The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  This rather Adorno-esque formulation of Yeats’s quandary is of course powerfully attractive. Yet perhaps it is weakened by its wanting to render Yeats more heroic than a crudely political reading would have suggested, and excuse his unacceptable and indigestible reactionary politics—his outright fascism, his fantasies of old homes and families, his incoherently occult divagations—by translating them into an instance of Adorno’s “negative dialectic.” As a small corrective, we might more accurately see Yeats as an exacerbated example of the nativist phenomenon which flourished elsewhere (e.g., négritude) as a result of the colonial encounter.

  True, the physical, geographical connections are closer between England and Ireland than between England and India, or between France and Algeria or Senegal. But the imperial relationship is there in all cases. Irish people never be English any more than Cambodians or Algerians can be French. This it seems to me was always the case in every colonial relationship, because it is the first principle that a clear-cut and absolute hierarchical distinction should remain constant between ruler and ruled, whether or not the latter is white. Nativism, alas, reinforces the distinction even while revaluating the weaker or subservient partner. And it has often led to compelling but demagogic assertions about a native past, narrative or actuality that stands free from worldly time itself. One sees this in such enterprises as Senghor’s négritude, or in the Rastafarian movement, or in the Garveyite back to Africa project for American Blacks, or in the rediscoveries of various unsullied, pre-colonial Muslim essences.

  The tremendous ressentiment in nativism aside (for example, in Jalal Ali Ahmad’s Occidentosis, an influential Iranian tract published in 1978 that blames the West for most evils in the world), there are two reasons for rejecting, or at least reconceiving, the nativist enterprise. To say, as Deane does, that it is incoherent and yet, by its negation of politics and history, also heroically revolutionary seems to me is to fall into the nativist position as if it were the only choice for a resisting, decolonizing nationalism. But we have evidence of its ravages: to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself. To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essences like négritude, Irishness, Islam, or Catholicism is to abandon history for essentializations that have the power to turn human beings against each other; often this abandonment of the secular world has led to a sort of millenarianism if the movement has had a mass base, or it has degenerated into small-scale private craziness, or into an unthinking acceptance of stereotypes, myths, animosities, and traditions encouraged by imperialism. Such programs are hardly what great resistance movements had imagined as their goals.

  A useful way of getting a better hold of this analytically is to look at an analysis of the same problem done in the African context: Wole Soyinka’s withering critique of négritude published in 1976. Soyinka notes that the concept of négritude is the second, inferior term in in opposition—European versus African—that “accepted the dialectical structure of European ideological confrontations but borrowed from the very components of its racist syllogism.”17 Thus Europeans are analytical, Africans “incapable of analytical thought. Therefore the African is not highly developed” whereas the European is. The result is, according to Soyinka, that

  négritude trapped itself in what was primarily a defensive role, even though its accents were strident, its syntax hyperbolic and its strategy aggressive . . . Négritude stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis of both man and his society, and tried to re-define the African and his society in those externalized terms.18

  We are left with the paradox that Soyinka himself articulates, that (he has Fanon in mind) adoring the Negro is as “sick” as abominating him. And while it is impossible to avoid the combative, assertive early stages in the nativist identity—they always occur: Yeats’s early poetry is not only about Ireland, but about Irishness—there is a good deal of promise in getting beyond them, not remaining trapped in the emotional self-indulgence of celebrating one’s own identity. There is first of all the possibility of discovering a world not constructed out of warring essences. Second, there is the possibility of a universalism that is not limited or coercive, which believing that all people have only one single identity is—that all the Irish are only Irish, Indians Indians, Africans Africans, and so on ad nauseam. Third, and most important, moving beyond nativism does not mean abandoning nationality, but it does mean thinking of local identity as not exhaustive, and therefore not being anxious to confine oneself to one’s own sphere, with its ceremonies of belonging, its built-in chauvinism, and its limiting sense of security.

  Nationality, nationalism, nativism: the progression is, I believe, more and more constraining. In countries like Algeria and Kenya one can watch the heroic resistance of a community partly formed out of colonial degradations, leading to a protracted armed and cultural conflict with the imperial powers, in turn giving way to a one-party state with dictatorial rule and, in the case of Algeria, an uncompromising Islamic fundamentalist opposition. The debilitating despotism of the Moi regime in Kenya can scarcely be said to complete the liberationist currents of the Mau Mau uprising. No transformation of social consciousness here, but only an appalling pathology of power duplicated elsewhere—in the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Zaire, Morocco, Iran.

  In any case nativism is not the only alternative. There is the possibility of a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world, in which imperialism courses on, as it were, belatedly in different forms (the North-South polarity of our own time is one), and the relationship of domination continues, but the opportunities for liberation are open. Even though there was an Irish Free State by the end of his life in 1939, Yeats partially belonged to this second moment, as shown by his sustained anti-British sentiment and the anger and gaiety of his anarchically disturbing last poetry. In this phase liberation, and not nationalist independence, is the new alternative, liberation which by its very nature involves, in Fanon’s words, a transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness.19

  Looking at it from this perspective, then, Yeats’s slide into incoherence and mysticism during the 1920s, his rejection of politics, and his arrogant if charming espousal of fascism (or authoritarian-ism of an Italian or South American kind) are not to be excused, not too quickly to be dialecticized into the negative utopian mode. For one can quite easily situate and criticize those unacceptable attitudes of Yeats without changing one’s view of Yeats as a poet of decolonization.

