Cultural Amnesia (98 page)

Edward Said (1935–2003) was the most spectacular intellectual asset of the Palestinians in
exile. Because he had been exiled all the way to Columbia University, where he was professor of English and comparative literature, it was possible to say, as the perennial crisis in the
Middle East continued to shape his scholarly and critical work, that he was caught between New York and a hard place. But there is no call to doubt his integrity just because he had been
raised in transit on luxury liners, laurelled at Princeton and Harvard, and otherwise showered with all the rewards that Western civilization can bestow. What can be doubted is his accuracy.
His influential book
Orientalism
(1978) painted a picture in which Western students of African, Arab and Eastern cultures had practised racist
imperialism under the guise of a search for knowledge. The book was hugely influential: its “narratives of oppression” became the tunnels through which non-Western academics came
to preferment in the West. Said’s ideas found such favour on the international left that he became a whipping boy for the right, but it is important to say that there were some Arab
thinkers who equally found
Orientalism
a wrong-headed book. According to them, it encouraged a victim mentality by enabling
failed
states to blame the West for their current plight: a patronizing idea, common to the Western left, which the emerging non-Western intelligentsia would find that much harder to rebut when
endorsed by someone with Said’s credentials and prestige. Though most of Said’s Western admirers were never aware of it, this ambiguity marked Said’s written work thoughout
his career: he was continually telling the people he professed to be rescuing from Western influence that they were helpless in its embrace. A quality of self-defeating ambiguity also
characterized Said’s role as a practical diplomat. In 1988 he helped secure the breakthrough by which the Palestinian National Council finally recognized the State of Israel’s
right to exist, but in 1991 he resigned in protest at the Oslo peace process, before Arafat had even had a chance to scupper it. If a solution had been secured it could well have meant that
the lives of everyone involved on the Palestinian side of the negotiating table would have been forfeit, but Said was unlikely to be put off by Arab extremists, who for a long time had been
threatening him with death in one ear just as loudly as extreme Zionists had been threatening him in the other. Yet Said was exemplary in his insistence that Israel had an historic claim in
Palestine and that anti-Semitism, with the Holocaust as its centrepiece, had better be understood by the Arab nations or there would be no end to the conflict. When he simplified history, it
wasn’t because he was a simpleton: though many a buffoon hoped to acquire points for intelligence by sitting beside him, his dignity was unimpaired, and he still looked wise even when
accompanied by Tariq Ali looking serious.

Said’s writing on the arts, at its best, has the exuberance that his writing on one art, music, always has. He
played the piano to professional standard: a piquant demonstration that the Western and non-Western worlds of creativity had not been symmetrical. But his answer to that was convincing: if
both sides had not created the music, they could both perform it. After his death, his orchestra plays on: the West-Eastern Divan, founded by him and Daniel Barenboim, has performed
in the Occupied Territories. Said was an accomplished and charming man who presented his admirers on the left with the dangerous illusion that by appreciating his writings they
were being fast-tracked to an understanding of the history of the Middle East in a refined form, without having to study it in further detail. There were non-Western scholars who thought that
he had the same illusion about his nominal subject, and that no Orientalist has ever been more damagingly superficial than he. There can be no doubt, alas, that some of his themes were
cartoons. His argument that every Orientalist racist imperialist scholar since the Enlightenment was furthering the territorial ambitions of his home country broke down on the obvious point
that the best of them came from Germany, which before the twentieth century had no colonies to speak of. Simply because they believed in the objective nature of knowledge, the great European
students of foreign cultures were all humanists before they were imperialists, and often defended the first thing against the second, out of love and respect. Today’s Indian scholars of
Indian languages further the work of English scholars whose names they revere, one fact among the many that Said found it convenient either not to mention or never to know. Also his idea that
Napoleon had wrecked Egypt’s advance into the modern age was not one shared by Naguib Mahfouz, who said that Egypt had Napoleon to thank for everything modern it possessed. Said was
right to this extent, however: Occidental intellectuals find out very little about what is thought and written in the Oriental world. Very few of Said’s admirers in the West could begin
to contemplate the fact that there are some bright people in the East who thought of Said as just another international operator doing well out of patronizing them, and with less excuse. I
finished writing the piece that follows not long before Said finally succumbed to cancer, and I have left it in the present tense to help indicate that I was treating him as a living force,
brave in a cause that was very short of his kind of soldier.

I pressed harder. What about the admiring caresses lavished by
the camera on Mathieu marching into Algiers?

—EDWARD SAID,
Reflections on Exile
, P. 286

A
NNOYINGLY
UNDATED
except for its opening phrase, “A few months ago,” Said’s essay on Gillo Pontecorvo is the account of a personal meeting that probably took place in the late
1990s, by which time Pontecorvo had not made a film in many years. But he had once, in 1966, made a film that Said continues to admire as a masterwork of political analysis:
The Battle of Algiers
. I feel the same, but for different reasons, and by focusing on the second of these two quoted sentences it is easy to make the difference plain.
Said wants the film to be an outright condemnation of imperialism, with no concessions made to the forces of oppression. Said thinks that the French claims to have extended civilization to
Algiers had nothing to be said for them, and that the rebellious native Algerians, whatever atrocities they might have committed, were well within their rights, considering the magnitude of the
atrocity that had been committed against them. I want the film to be what it is. It certainly does condemn imperialism, but it shows that the French imperialism in Algeria was the work of human
beings, not automatons. It need hardly be added that Said is right about how their apparently successful colonial efforts in Algeria corrupted the French into illusions of manifest destiny.
Elsewhere in the same book, Said gives an exemplary caning to Tocqueville, who was respectful enough about the repressed minorities in America, but who chose to despise Islam when he became
gung-ho for a French Algeria.

