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A mighty and passionate heart
Edward Said, dead at 67
By Alexander Cockburn
Sept. 25— A mighty and a passionate heart has ceased to beat.
Edward Said, the greatest Arab of his generation, died in a hospital in
New York City Wednesday night at 6:30pm, felled at last by complications
arising from the leukemia he fought so gamely ever since the early 1990s.
We march through life buoyed by those comrades-in-arms we know to be marching
with us, under the same banners, flying the same colors, sustained by
the same hopes and convictions. They can be a thousand miles away; we
may not have spoken to them in months; but their companionship is burned
into our souls and we are sustained by the knowledge that they are with
us in the world.
Few more than Edward Said, for me and so many others beside. How many
times, after a week, a month or more, I have reached him on the phone
and within a second been lofted in my spirits, as we pressed through our
updates: his trips, his triumphs, the insults sustained; the enemies rebuked
and put to flight. Even in his pettiness he was magnificent, and as I
would laugh at his fury at some squalid gibe hurled at him by an eighth-rate
scrivener, he would clamber from the pedestal of martyrdom and laugh at
himself.
He never lost his fire, even as the leukemia pressed, was routed, and
pressed again. He lived at a rate that would have felled a man half his
age and ten times as healthy: a plane to London, an honorary degree, on
to Lebanon, on to the West Bank, on to Cairo, to Madrid, back to New York.
And all the while he was pouring out the Said prose that I most enjoyed,
the fiery diatribes he distributed to CounterPunch and to a vast world
audience. At the top of his form his prose has the pitiless, relentless
clarity of Swift.
The Palestinians will never know a greater polemical champion. A few weeks
ago I was, with his genial permission, putting together from three of
his essays the concluding piece in our forthcoming CounterPunch collection,
The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I was seized, as so often before, by the
power of the prose. How could anyone read those searing sentences and
not boil with rage, while simultaneously admiring Edward’s generosity
of soul: that with the imperative of justice and nationhood for his people
came the humanity that called for reconciliation between Palestinians
and Israeli Jews.
His literary energy was prodigious. Memoir, criticism, homily, fiction
poured from his pen, a fountain pen that reminded one that Edward was
very much an intellectual in the nineteenth-century tradition of a Zola
or of a Victor Hugo, who once remarked that genius is a promontory in
the infinite. I read that line as a schoolboy, wrote it in my notebook
and though I laugh now a little at the pretension of the line, I do think
of Edward as a promontory, a physical bulk on the intellectual and political
landscape that forced people, however disinclined they may have been,
to confront the Palestinian experience.
Years ago his wife Mariam asked me if I would make available my apartment
in New York, where I lived at that time, as the site for a surprise 40th
birthday for Edward. I dislike surprise parties but of course agreed.
The evening arrived; guests assembled in my sitting room on the eleventh
floor of 333 Central Park West. The dining room table groaned under Middle
Eastern delicacies. Then came the word from the front door. Edward and
Mariam had arrived! They were ascending in the elevator. Then we could
all hear Edward’s furious bellow: “But I don’t want to
go to dinner with *******, Alex!” They entered at last and the shout
went up from seventy throats, Happy Birthday! He reeled back in surprise
and then recovered, and then saw about the room all those friends happy
to have traveled thousands of miles to shake his hand. I could see him
slowly expand with joy at each new unexpected face and salutation.
He never became blasé in the face of friendship and admiration,
or indeed honorary degrees, just as he never grew a thick skin. Each insult
was as fresh and as wounding as the first he ever received. A quarter
of century ago he would call, with mock heroic English intonation, “Alex-and-er,
have you seen the latest New Republic? Have you read this filthy, this
utterly disgusting diatribe? You haven’t? Oh, I know, you don’t
care about the feelings of a mere black man such as myself.” I’d
start laughing, and say I had better things to do than read Martin Peretz,
or Edward Alexander or whoever the assailant was, but for half an hour
he would brood, rehearse fiery rebuttals and listen moodily as I told
him to pay no attention.
He never lost the capacity to be wounded by the treachery and opportunism
of supposed friends. A few weeks ago he called to ask whether I had read
a particularly stupid attack on him by his very old friend Christopher
Hitchens in the Atlantic Monthly. He described with pained sarcasm a phone
call in which Hitchens had presumably tried to square his own conscience
by advertising to Edward the impending assault. I asked Edward why he
was surprised, and indeed why he cared. But he was surprised and he did
care. His skin was so, so thin, I think because he knew that as long as
he lived, as long as he marched onward as a proud, unapologetic and vociferous
Palestinian, there would be some enemy on the next housetop down the street
eager to pour sewage on his head.
Edward, dear friend, I wave adieu to you across the abyss. I don’t
even have to close my eyes to savor your presence, your caustic or merry
laughter, your elegance, your spirit as vivid as that of d’Artagnan,
the fiery Gascon. You will burn like the brightest of flames in my memory,
as you will in the memories of all who knew and admired and loved you.
Source: CounterPunch
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