I wanted to bring something up that I know wasn’t an assigned reading for the class, but I found it to be quite interesting and might help us all understand the role of writing/journalism during Partition. My presentation assignment included many essays, but the second essay is the one I would like to comment on. It is called “Papa and Pakistan” by Sara Suleri and she recounts her father’s political involvement in the creation of Pakistan, that is, his odd obsession with Jinnah, his views on creating a strictly Pakistani history that leads to a Pakistani nationalist identity, and the trials and tribulations that he had to endure to have his voice heard (at the time he was a journalist for various Pakistani newspapers, and during the struggles of establishing their government, his critiques earned him jail time).
I found this story interesting because it brings up the question of how to establish a history of a nation that was newly created. It seems as though Suleri’s father regarded the birth of Pakistan as a match to the divine creation of a people as he worshipped Jinnah as a God among mortals, bringing the promise of a new identity, a new history of a new nation, pure in its form. To quote from her essay: “Consider Papa, growing up in a part of northern India known as Quadian, born in 1913 when his father was approaching sixty, first seduced by poetry, and then by history. What else could he do when he met Jinnah but exclaim, ‘Amazing grace!’” (22). Here, we get a brief psyche reading of Papa. His father has grown old by the time he is born, reflecting the past information she gives about his relationship with his father (earlier in the essay she remembers asking him what he remembers about his father and all he comes up with is he was pious and liked to ride camels) and adding to the fact that he did not know his father at all. Since Papa was “seduced by history” he finds Jinnah as the man to create a new history, a Pakistani one, written in the tongue of Pakistan and not English, as “English is the language of history” (). Her father worships Jinnah as a god, replacing his actual father figure with his image in politics, and writes a novel titled, My Leader, which earns him attention from Jinnah himself, expressed upon a letter that he keeps forever. She explains: “The book gave Pip [Papa] some fame, but—even more—it gave him what in the years of my formation was referred to only as ‘The Letter’ to this day it remains the one object in Pip’s home that he has ever loved” (24). The letter provided so much encouragement to her father that he leaves for England (with Jinnah’s blessing) to lobby the “Pakistan Cause” (24) and his presence among the politicians earned him recognition as he stood out from the “bulging hand of [the] Hindu counterparts, who had monopolized the scene for decades” (24). He believes that he is a voice that needs to be heard, as he has had his confidence augmented by the attention he received from Jinnah. The way she portrayed her father’s confidence was nearly god-given as she quotes her father further: “At that time I was the lone Pakistani correspondent in Britain—‘Pakistani’ before Pakistan, because I didn’t attend any of these gatherings without raising the issue of the Muslim struggle for Pakistan” (24). He wanted a nation in which he can become what he solely is, a Pakistani man with a Pakistani history. He felt that through his journalism, his novels, his political involvement was writing the beginnings of a history that was not to be ignored by the leader of the creation of a Pakistani nation (Jinnah) and by those who hold the nations fate in their hands (the British).
I find that this is important because there is a parallel between writing down the history of a developing nation as well as writing a history down as a citizen deciphering the lines between what a person identified themselves before they became a new inhabitant of a brand new nation.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Five Reasons to Hate “Earth”
Whatever flaws Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel “Cracking India” may have the film adaptation “Earth” is even worse. Much of what was best about Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel was either totally absent or horribly distorted in the movie. In fact, there are five reasons to tell all your friends to leave “Earth” on the shelf at the video store:
1. the characterization of the protagonist Ayah,
2. the absence of key female characters from the novel,
3. the “crunch” of time from four years to what seems like a few months,
4. the “out” given to Ice-Candy Man, and
5. the ending!
In the novel, Ayah is a curvy, sensual woman. With her “extra servings of butter, yogurt, curry, and chapatti” she is not one of those “stringy, half-starved women in India whom one looks at only once – and never turns around to look at twice.” Her “globules” draw the looks of men of every race and creed. It was refreshing to have womanly curves praised over the androgynous build of a 12-year-old girl. But, in the film, the lead actress is more akin to the latter than the former — not that she didn’t have a few well-placed curves of her own. However, she definitely did not have enough to warrant the use of the word “globules.”