Said’s only mistake, but a crucial one, is to question Pontecorvo’s directorial emphasis at
the exact moment when Pontecorvo is being most sensitive. At his most sensitive, he is at his most comprehensive, and comprehending. In letting the camera, and thus the audience, be impressed by
the French general’s heroic stature as he marches into Algiers at the head of his paratroopers, Pontecorvo shows why he ranks with Costa-Gavras as a true
auteur
of the political film. In Costa-Gavras’s film
The Confession
, there is a similarly penetrating moment when Yves
Montand, released from gaol, meets his torturer in the street, and can show nothing except embarrassment, while the torturer
(Gabriele Ferzetti) assumes that the victim will
join him in blaming the whole episode on unfortunate circumstances. These are human reactions, in all their ambiguity. In
The Battle of Algiers
, the
paratroopers’ commander, Mathieu (in real life he was General Jacques Massu), is greeted with rapture by the
pieds noirs
as he leads his soldiers down
the main street. They cheer, weep, do everything but lay palm fronds before his polished boots. He is greeted with hosannas because he looks like a saviour. Here is the man who will take the
necessary measures to ensure that our innocent children are no longer blown to pieces in the nightclubs and restaurants. When the camera is on him, it has the eyes of his worshippers. If the
camera bestows admiring caresses, it is because the crowd is doing the same.

Since 1834, generations of the French in Algiers had grown up believing they inhabited part of France. In
1963 they believed de Gaulle when he said that Algeria would stay French. To them, the paratroopers looked like the guarantee that it would do so. The paratroopers believed it too, and the film,
in its tragically logical unfolding, shows that belief being undermined by horror at the tenacity of the other belief that they encountered, and at what they must do to fight it.
“
Non siamo sadici
,” the general tells the press: “We are not sadists,” and one of the measures of the film’s unique subtlety
is that we believe they are not, even as they set about doing sadistic things. There is a key moment when a couple of the paratroopers say a respectful “Courage!” to the man who is
about to be tortured. Said might legitimately have objected to that. In any military group conducting interrogation by violence, no matter how reluctantly the policy is pursued, there are always
a few genuine enthusiasts who relish the opportunity to make their sinister dreams come true. But Said’s objection is directed elsewhere, at the very idea that the French in Algeria might
have had a point in thinking that they had something to protect.

Wedded to his conviction that imperialism is always and exclusively a force bent on destruction, Said writes as if the
French could have had no reason to believe in their
mission civilisatrice
. He writes as if they would only have had to take thought to see the truth. But
they had been bred to believe that there was something to it. In the opening sequence of the movie, Pontecorvo showed that their belief was an illusion. As the future insurgents look on silently
from the gaol window,
an anonymous colleague, with frightening efficiency and speed, is executed in the courtyard. Civilization means the guillotine. But the
pieds noirs
thought the repression of the natives was incidental, not fundamental. They had developed a culture, had some reason to believe in its superiority, and were
concerned to protect it. (There is a constant assumption behind Said’s writings that multiculturalism, in imperial times, was an
a priori
view that
had to be suppressed by propaganda, rather than a view which grew out of the imperial experience as a result of the contact.) For the French in Algeria, their mission to rule by right was an
understandable belief. Even Camus shared it to a certain extent: he could be single-minded in despising Nazism and communism, but he was in two minds about Algeria until his last day. How would
Said have had Pontecorvo film the scene in question, the one about the paratroopers arriving in Algiers like redeeming heroes at the striding heels of their suave commander? Should the actor
playing him have been uglier, even though Massu looked like a film star in real life? Should his dialogue have been less subtle, even though Massu was well aware that a holding action was the
best that could be hoped for, and said so? Should he have been wearing a swastika armband?

Said has similar objections to the glamour of the Marlon Brando character in Pontecorvo’s other big political
statement,
Quemada!
. The imperialist looks too good. This bothers Said even though
Quemada!
, like
The Battle of Algiers
, is scrupulous in attributing all the impetus and justification of history to the insurgents: scrupulous, relentless and disturbingly convincing
for those of us who doubt the efficacy of the outcome. Said doesn’t doubt it, yet he detects in Pontecorvo a lingering tendency to admire the envoys of established power. The same tendency
can’t be imputed to Said. One detects in him a puritanical determination to remain unsullied by the blandishments of his own cultural sympathies. As a critic and man of letters he has an
enviable scope, but it is continually invaded by his political strictness. It would be foolish to blame him for this. If he had a secular Islamic intelligentsia behind him, he could leave a share
of his self-imposed task to others. But he is pretty much on his own, and needs his absolutism if he is to fight his battle. Though his aesthetic judgements are often finely nuanced, there can be
few nuances in his basic political position, so he is easily put out when the same turns out not to be true for an established Western
radical he would like to admire without
reserve. At the end of his encounter with Pontecorvo, he is disappointed to discover that Pontecorvo has been making commercials without telling anybody. The implication is that if Pontecorvo had
lived up to the seriousness of his early masterpieces, he would now be living in a tent, and proud of it. But Pontecorvo, until 1956, was a Communist, and Said has underestimated—or,
rather, overestimated—the grandees of the Italian Communist intelligentsia. Few of them ever embraced the privations of the proletariat. The Italian intellectuals of the post-war
sinistra
might have paid lip service to Gramsci but their true models were among the perennial left-leaning artists of Europe: the Picasso who disguised his
limousine as a taxi, and the Brecht whose rough-looking blue work-shirts were tailored for him out of matted silk. The luminaries of the Italian left were concerned with taking their place in a
current society, not a future one. Fundamentalism was corrupted by the temptations of civilization, and Said might eventually reach the conclusion that it would be better if the same thing could
happen in the Islamic world.