  This way beyond nativism is figured in the great turn at the climax of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour when the poet realizes that, after rediscovering and reexperiencing his past, after re-entering the passions, horrors, and circumstances of his history as a Black, after feeling and then emptying himself of his anger, after accepting—

  J’accepte . . . j’accepte . . . entièrement, sans reserve

  ma race qu’aucune ablution d’hypsope et de lys melés ne pourrait puri-

  fier

  ma race rongée de macule

  ma race raisin mur pour pieds ivres20

  (I accept . . . I accept totally, without reservation

  my race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with lilies could purify

  my race pitted with blemishes

  my race a ripe grape for drunken feet)

  —after all this he is suddenly assailed by strength and life “comme un taureau,” and begins to understand that

  il n’est point vrai que l’oeuvre de l’homme est finie

  que nous n’avons rien à faire au monde

  que nous parasitons le monde

  qu’il suffit que nous mettions au pas du monde

  mais l’oeuvre de l’homme vient seulment de commencer

  et il reste à l’homme à conquérir toute interdiction

  immobilisée aux coins de sa ferveur et aucune race

  ne possède le monopole de la beauté, de l’intell
igence, de la force

  et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête

  et nous savons maintenant que le soleil tourne

  autour de notre terre éclairant la parcelle qu’a fixé

  notre volonté seule et que toute étoile chute de ciel

  en terre à notre commandement sans limite.21

  (for it is not true that the work of man is done

  that we have no business being on earth

  that we parasite the world

  that it is enough for us to heel to the world

  whereas the work has only begun

  and man still must overcome all the interdictions

  wedged in the recesses of his fervor and no race has a

  monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength

  and there is room for everyone at the convocation of

  conquest and we know now that the sun turns around our

  earth lighting the parcel designated by our will alone

  and that every star falls from sky to earth at our

  omnipotent command.)

  The striking phrases are “à conquérir toute interdiction immobilisée aux coins de sa ferveur” and “le soleil . . . éclairant la parcelle qu’a fixé notre volonté seule.” You don’t give in to the rigidity and interdictions of self-imposed limitations that come with race, moment, or milieu; instead you move through them to an animated and expanded sense of “[le] rendez-vous de la conquête,” which necessarily involves more than your Ireland, your Martinique, your Pakistan.

  I don’t mean to use Césaire against Yeats (or Seamus Deane’s Yeats), but rather more fully to associate a major strand in Yeats’s poetry both with the poetry of decolonization and resistance, and with the historical alternatives to the nativist impasse. In many other ways Yeats is like other poets resisting imperialism—in his insistence on a new narrative for his people, his anger at England’s schemes for Irish partition (and enthusiasm for wholeness), the celebration and commemoration of violence in bringing about a new order, and the sinuous interweaving of loyalty and betrayal in the nationalist setting. Yeats’s direct association with Parnell and O’Leary, with the Abbey Theatre, with the Easter Uprising, bring to his poetry what R. P. Blackmur, borrowing from Jung, calls “the terrible ambiguity of an immediate experience.”22 Yeats’s work of the early 1920s has an uncanny resemblance to the engagement and ambiguities of Darwish’s Palestinian poetry half a century later, in its renderings of violence, of the overwhelming suddenness and surprises of historical events, of politics and poetry as opposed to violence and guns (see his marvelous lyric “The Rose and the Dictionary”),23 of the search for respites after the last border has been crossed, the last sky flown in. “The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished,” says Yeats, “I have nothing but the embittered sun.”

  One feels in reading the great poems of that climactic period after the Easter Uprising of 1916, like “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” or “Easter 1916,” and “September 1913,” not just the disappointments of life commanded by “the greasy till” or the violence of roads and horses, of “weasels fighting in a hole,” or the rituals of what has been called Blood Sacrifice poetry, but also a terrible new beauty that changes the old political and moral landscape. Like all poets of decolonization, Yeats struggles to announce the contours of an imagined or ideal community, crystallized by its sense not only of itself but also of its enemy. “Imagined community” is apt here, so long as we are not obliged also to accept Benedict Anderson’s mistakenly linear periodizations. In the cultural discourses of decolonization, a great many languages, histories, forms circulate. As Barbara Harlow has shown in Resistance Literature, the instability of time, which has to be made and remade by the people and its leaders, is a theme one sees in all the genres—spiritual autobiographies, poems of protest, prison memoirs, didactic dramas of deliverance. The shifts in Yeats’s accounts of his great cycles invoke this instability, as does the easy commerce in his poetry between popular and formal speech, folktale and learned writing. The disquiet of what T. S. Eliot calls the “cunning history [and] contrived corridors” of time—the wrong turns, the overlap, the senseless repetition, the occasionally glorious moment—furnishes Yeats, as it does all the poets and men of letters of decolonization—Tagore, Senghor, Césaire—with stern martial accents, heroism, and the grinding persistence of “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.” Thus the writer rises out of his national environment and gains universal significance.