Furthermore, when the unwitting Ayah realizes that while she’s been chomping down nuts her male admirers have been ogling her cleavage she becomes uncomfortable and seemingly embarrassed, quickly covers herself up. The Ayah in the novel would have eaten those nuts fully realizing that the men were watching her every move and she would have loved it.
But at least Ayah appears in the book. Some of the most important and interesting characters in the novel don’t even appear in the film. For instance, Godmother and Slavesister and the replacement Ayah are totally absent and Papoo appears only briefly as the child bride. For a film that is part of a trilogy about women and nationalism in post-colonial India, women are strangely absent from “Earth.” This seems strangely contrary to Sidhwa’s intentions and this is even more complicated by her appearance at the end of the film as the grown Lenny. This seems to suggest that the author put her stamp of approval on what appears to be a rather anti-feminist directorial decision. Weird.
And to add insult to injury the time span of the novel (four years) is crunched to what seems to be a matter of months. Although the difficulties of working with child actors is understandable (how does one actress pull off growing from four to eight years old as Lenny does in the novel, for instance?), but “fudging” the timeline came off as offensive. Loving neighbors do not go from dinner parties to massacres over night and to suggest that this is what happened in India rubbed me the wrong way.
To make matters worse, the “melding” of the characters of Ice Candy Man and Imam Din (the cook) also sat wrong. In the novel, it is Imam Din’s family that is massacred on the train, but in the novel Ice Candy Man finds his Muslim sisters butchered. This seems to give him an “excuse” for betraying Ayah and gives us a reason to not hate him. This was an unnecessary and again, offensive, device. One of the best things about Sidhwa’s novel was that it lived in the “gray areas.” Lenny’s world was turned upside down and flipped around and in the ensuing chaos right became wrong and wrong became right, but there are no excuses because there are no excuses good enough. No explanation satisfactorily explains why friend betrayed friend, or why lover became rapist so to make it as simple as x + y = z, as the film did in Ice Candy Man’s case, trivializes the horrors of partition.
And finally, the film’s hopeless ending sat in direct contrast to Sidhwa’s tragic, but not hopeless ending. I don’t know if I would go so far as to call the novel’s ending hopeful, but it is certainly not hopeless as the limping, lone woman who never saw her betrayed Ayah again at the end of the film certainly is. In Sidhwa’s novel the women of India are slowly putting their country back together again, working together to rescue stolen women and even “punish” their betrayers. They are not left powerless, crippled figures bowled over by the crushing hand of partition. They may be damaged, but they are not broken. Ayah may have lost her brilliant glow, but she has enough life left in her to leave her husband.
So, after all of this, if you are at the video store and your friend reaches for that copy of “Earth” with “the chest” on it SMACK THAT HAND! Put that DVD back and take a trip to the bookstore instead.
1. the characterization of the protagonist Ayah,
2. the absence of key female characters from the novel,
3. the “crunch” of time from four years to what seems like a few months,
4. the “out” given to Ice-Candy Man, and
5. the ending!
In the novel, Ayah is a curvy, sensual woman. With her “extra servings of butter, yogurt, curry, and chapatti” she is not one of those “stringy, half-starved women in India whom one looks at only once – and never turns around to look at twice.” Her “globules” draw the looks of men of every race and creed. It was refreshing to have womanly curves praised over the androgynous build of a 12-year-old girl. But, in the film, the lead actress is more akin to the latter than the former — not that she didn’t have a few well-placed curves of her own. However, she definitely did not have enough to warrant the use of the word “globules.”
Furthermore, when the unwitting Ayah realizes that while she’s been chomping down nuts her male admirers have been ogling her cleavage she becomes uncomfortable and seemingly embarrassed, quickly covers herself up. The Ayah in the novel would have eaten those nuts fully realizing that the men were watching her every move and she would have loved it.
But at least Ayah appears in the book. Some of the most important and interesting characters in the novel don’t even appear in the film. For instance, Godmother and Slavesister and the replacement Ayah are totally absent and Papoo appears only briefly as the child bride. For a film that is part of a trilogy about women and nationalism in post-colonial India, women are strangely absent from “Earth.” This seems strangely contrary to Sidhwa’s intentions and this is even more complicated by her appearance at the end of the film as the grown Lenny. This seems to suggest that the author put her stamp of approval on what appears to be a rather anti-feminist directorial decision. Weird.
