said became a real thorn in the wrong place of the Euro-American Empire with his strong views against Zionism and the apartheid of Israel against Palestinians.
Situated right in the belly of the beast, at Columbia University in the United States of America, Edward Said’s critique of both zionism and anti-semitsim, the apartheid of Israel and the tyranny of Arab regimes, made him a true intellectual bandit who wrote and spoke back to Empire without fear or favour.
Edward Said’s 1979 publication, The Question of Palestine, is a forceful and punchy narrative against zionism, a classic of such decolonial stamina that European and American publishers are conspiring to ensure that it does not get reprinted for circulation.
When in one of his Reith Lectures of 1994, Edward Said exhorted intellectuals of the world to “speak truth to power” he was encouraging thinkers, especially of the Global South, to do what he had already been doing, unmasking the myths, fictions and the propaganda of Empire.
For that reason, the death of Edward Said of the ailment of lymphatic leukaemia in 2003 was not only suspicious but it became a blow to the decolonial movement worldwide and a loss for intellectuals of the left in general.
Mandarins of Empire such as the intellectuals, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and Bernard Lewis among others could continue their Euro-American jingoism knowing that there was no more Edward Said to debunk their bluff that is disguised as scholarly erudition.
Arguably ahead of Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, Edward Said had become the living nightmare of European and American propagandists as he used his deep and wide knowledge of the world, his sharp critical mind and lucid prose to stupefy them for their discourses no matter how well couched and weaved, and no matter how disguised as the latest wisdom from Europe and America.
The Making of a Decolonial Iconoclast
When it came to intellectual combat, Edward Said had no god. Giants of critical thought like Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno and even Karl Marx were frequently reduced to dust and their ideas described as “pure wind” by Edward Said. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, partly growing up in Cairo and getting educated in the USA, Edward Said was a true planetary thinker, a scholar who had physical experience and sensibility of the entire world and humanity.
Such planetary thinkers as Frantz Fanon who was born in the Caribbean, partly grew up and got educated in France and ended up in Africa’s Algeria tend to be strong humanists who are capable of articulating liberatory insights that interest peoples of the entire planet, they are not hostage to narrow nationalisms and captive to toxic nativisms.
Describing the exilic moments, reflecting from his experience as a Palestinian exile in the USA, Edward Said noted that exile makes an intellectual “a foreigner everywhere but also makes the whole world his home” from where he can pitch his intellection on behalf of the whole planet. As a critical humanist, Edward Said was not afraid of taking bold and clear political positions.
He became a member of the Palestinian National Council and the Palestinian Parliament in Exile, positions that he used to intellectually berate the Israeli regime and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation alike. To Edward Said, the big philosophical question of the day was “ can anyone divide human reality into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?” In short, Edward Said believed that racism, apartheid, tribalism, xenophobia, nativism and zionism were dehumanising and inhumane practices that animalised even those that benefited from them, the perpetrators.
Decolonial Disciplinary Banditry
Most critics of Edward Said, especially victims and survivors of his sharp tongue and pen frequently complained about his nomadic intellect, his “travelling theory” and intellection as he put it himself. Edward Said took pride in being a literary critic who “interfered” in other disciplines and trespassed into other provinces of thought rather disobediently.
He has been called a Marxist but he rubbished Marx as limited in his experience of the world, he has also been called a philologist when he actually cast scorn at the limits of philology as a philosophy of language, he has been called a phenomenologist while some of his work, such as the work on the question of Palestine dismisses phenomenological analysis.
Edward Said has been called a founder of postcolonial theory and a poststructuralist, but some of his victims, the casualties of his mind, pen and speech are postcolonial theorists and poststructuralist thinkers. As a “travelling theorist” and one who believed in the fluidity and not the rigidity of thought, Edward Said used tools of literary criticism such as semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and many other tools of interpretation in search of answers to the problems of the human condition.
He became undisciplined and undisciplinary in search of truth and meaning about the condition of Palestinians and other marginal and oppressed peoples of the world. When it came to methods, theories and disciplines of intellection, Edward Said was a true bandit and an outlaw who observed no doctrines and rules.
The Decolonial Stylist
As an accomplished critic of music, in addition to his many other accomplishments like literary criticism, Edward Said is stylistic. In 2006, posthumously, Edward Said’s book, On Late Style, was published. The book dwells on the themes of “music and literature against the grain.” In thought and presentation, in speech and in text, Edward Said is a stylistic composer.
His prose is lyrical, simple but not simplistic, what are sophisticated are the thoughts and the nuances and not the vocabulary and the diction. Said writes in common phraseology that is, however, not commonplace as he has the lucidity of a linguist and depth of a philosopher and a poet. Textual clarity and transparency are usually the property of confident deep thinkers who are keen to circulate their meaning more than to arrest the reader with mundane syntactical complexities.
On his part, much like Chinua Achebe, Edward Said has the linguistic embroidery of a philologist and a literary critic and also the clarity of a preacher and polemicist who has an urgent message for the world, a message that must not be lost and compromised by the sound of words and turns of syntax and phrase. Decolonial humanist philosophers, like other intellectuals use theories and academic methods, but above all their preoccupation is to contribute not just to theory and methodology but to liberation.
As much as the “colonial wound” was the problem that haunted the intellection of Chinua Achebe, the “question of Palestine” became the wound that, in his own words “molested” the imagination of Edward Said.
It is not enough in the Global South to celebrate Edward Said, Chinua Achebe and other decolonial humanists as heroes and legends.
What is needed is to decipher how present education systems and institutions can be structured and styled in order to produce more humanist and liberation thinkers.
A reading of Edward Said’s life story, told by himself in, Out Place, his autobiography of 2000, he was a passionate reader and a committed humanist whose scholarship was fired by the need to uncover the origins of domination and coloniality in the world, he was an autodidact, a self-taught and self-styled thinker, who went to university only to certificate the thoughts and ideas that he uncovered and polished in his personal study.
The cause of justice and liberation for Palestinians was the reason Edward Said read and wrote. He was a committed intellectual with a weighty political cause, different from the regular commissioned scholars who read, write and speak for cash not for cause.
Suspiciously, like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said died of leukaemia; a condition of blood that late science has proven can be as natural as it can be induced with carefully crafted poisons by assassins and other killers.
Frequently, liberation thinkers of the caliber of Said and Fanon become Messianic; they are crucified symbolically through persecution or physically through assassinations. Empire does not suffer gladly the decolonial bandits of the Global South.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected]
Bongani Ndlovu