  In the first volume of his memoirs, Pablo Neruda speaks of a writers’ congress in Madrid held in 1937 in defense of the Republic. “Priceless replies” to the invitations “poured in from all over. One was from Yeats, Ireland’s national poet; another, from Selma Lagerlöf, the notable Swedish writer. They were both too old to travel to a beleaguered city like Madrid, which was steadily being pounded by bombs, but they rallied to the defense of the Spanish Republic.”24 Just as Neruda saw no difficulty in thinking of himself as a poet who dealt both with internal colonialism in Chile and with external imperialism throughout Latin America, we should think of Yeats, I believe, as an Irish poet with more than strictly local Irish meaning and applications. Neruda accepted him as a national poet representing the Irish nation in its war against tyranny and, according to Neruda, Yeats responded positively to that unmistakably anti-fascist call, despite his frequently cited dispositions toward European fascism.

  The resemblance between Neruda’s justly famous poem “El Pueblo” (in the 1962 collection Plenos Poderes, translated by Alastair Reid, whose version I have used, as Fully Empowered) and Yeats’s “The Fisherman” is striking: in both poems the central figure is an anonymous man of the people, who in his strength and loneliness is a mute expression of the people, a quality that inspires the poet in his work. Yeats:

  It’s long since I began

  To call up to the eyes

  This wise and simple man.

  All day I’d look in the face

  What I had hoped ’twould be

  To write for my own race

  And the reality.25

  Neruda:

  I knew that man, and when I could

  when I still had eyes in my head,

  when I still had a voice in my throat,

  I sought him among the tombs and I said to him,

  pressing his arm that still was not dust:

  “Everything will pass, you will still be living.

  You set fire to life.

  You made what is yours.”

  So let no one be perturbed when

  I seem to be alone and am not alone;

  I am not without company and I speak for all.

  Someone is hearing me without knowing it,

  But those I sing of, those who know,

  go on being born and will overlfow the world.26

  The poetic calling develops out of a pact made between people and poet; hence the power of such invocations to an actual poem as those provided by the figures both men seem to require.

  The chain does not stop there, since Neruda goes on (in “Deber del Poeta”) to claim that “through me, freedom and the sea / will call in answer to the shrouded heart,” and Yeats in “The Tower” speaks of sending imagnation forth “and call[ing] images and memories / From ruin or from ancient trees.”27 Because such protocols of exhortation and expansiveness are announced from under the shadow of domination, we may connect them with the narrative of liberation depicted so memorably in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. For whereas the divisions and separations of the colonial order freeze the population’s captivity into a sullen torpor, “new outlets . . . engender aims for the violence of colonized peoples.”28 Fanon specifies the declarations of rights, clamors for free speech and trades union demands; later, an entirely new history unfolds as a revolutionary class of militants, drawn from the ranks of the urban poor, outcasts, criminals, and déclassés, takes to the countryside, there slowly to form cells of armed activists, who return to the city for the f
inal stages of the insurgency.

  The extraordinary power of Fanon’s writing is that it is presented as a surreptitious counter-narrative to the above-ground force of the colonial regime, which in the teleology of Fanon’s narrative is certain to be defeated. The difference between Fanon and Yeats is that Fanon’s theoretical and perhaps even metaphysical narrative of anti-imperialist decolonization is marked throughout with the accents and inflections of liberation: this is far more than a reactive native defensiveness, whose main problem (as Soyinka analyzed it) is that it implicitly accepts, and does not go beyond, the basic European versus non-European oppositions. Fanon’s is a discourse of that anticipated triumph, liberation, that marks the second moment of decolonization. Yeats’s early work, by contrast, sounds the nationalist note and stands at a threshold it cannot cross, although he sets a trajectory in common with that of other poets of decolonization, like Neruda and Darwish, which he could not complete, even though perhaps they could go further than he. One might at least give him credit for adumbrating the liberationist and utopian revolutionism in his poetry that was belied and even cancelled out by his later reactionary politics.

  Yeats has often been cited in recent years as someone whose poetry warned of nationalist excesses. He is quoted without attribution, for example, in Gary Sick’s book on the Carter admistration’s handling of the Iranian hostage crisis 1979–1981 (All Fall Down);29 and The New York Times correspondent in Beirut in 1975–1977, the late James Markham, quoted the same passages from “The Second Coming” in an article on the onset of the Lebanese civil war in 1976. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” is one phrase. The other is “‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Sick and Markham both write as American liberals alarmed at the revolutionary tide sweeping through a Third World once contained by Western power. Their use of Yeats is minatory: remain orderly, or you’re doomed to a frenzy you cannot control. As to how, in an inflamed colonial situation, the colonized are supposed to hold the center, neither Sick nor Markham tells us, but their presumption is that Yeats, in any event, would oppose the anarchy of civil war. It is as if both men had not thought to take the disorder back to the colonial intervention in the first place—which is what Chinua Achebe did in 1959 in his great novel Things Fall Apart.30