And to add insult to injury the time span of the novel (four years) is crunched to what seems to be a matter of months. Although the difficulties of working with child actors is understandable (how does one actress pull off growing from four to eight years old as Lenny does in the novel, for instance?), but “fudging” the timeline came off as offensive. Loving neighbors do not go from dinner parties to massacres over night and to suggest that this is what happened in India rubbed me the wrong way.
To make matters worse, the “melding” of the characters of Ice Candy Man and Imam Din (the cook) also sat wrong. In the novel, it is Imam Din’s family that is massacred on the train, but in the novel Ice Candy Man finds his Muslim sisters butchered. This seems to give him an “excuse” for betraying Ayah and gives us a reason to not hate him. This was an unnecessary and again, offensive, device. One of the best things about Sidhwa’s novel was that it lived in the “gray areas.” Lenny’s world was turned upside down and flipped around and in the ensuing chaos right became wrong and wrong became right, but there are no excuses because there are no excuses good enough. No explanation satisfactorily explains why friend betrayed friend, or why lover became rapist so to make it as simple as x + y = z, as the film did in Ice Candy Man’s case, trivializes the horrors of partition.
And finally, the film’s hopeless ending sat in direct contrast to Sidhwa’s tragic, but not hopeless ending. I don’t know if I would go so far as to call the novel’s ending hopeful, but it is certainly not hopeless as the limping, lone woman who never saw her betrayed Ayah again at the end of the film certainly is. In Sidhwa’s novel the women of India are slowly putting their country back together again, working together to rescue stolen women and even “punish” their betrayers. They are not left powerless, crippled figures bowled over by the crushing hand of partition. They may be damaged, but they are not broken. Ayah may have lost her brilliant glow, but she has enough life left in her to leave her husband.
So, after all of this, if you are at the video store and your friend reaches for that copy of “Earth” with “the chest” on it SMACK THAT HAND! Put that DVD back and take a trip to the bookstore instead.
The Wisdom in Choosing a 5-year-old Narrator
We've been talking about how Bapsi Sidhwa's choice of a narrator is problematic. Choosing to write a novel from the perspective of a 4- to 5-year-old child seems ludicrous but Bapsi Sidhwa actually found a few good reasons to do so in her novel “Cracking India.” The most important of which is that it adds a visceral feel to her novel about a very physical thing — splitting a nation.
Children experience the world through their senses. That’s why everything goes in the mouth. It all has to be touched, smelled, and tasted. They have to mash it in their fingers, stick it up their noses and slobber it up really good. By choosing a child narrator Sidhwa is invoking the focuses of this stage of development in her novel. What better way to talk about the physical breaking up of a nation than through a child who spends all her time trying to make sense of the physical world?
Children spend most of their day puzzling through the physical necessities of life. At four and five years old children are fascinated by all bodily functions from urinating to eating to sex because they’re worlds are small and their bodies take up a big part of their reality. Children are born with a rudimentary understanding of the mechanics of such bodily functions as urinating and eating, but are ignorant of the social customs and restrictions attached to them. So using a child narrator to talk about India at this very physical moment, when they’re talking about cracking a physical thing, like India, open, makes a little sense.
Bapsi uses physical things like the defecating in the streets in the early morning hours, Ayah’s sexual antics and Cousin’s gropings, to tell her story. The novel is full of odd bodily moments, such as when Lenny watches the early risers perform their morning ritual, and this focus on the visceral keeps readers focused on the fact that these are people who eat, sleep, and breath just like them. It keeps readers focused on their humanness, not their race, nationality, religion, or creed.
Furthermore, Children, like the villagers Lenny visits with Imam Din, are closer to the Earth where “ancient friendships seem more important than political machinations,” which is a major theme of the book. How long-time friendships and neighborly ties are broken is a central concern of the novel. To children the immediate, close bonds formed in everyday life are all important. When these bonds are broken, to a child narrator, the act would particularly stand out.
Between four and five years old children are also learning social customs, thus they are particularly aware of the inconsistencies and peculiarities of social interactions. In a novel where differing social customs led to unspeakable atrocities and brutal massacres, a child narrator’s hypersensitivity to this issue would support the author’s focus.
