The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  from The Politics of Dispossession

  10

  Interiors (1986)

  After the Last Sky, Edward Said’s most experimental book, draws its title from a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish but owes its birth to two contradictions. Said had been acting as a consultant to the United Nations for its International Conference on the Question of Palestine in 1983. Having suggested that a photo essay of Palestinians be hung in the assembly hall in Geneva for the conference, Said was met with a rude surprise. Several participating nations objected to his idea. A compromise was eventually reached whereby pictures could be hung but no captions were allowed to be attached. The belligerent nations in this case were not Israel or the United States (both of whom had boycotted the conference), but principally Arab states who found Palestinians, as Said writes, “useful up to a point—for attacking Israel, for railing against Zionism, imperialism, the United States, for bewailing the settlement and expropriation of Arab land in the Occupied Territories. Beyond that point, when it came to the urgent needs of the Palestinians as a people, or to the deplorable conditions in which many Palestinians live in Arab countries as well as in Israel, lines had to be drawn.” After the Last Sky is an attempt to erase such lines and fill in the spaces with subjective accounts of being Palestinian.

  The second major contradiction of After the Last Sky rests in the fact that at the time it was being written, Said was barred from entering Israel (not until 1992 did he return) and thus had no direct access to the land of his birth and childhood. “I cannot reach the actual people who were photographed, except through a European photographer,” Said writes in After the Last Sky. This is “an exile’s book,” he explains.

  The work was met with overwhelming critical success. In was widely reviewed and even spawned an experimental dance piece of the same name in England in 1995. In 1999 Columbia University Press reissued the text.

  Reviewing the book for the Manchester Guardian Weekly, Salman Rushdie called it “the most beautiful piece of prose I have read about what it means to be a Palestinian.” The New York Times praised the work, commenting that Said has introduced new Arabic vocabularies into our discussions of the Palestinians (manfa for “exile,” ghurba for “estrangement,” awdah for “return”) and noting that Said “writes not to the pictures but from them.”

  In fact, After the Last Sky is a deliberate attempt to interrogate the very tools of representation (photography, prose). The choice of Jean Mohr as photographer for the work is not accidental. Mohr had previously collaborated with the critic and novelist John Berger in two works (Another Way of Telling and A Seventh Man), where Berger was rethinking the political uses of photography. In an essay published several years before After the Last Sky, Said had praised Berger for his use of “the visual faculty . . . to restore the nonsequential energy of lived historical memory and subjectivity as fundamental components of meaning in representation.” Said was drawn to Berger’s ability to make something new out of the very tools of representation which maintain the status quo. As Berger explained in Another Way of Telling, “When photographs are used in control systems, their evidence is more or less limited to establishing identity and presence. But as soon as a photograph is used as a means of communication, the nature of lived experience is involved, and then the truth becomes more complex.” After the Last Sky involves its readers, through the interplay of photography and prose, in what it means to be Palestinian.

  The phrase min al-dakhil, “from the interior,” has a special resonance to the Palestinian ear. It refers, first of all, to regions of the interior of Israel, to territories and people still Palestinian despite the interdictions of the Israeli presence. Until 1967, therefore, it meant the Palestinians who lived within Israel; after 1967 the phrase expanded to include the inhabitants of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, and since 1982 it has also meant the Palestinians (and Lebanese) of South Lebanon. The most striking thing about this meaning of al-dakhil is the change in value that has taken place in its connotation. As recently as the early 1970s, I can recall, Israeli Palestinians were considered a special breed—someone you might easily be suspicious of if you were a member of the exile or refugee Palestinian population residing outside Israel. We always felt that Israel’s stamp on these people (their passports, their knowledge of Hebrew, their comparative lack of self-consciousness about living with Israeli Jews, their references to Israel as a real country, rather than “the Zionist entity”) had changed them. They weren’t like us in the sense that as Arabs living in the Arab world, subject to the heady triumphs and weepy sorrows of Arab nationalism, we were leading a life independent of imperialism and Zionism. They were different in a pejorative sense.

  Now they are still different, but privileged. The people of the interior are cherished as Palestinians “already there,” so to speak, Palestinians whose lives on the edge, under the gun, inside the barriers and kasbahs, entitle them to a kind of grace denied the rest of us. It is also true, alas, that since 1970 our collective history filkharij (“in the exterior”) or in the manfa and ghurba (“exile” and “estrangement”) has been singularly unsuccessful, progressively graceless, unblessed, more and more eccentric, de-centered, alienated. We Palestinians lost our status in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. Of course, the PLO is recognized by over one hundred countries, and we have a whole sheaf of UN resolutions to our credit, but no one has any illusions about our real status as outcasts, and failures to boot. A look at our balance sheet reveals massacres, expulsions, and demotions on one side of the ledger, and practically nothing on the other, the credit side. And, to jump to another metaphor, not only is the writing on the wall ominous, but we’re not sure what it is trying to tell us.

