Attempts to cast Said as the consummate New York intellectual miss the point that his milieu was one of global, and specifically Palestinian, anticolonial struggle.
Image: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty
Attempts to cast Said as the consummate New York intellectual miss the point that his milieu was one of global, and specifically Palestinian, anticolonial struggle.
Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
Timothy Brennan
On February 2, 1977, Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein died in his New York apartment. Hussein had been born forty-one years earlier in Musmus, a town not far from Nazareth. Politics for Hussein, Edward Said remembered, “lost its impersonality and its cruel demagogic spirit.” Hussein, Said wrote of his dear friend, “simply asked that you remember the search for real answers, and never give it up, never be seduced by mere arrangements.” Sharply critical of his own society and its rulers he had a map of the Middle East on his wall with “thought forbidden here” scrawled across it in Arabic Hussein was also a partisan of the Third World. “I am from Asia,” he pronounced in an early poem, “The l