Another reason there is some wisdom to choosing a child narrator is that it is a constantly changing perception: “My perception of people has changed. I still see through to their hearts and minds, but their exteriors superimpose a new set of distracting impressions.” The adult Lenny’s words suggests that when people are young their perceptions are clearer and when people enter the adult world they are more deceived by illusory things. This argument actually gives greater credibility to Lenny’s impression over those of an adult’s.
Children experience the world through their senses. That’s why everything goes in the mouth. It all has to be touched, smelled, and tasted. They have to mash it in their fingers, stick it up their noses and slobber it up really good. By choosing a child narrator Sidhwa is invoking the focuses of this stage of development in her novel. What better way to talk about the physical breaking up of a nation than through a child who spends all her time trying to make sense of the physical world?
Children spend most of their day puzzling through the physical necessities of life. At four and five years old children are fascinated by all bodily functions from urinating to eating to sex because they’re worlds are small and their bodies take up a big part of their reality. Children are born with a rudimentary understanding of the mechanics of such bodily functions as urinating and eating, but are ignorant of the social customs and restrictions attached to them. So using a child narrator to talk about India at this very physical moment, when they’re talking about cracking a physical thing, like India, open, makes a little sense.
Bapsi uses physical things like the defecating in the streets in the early morning hours, Ayah’s sexual antics and Cousin’s gropings, to tell her story. The novel is full of odd bodily moments, such as when Lenny watches the early risers perform their morning ritual, and this focus on the visceral keeps readers focused on the fact that these are people who eat, sleep, and breath just like them. It keeps readers focused on their humanness, not their race, nationality, religion, or creed.
Furthermore, Children, like the villagers Lenny visits with Imam Din, are closer to the Earth where “ancient friendships seem more important than political machinations,” which is a major theme of the book. How long-time friendships and neighborly ties are broken is a central concern of the novel. To children the immediate, close bonds formed in everyday life are all important. When these bonds are broken, to a child narrator, the act would particularly stand out.
Between four and five years old children are also learning social customs, thus they are particularly aware of the inconsistencies and peculiarities of social interactions. In a novel where differing social customs led to unspeakable atrocities and brutal massacres, a child narrator’s hypersensitivity to this issue would support the author’s focus.
Another reason there is some wisdom to choosing a child narrator is that it is a constantly changing perception: “My perception of people has changed. I still see through to their hearts and minds, but their exteriors superimpose a new set of distracting impressions.” The adult Lenny’s words suggests that when people are young their perceptions are clearer and when people enter the adult world they are more deceived by illusory things. This argument actually gives greater credibility to Lenny’s impression over those of an adult’s.
The False Prophet of Palestine...
This article is taken from The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs:
THE FALSE PROPHET OF PALESTINE:
IN THE WAKE OF THE EDWARD SAID REVELATIONS
Justus Weiner
A Mythical Childhood in Jerusalem / Unraveling the Mystery / An Avatar of Palestinian Suffering / Evicting Martin Buber / Said's Network of Friends / The Response of Independent Journalists / Generating a Smokescreen / Should Intellectuals Lie?
A Mythical Childhood in Jerusalem
Professor Edward Said of Columbia University is the Western world's foremost spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Said, a world-class writer, elevated his personal parable of a paradise destroyed and dispossessed to his trump card in articles, books, lectures, interviews, and television documentaries. He presented himself as the genuine article - a dispossessed Palestinian refugee deserving of "reparations" for what he claimed was his house and his father's business.
Said writes, "I was born, in November 1935, in Talbiya, then a mostly new and prosperous Arab quarter of Jerusalem. By the end of 1947, just a few months before Talbiya fell to Jewish forces, I'd left with my family for Cairo."1 He wrote elsewhere, "I was born in Jerusalem and spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt."2
For years, the eminent intellectual and activist has told his life story as an allegory of the Palestinian people, but it is not his life story. Jerusalem, about which he claimed "nearly everything in my early life could be traced," was in fact the home of relatives whom Said occasionally visited.