  Therefore, those in Palestine, in the interior, who experience Israeli rule directly, are in a sense better off than those of us who can only talk about Zionism while experiencing the unlovely solicitude of our Arab brethren on the outside. Politically, it is important to note that Palestinian activity is now mainly directed toward and focused on the interior, whereas until the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the problems and politics of the exterior were what mattered most.

  The second meaning of al-dakhil is slightly more complicated. It refers to privacy, to that region on the inside that is protected by both the wall of solidarity formed by members of the group, and the hostile enclosure created around us by the more powerful. Two Palestinians meet for the first time, let us say in Delhi or London, and strike up a conversation. Within a minute or two, and with no explicit questions or answers, they can determine each other’s original residence, their type of work, their political persuasion (even the deviation or current within that), and their value system—all of them conveyed in a set of specific words or phrases, names, inflections, and emphases, known only to Palestinians. But to be on the inside is also not to be yourself on the outside: You have to participate in and speak the language of the outside world, which means that you have to use “their” codes, but to mean something quite different. But the problem of the inside is that it is inside, private, and can never be made plain or evident to anyone, perhaps not even to one’s fellow members. The world of secrecy, of private existence, of cabals and conspiracies is a fact of most societies. In Arab tradition it is almost always colored by religion, both Muslim and Christian, but in ways that, I think, are much more subtle and nuanced than most Orientalists (or outsiders) have suspected. Even when it appears that insiders or initiates know the codes, they are never sure whether these codes can in fact deliver the right answers to the important questions, can confirm the stability of what is or gain the assent of the whole group. Thus, although to Palestinians today the word awdah (“return”) is crucial and stands at the very heart of our political quest for self-determination, to some it means return to a Palestinian state alongside Israel, yet to others it means a return to all of Palestine.

  To be on the inside, in this sense, is to speak from, be in, a situation which, paradoxicall
y, you do not control and cannot really be sure of even when you have evolved special languages—sometimes evasive, always idiosyncratic—that only you and others like you can understand. The structure of your situation is such that being inside is a privilege that is an affliction, like feeling hemmed in by the house you own. Yes, an open door is necessary for passing between inside and outside, but it is also an avenue used by others to enter. Even though we are inside our world, there is no preventing others from getting in, overhearing us, decoding our private messages, violating our privacy. That is how we read the history of Palestine, from the Crusades to Balfour and Weizmann: that it was entered despite us, and lived in despite us.

  What do you do then? You try to get used to living alongside outsiders and endlessly attempting to define what is yours on the inside. We are a people of messages and signals, of allusions and indirect expression. We seek each other out, but because our interior is always to some extent occupied and interrupted by others— Israelis and Arabs—we have developed a technique of speaking through the given, expressing things obliquely and, to my mind, so mysteriously as to puzzle even ourselves.

  Example: The cult of physical strength, of fascination with body-building, karate, and boxing, which has been a striking fact of life among Palestinian youth for quite a while, is obviously the response of the weak to a strong, visibly dominating other. But it is also an eye-catching, almost decorative pattern woven through ordinary experience, and it means something much more than “making ourselves strong.” It is an assertion of self, an insistence on details beyond any rational purpose. But what may appear to outsiders as utter stupidity for us scores a tiny, almost imperceptible point on the inside, as it were.

  The following story illustrates my meaning. The wife of a distinguished European literary figure wrote me some time ago of their visit to Jerusalem; he was lecturing at the university, as was she, I think. They were there for six weeks. During that time she said they’d only met Palestinians twice, of which one meeting was the occasion for her letter. The man “in charge of a shop [selling embroidery] in David Street” engaged her in conversation, in between bargaining over some merchandise. It appeared that he was “an acquaintance and admirer” of mine: It was clear to me that he had volunteered this information in response to her telling him in a perfectly natural but quite irrelevant way that she knew Edward Said. She had undertaken then “to send on . . . the enclosed message,” which was written in Arabic on a small bit of paper torn out of a spiral notebook. My friend also noted the man’s wish to register Palestinian superiority over the Arabs in all things (intelligence, martial arts, trading), a superiority expressed by him in the phrase “we are the Jews of the Arab world.” In all this my correspondent accurately sensed “rhetorical nuances and complications which I [she] was too unsituated to understand,” especially since she was accompanied by an Israeli friend for whose benefit much of the man’s performance was carried on.

  In a camp north of Ramallah, 1979. A youth club where, as in prison, it is vital to keep in good physical shape.

