Winter Spirit: After Edward Said

“Thinking about exile is curiously appealing, even instigating. But living through an exile is terrifying. Exile is an incurable gap between a person and the place he/she was born and grew in, a gap between personality and the real place of the personality: It is impossible to overcome the sorrow, which is the essence of exile… Those things won in exile are constantly undermined by losing something you had left behind…”

When you meet Edward Said, you feel the sadness behind the self-confident looks of an academician who went to Princeton and Harvard, who plays the piano perfectly, and who teaches in one of the best universities in the United States of America (USA).

I met him in 1996 when he came to Turkey with Jean Stein, the owner of Grand Street. Said was in the publishing board of the Grand Street.  The night that we met the conversation, which began with polite, distant and theoretical sentences were, within couple of hours, replaced with the mutual history of the countries in which we were born, and then with our childhood memories. We were surprised at how much we had in common as children despite the difference between our ages.

I believe sorrow lies beneath the thing that has made him a dauntless advocate of the Palestine case. This is not a longing for the past, but as Paul A. Bové' said, “A more-than-ordinary commitment to the devastated values of the history, like Walter Benjamin’s.” It seems like Said believes that “if we can remember this devastated history at the right time, and talk about it in the right way, we can have a chance to save our immature and even ruthless civilizations.”

During our interview for the Defter magazine in Istanbul, he said: “Benjamin has a great sentence. He says the history is the history of the victorious. The mission of a historian is to always remember that this victorious parade is taking place over the collapsed bodies of the victims. You need to have this sensibility. This is why narration and personality, at least for me, was never stable things, because you can get trapped within these, you can become a creature of the apparatus, because personality and narration, of course, plays a central role for the government, the social authority, and the political power of the state.”

Said, who knew the limitedness of personality politics, kept on emphasizing that “the problem is the absence of universal principles,” during our interview. “I support intercultural dialogue and I think people should live together,” Said says in his book, Peace and Displeasures. “Everything I have written and fought for serve this aim. But for a real dialogue, there has to be real principles and real justice.”

This is why he was very disturbed by those who saw his book, Orientalism as anti-Western. He had added a special section in the book’s new editions, and asked us to retranslate and publish the book in Turkey. He felt the Turkish edition was one-sided and incomplete. In 1999 Berna Ulner retranslated Orientalism and we published it again.

One of the most important lessons he taught us was to never lose hope. He never lost hope, but he also never shut his eyes to the world’s evil. I believe he found the strength to do this from the fact that he never got detached from practice and current politics as he worked with theory.  Also, he had relations with many precious minds of the world because of his interest in books and music. And I believe it is our mission to keep Edward Said’s memory alive, for he made this world a better place to live in…

(MS/NM)

* Metis Publishing House, published Orientalism by Edward Said (translated by Berna Ulner, first edition March1999, third edition September 2003) and Winter Spirit (translated by Tuncay Birkan, September 2003).