Recently, Commentary magazine published "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications of Edward Said," an expose I had written of the myths Said had created while reinventing his life story to become a "Palestinian refugee."3 In addition, the Wall Street Journal published a condensed version entitled "The False Prophet of Palestine" (August 26, 1999).
Unraveling the Mystery
The unraveling of this mystery began as I was preparing an article on "Peace and its Discontents: Israeli and Palestinian Intellectuals Who Oppose the Current Peace Process," which appeared in the Cornell International Law Journal (Winter 1996). Part of my research included reading Said's book Peace and its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process.
Out of natural curiosity, I tried to find out more about this highly persuasive and influential intellectual-academic and his tragic childhood/adolescence in Jerusalem, especially since I had lived around the corner from what he nostalgically referred to as "my beautiful old house" on Brenner Street, and I had worked for years in an office behind St. George's school which Said claimed to have attended.
Yet when I sought out people who might recall Said or at least could remember the prevailing conditions prior to or during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, much of what I discovered was at odds with the "facts" as presented by Said. As I dug deeper, I found a pervasive pattern of falsity. When I began discovering discrepancies in Said's frequent autobiographic references, I telephoned his office at Columbia University to request an interview, but Said did not return the call.
The publication of my expose triggered a major controversy, "detonating one of the nastiest rows of its kind to rend New York's intelligentsia in years," according to the British Observer. Scores of articles appeared in far-flung publications from Finland to India and from Syria to Canada. The (London) Daily Telegraph deemed the article "a remarkable piece of investigative journalism," and it has been nominated for a prestigious award in the United States.
An Avatar of Palestinian Suffering
Where and under what circumstances an intellectual or academic grew up would ordinarily be of little consequence, but this case is different. His "entire" family, as Said tells it, was "ethnically cleansed."
In his narratives, Edward Said paints romantic images of pre-1948 Palestine as a paradise, where his life was simple, harmonious, and happy. This parable of perfection was rudely destroyed by the outbreak of inter-communal conflict which preceded the 1948 War, allegedly forcing young Edward out of his home and school in Jerusalem and into "the Palestine exile" for "50 years."4
According to Said, "the central metaphor for me is exile,"5 and "1947 was for me and my family the last year of our residence in Jerusalem."6 He claimed on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour that "I lost - and my family lost - its property and rights in 1948."7
Yet after more than three years of research in archives, libraries, and public record offices on four continents, together with more than 85 interviews, a very different picture of Said's life has emerged. Edward Said in fact created a parable out of the first twelve years of his life and used it to perpetrate a multi-level deception on Western intellectuals and his Palestinian admirers alike.
Edward Said actually grew up in Cairo, Egypt. His childhood friend Professor Hoda Gindi of Cairo University, who lived downstairs in the same apartment house, confirmed that Said was the scion of a wealthy Cairene family. As was discovered, his father was an American citizen who moved to Cairo from Jerusalem a decade before Edward was born. Living in Cairo until his departure to attend prep school in America in 1951, Edward Said resided with his family in luxurious apartment buildings in the exclusive Zamalek neighborhood, played with childhood friends in the manicured private gardens of the Aquarium Grotto, attended private English and American schools, was driven around in his father's large black American cars by his chauffeur, and enjoyed the facilities at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the son of one of its only Arab members.
Said's father was the owner of a thriving office supply business, the Standard Stationary Company, based in Cairo. In 1952 a revolutionary mob burned his flagship store (and a branch) to the ground, and several years later the nationalization program instituted by Egyptian President Nasser ultimately forced Said's father out of the country. Thus, the truly devastating financial losses suffered by Said's father were in no way connected to Israel.
Evicting Martin Buber
In a speech at Birzeit University in 1998, Said publicly charged that the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, known as an apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews, had lived in the Brenner Street house and "did not mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced."8
Once again, the truth involves a very different story. The house at 10 Brenner Street was built in the early 1930s and its registered owners were Said's grandfather and later his aunt and her five children. There is no record in the Land Registry of Edward Said's parents ever owning any interest in the house. The building was initially divided into two apartments which were rented out from 1936 onwards. After 1938, one apartment (and a downstairs storeroom) was leased to Martin Buber and his extended family, all of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany. The Bubers, relying on the long-term nature of their lease, made major improvements in the apartment and landscaped the garden.