  After all this, what was the message to me? I confess to a certain excitement as I unfolded the tiny bit of paper, and also to a self-congratulatory feeling about the esteem in which I was held by people who didn’t know me but who nevertheless valued the contribution I was making to our cause. To begin with, the message was headed by my name in roman script. There followed five lines of Arabic, telling of the writer’s great expertise in karate and of his participation in the world karate championship “under the name of Palestine.” There was nothing else. But, I thought, how typical of Palestinian insiders’ communications—that odd bravado, not really meant to be a joke. The exchange of messages came almost naturally to both of us, given our situations. He was inside, and using the good offices of a sympathetic outsider to contact me, an insider who was now outside Jerusalem, the place of our common origin. That he wrote my name in English was as much a sign that he too could deal with the world I lived in as it was that he followed what I did, with some pride, perhaps, but also with the wariness of one who for too long has been “represented” by Westernized intellectuals whose track record wasn’t any too good. The time had come to demonstrate a healthy indication that the Edward Saids had better remember that we were being watched (by karate experts), somewhat approvingly, but also cautiously. Finally, his (to me) comic insistence on his physical skills revealed the same, often uninspired, assertion of self all of us seem to possess. He had already done his super-Palestinian routine for my friend, and probably knew that she would tell me; now he was doing it again, knowing that I would repeat the story. I have.

  Such networks of witnesses, testimonials, and authorities threaded through our dispersed community amplify our assertions with such insistence as to be positively numbing. To outsiders this assertiveness is frustrating, not only because of its obduracy, but also because it seems to renew itself ceaselessly, without ever producing anything new or anything outside it that might be illuminating. To me, and to others like me who live in the manfa (“exile”) or ghurba (“estrangement”), there is nevertheless something reassuring (if a bit inane) about those on the inside—in Palestine or in the Arab world, which is closer than New York or Berlin to al-dakhil— repeating familiar patterns to the point where repetition itself becomes more important than what is being repeated. In the rigorous discipline of the repetition, as my karate expert knew perfectly, you cannot get out of it, cannot easily transform it into a symbol of something else. Karate does not stand for self-development, but only for the repeated act of being a Palestinian karate expert. A Palestinian. It is as if the activity of repeating prevents us, and others, from skipping us or overlooking us entirely.

  Jenin, 1984.

  This compulsion to repeat is evident in the interiors of Palestinian houses of all classes. The same food and eating rituals organized around a table or central space occur with maddening regularity. The rituals of offering and hospitality are designed, I think, to be excessive, to put before a guest more than is needed, more than will be consumed, more than can be afforded. Wherever there are Palestinians, the same signs of hospitality and offering keep appearing, the same expectant intimacy, the same displays of affection and of objects—replicas of the Mosque of Omar, plates inlaid with mother-of-pearl, tiny Palestinian flags—appropriated for protection as well as sociability. Naturally, they authenticate and certify the fact that you are in a Palestinian home. But it is more than that. It is part of a larger pattern of repetition in which even I, supposedly liberated and secular, participate. We keep re-creating the interior— tables are set, living rooms furnished, knick-knacks arranged, photographs set forth—but it inadvertently highlights and preserves the rift or break fundamental to our lives. You see this if you look carefully at what is before you. Something is always slightly off, something always doesn’t work. Pictures in Palestinian houses are always hung too high, and in what seem to be random places. Something is always missing by virtue of the excess. I do not mean that the result is tragic or sad; to the contrary, the rift is usually expressed as a comic dislocation, the effect of too much for too little a space or for too uninteresting an occasion. Too many places at a table; too many pictures; too many objects; too much food. My own rather trivial version of this tendency toward disproportion and repetition is that I always carry too many objects—most of them unused—when I travel, which I do frequently. Every time it occurs, the repetition introduces an almost imperceptible variation. Each of us, I believe, recognizes the pattern in her- or himself, and in others.

  This pattern of similarly unbalanced, but always infinitesimally varied, interiors will ultimately attract the attention of the outside observer—as it has caught Jean Mohr’s eye—but I doubt that deeper reasons for it are easily explained. Yes, the oddness of these excesses, and asymmetries, their constitutively anti-aesthetic effect, their communicated insecurity seem to symbolize exile—exile from a place, from a past, from the actuality of a home. But there i
s yet another problem being expressed in this form of repetition.

  Palestine is a small place. It is also incredibly crowded with the traces and claims of peoples. Its legacy is one not just of conquest and resettlement, but also of reexcavations and reinterpretations of history. Glenn Bowersock, the classical historian, describes this history aptly as the “deliberate fragmentation of a fundamentally unified region.” The novelty of Bowersock’s approach is that because of his special focus on pre-Zionist and pre-Islamic early Palestine, he is able to perceive beyond all the jostling and shoving “the fact of an Arabian state and subsequently an even more extensive Palestinian state in the Middle East” during the period from Alexander’s death to the coming of Islam.

  The original spaciousness of that region disappeared, alas, with the arrival of a whole army of nineteenth- and twentieth-century foreign claimants to Palestine. Instead, topographically and even bibliographically, the place is unimaginably divided, dense, and cluttered. Cover a map of Palestine with the legends, insignia, icons, and routes of all the peoples who have lived there, and you will have no space left for terrain. And the more recent the people, the more exclusive their claim, and the more vigorous the pushing out and suppressing of all others. In addition, each claim invents its own tradition, its own dynastic filiations, causing still more deflections, shoving matches, and dislocations: The already overcrowded map now seethes with violently conflicting forces, raging over the surface.