In early 1942, Edward Said's aunt broke the lease and reclaimed the premises for her family's personal use, winning a judge's ruling in favor of eviction, and forcing Buber to vacate together with his library of some 15,000 books.9 Given the shortage of housing in Palestine during World War II, their eviction could not have come at a worse time. Curiously, this event occurred during the very period when Edward Said was himself allegedly growing up in the same house, and long before Israel's War of Independence in 1948, but Said never mentioned the presence of Martin Buber or his library in "my beautiful old house" during those years.
Said's Network of Friends
As responses to my article began to pour in, an obvious dichotomy emerged. First, there was the network of Said's friends whose names had come up frequently in my research into his writings. Their articles, editorials, and book reviews regularly lauded Said the man and often even Said the icon. Interestingly, the admiration was mutual as Said had written favorably about them (or their writings). For example, in 1986 Salman Rushdie reviewed Said's book After the Last Sky in the Guardian; then Said wrote favorably about Rushdie in the Washington Post and reviewed his book The Jaguar Smile in the London Review of Books. On at least three other occasions Rushdie and Said have engaged in mutually flattering conversations which were later published. Since the current controversy broke, Rushdie has jumped in on Said's side with an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail (Canada) which also appeared in The Age (Melbourne).
Next there is Christopher Hitchens, who in 1988 co-edited Blaming the Victims with Said and later wrote a laudatory foreword to Said's book Peace and Its Discontents. Recently, Hitchens has devoted two of his columns in The Nation and a review of Said's Out of Place for the (Canadian) National Post to vitriolic attacks on me and my critique of Said's intellectual dishonesty. In a recent radio interview, Said referred to Hitchens as "my defender."
Said's close connection with Alexander Cockburn goes back to at least the early 1980s, when a scandal broke concerning an undisclosed $10,000 "grant." In 1982, the now-defunct Institute of Arab Studies secretly gave Cockburn a $10,000 "grant" to write a book on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.10 When the payment was exposed, Cockburn, who had never disclosed it to his editor or readers, was sacked from the Village Voice. Meanwhile his friend Edward Said, Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Arab Studies, under questioning arising out of the scandal, defended its work in the New York Times.
Apparently undeterred by the uproar, Cockburn's book Corruptions of the Empire was reviewed by Edward Said in the London Review of Books under the title of "Alexander the Brilliant." Said wrote, "Why, in the desert of today's journalistic mediocrity and cowardly trimming, anyone with Cockburn's gifts and courage should be modest, or mock-modest, I shall leave to others to discuss." Cockburn later provided a blurb for the inside cover page of Said's Representations of the Intellectual. He has on at least two occasions touted Said in his column in The Nation, and recently devoted his column in that magazine to a no-holds-barred attack on my research. Cockburn also published similar attacks in his columns in the Los Angles Times and in the New York Press.
The Response of Independent Journalists
Fortunately, there exist many dedicated journalists who took the trouble to investigate and ascertain how the parties' claims stood up to analysis. This group, none of whom I have ever had dealings with, includes Daniel Johnson of the Daily Telegraph, Jeff Jacoby syndicated in the Boston Globe, Dan Kennedy in the Boston Phoenix, Premen Addy in The Hindu, Charles Krauthammer in Time, Mark Berley in the New York Post, Neil Seeman in the (Canadian) National Post, Hillel Halkin in The Forward, and David Horowitz at salon.com. Despite their efforts, judging from what appeared in print, not a single journalist succeeded in pinning down Said on even one of the direct quotes which I included in my article. I was repeatedly told that he became angry and simply dismissed any effort to address the key evidence of his duplicity.
Generating a Smokescreen
In the months since the publication of the article, Said and his followers have never attempted, in any systematic way, to refute the evidence. Instead, Said's network of friends echoed and amplified his attacks, publishing suspiciously similar criticisms of my work. Not only are the specific points of attack frequently identical, but similar phraseology suggests common parentage.
One of the most curious allegations that occurred in the aftermath of the article was Said's accusation published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (August 26, 1999) that I had threatened his cousin Robert Said, a man whom I have never met or even spoken with. Actually, it was my Belgian research assistant, Paul Lambert, who is half my age, who conducted the interview with Robert Said in his office in Amman on January 23, 1997. According to Lambert, today a cadet in the Belgian diplomatic corps,
Robert Said met me in his impressive office, on the second floor of a large office supply company. Although initially gracious - I was offered a cup of coffee - once I began asking basic questions about Edward's childhood and the house [on Brenner St. in Jerusalem], Robert Said refused to answer. He then turned verbally abusive, shouting insults and gesticulating with his hands....At no time did I...threaten him saying anything like "it would be better if you answered questions." This claim is manifestly factually incorrect, I would even say grotesque: if one should have felt threatened it was me. Indeed, Robert Said called in one of his bouncer co-workers and went on shouting at me unpleasant things like "why did you really come here?," "you are a tool," "you have been brainwashed," and eventually he stated that "the Jews are the worst people in the world." [Lambert is a Flemish Catholic.] Frankly, I was rather concerned about my own safety than about the interview. Please note my position: 25y old, alone as a non-Arabic speaker in the middle of unknown Amman - not exactly a position to threaten anyone.11
Should Intellectuals Lie?
This controversy raises larger questions than simply the myth-making and selective memory of Edward Said. As a world-class intellectual, it would be revealing to pose to him the following questions: Should intellectuals lie? Should they deceive or misrepresent personal or historical facts? Should they remember and forget selectively? Is such conduct ever justified? While some radical intellectuals go so far as to claim that all knowledge is a form of duping and others deny the very existence of "truth," Professor Edward Said, despite his radical politics, has taken a traditionalist approach to this topic. Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, Said has noted that "there is a great difference between political and intellectual behavior. The intellectual's role is to speak the truth, as plainly, directly and as honestly as possible....the intellectual's constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth unadorned."12
Indeed, in his new memoir Out of Place (1999), published after he became aware of my investigation, Said presents a radically revised version of his life in which he describes his Cairo childhood in great detail, and we learn that his schooling from age 6 to 16 took place in three different Cairo institutions. The publication of Said's new memoir a month after my article appeared in Commentary placed his defenders in an untenable situation, because without admitting to the inconsistency with his previous autobiographical writings, Said completely confirmed the core discoveries of my research.
The cause of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, to which so many of Said's friends assert their devotion, is not well-served by historical lies. The fact is that the "best-known Palestinian intellectual in the world" (as he was recently described on the BBC) made wholesale political use of the supposed circumstances of his childhood, weaving an elaborate myth of paradise and expulsion from paradise out of one or two circumstances and a raft of inventions. Edward Said was never a refugee from Palestine, but he is certainly a refugee from the truth.
* * *
Notes
Edward Said, "Palestine, Then and Now: An Exile's Journey Through Israel and the Occupied Territories," Harper's Magazine, December 1992, p. 47.
Edward Said, "Between Worlds: Edward Said Makes Sense of His Life," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998, p. 3.
Commentary, September 1999.
Edward Said, "Fifty Years in the Wilderness: A State of Dispossession and Violence," The Guardian, May 2, 1998, p. 21.
Bryan Appleyard, "Reflections from the Tightrope," The Independent (London), June 23, 1993, p. 23.
Edward Said, Lecture on "The Tragedy of Palestine" at Rice University, Houston, March 26, 1998.
Interview with Edward Said, Educational Broadcasting and GWETA, the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, August 1, 1991, Transcript #4129.
Edward Said, Lecture at the Fifth International Conference for "The Scenarios of Palestine," Birzeit University, November 12, 1998.
Interview with Barbara (Buber) Goldschmidt, November 10, 1996.
The incident was reported in the Boston Phoenix (January 10, 1984), New York Times (January 12, 1984), and Washington Post (January 13, 1984).
Letter to the Editor, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 1999.
Edward Said, "Israel-Palestine: A Third Way," Le Monde Diplomatique (Aug-Sep 1998).
* * *
Justus R. Weiner is an international human rights lawyer and a member of the Israel and New York Bar Associations. He is currently a Scholar in Residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and an adjunct lecturer at Hebrew and Tel Aviv Universities. The complete version of the research on Edward Said (with 141 footnotes, two charts, and a photograph) is available at http://www.commentarymagazine.com/9909/weiner.html. See also letters and responses on the article in Commentary (January 2000). The author wishes to express his appreciation to Judy Shulewitz and Zev Kanter for their assistance.
The Jerusalem Letter and Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints are published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 13 Tel-Hai St., Jerusalem, Israel; Tel. 972-2-5619281, Fax. 972-2-5619112, Internet: jcpa@netvision.net.il. In U.S.A.: 1515 Locust St., Suite 703, Philadelphia, PA 19102; Tel. (215) 772-0564, Fax. (215) 772-0566. © Copyright. All rights reserved. ISSN: 0792-7304.
The opinions expressed by the authors of Viewpoints do not necessarily reflect those of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
THE FALSE PROPHET OF PALESTINE:
IN THE WAKE OF THE EDWARD SAID REVELATIONS
Justus Weiner
A Mythical Childhood in Jerusalem / Unraveling the Mystery / An Avatar of Palestinian Suffering / Evicting Martin Buber / Said's Network of Friends / The Response of Independent Journalists / Generating a Smokescreen / Should Intellectuals Lie?
A Mythical Childhood in Jerusalem
Professor Edward Said of Columbia University is the Western world's foremost spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Said, a world-class writer, elevated his personal parable of a paradise destroyed and dispossessed to his trump card in articles, books, lectures, interviews, and television documentaries. He presented himself as the genuine article - a dispossessed Palestinian refugee deserving of "reparations" for what he claimed was his house and his father's business.
Said writes, "I was born, in November 1935, in Talbiya, then a mostly new and prosperous Arab quarter of Jerusalem. By the end of 1947, just a few months before Talbiya fell to Jewish forces, I'd left with my family for Cairo."1 He wrote elsewhere, "I was born in Jerusalem and spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt."2
For years, the eminent intellectual and activist has told his life story as an allegory of the Palestinian people, but it is not his life story. Jerusalem, about which he claimed "nearly everything in my early life could be traced," was in fact the home of relatives whom Said occasionally visited.
Recently, Commentary magazine published "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications of Edward Said," an expose I had written of the myths Said had created while reinventing his life story to become a "Palestinian refugee."3 In addition, the Wall Street Journal published a condensed version entitled "The False Prophet of Palestine" (August 26, 1999).
Unraveling the Mystery
The unraveling of this mystery began as I was preparing an article on "Peace and its Discontents: Israeli and Palestinian Intellectuals Who Oppose the Current Peace Process," which appeared in the Cornell International Law Journal (Winter 1996). Part of my research included reading Said's book Peace and its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process.
Out of natural curiosity, I tried to find out more about this highly persuasive and influential intellectual-academic and his tragic childhood/adolescence in Jerusalem, especially since I had lived around the corner from what he nostalgically referred to as "my beautiful old house" on Brenner Street, and I had worked for years in an office behind St. George's school which Said claimed to have attended.
Yet when I sought out people who might recall Said or at least could remember the prevailing conditions prior to or during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, much of what I discovered was at odds with the "facts" as presented by Said. As I dug deeper, I found a pervasive pattern of falsity. When I began discovering discrepancies in Said's frequent autobiographic references, I telephoned his office at Columbia University to request an interview, but Said did not return the call.
The publication of my expose triggered a major controversy, "detonating one of the nastiest rows of its kind to rend New York's intelligentsia in years," according to the British Observer. Scores of articles appeared in far-flung publications from Finland to India and from Syria to Canada. The (London) Daily Telegraph deemed the article "a remarkable piece of investigative journalism," and it has been nominated for a prestigious award in the United States.
An Avatar of Palestinian Suffering
Where and under what circumstances an intellectual or academic grew up would ordinarily be of little consequence, but this case is different. His "entire" family, as Said tells it, was "ethnically cleansed."
In his narratives, Edward Said paints romantic images of pre-1948 Palestine as a paradise, where his life was simple, harmonious, and happy. This parable of perfection was rudely destroyed by the outbreak of inter-communal conflict which preceded the 1948 War, allegedly forcing young Edward out of his home and school in Jerusalem and into "the Palestine exile" for "50 years."4
According to Said, "the central metaphor for me is exile,"5 and "1947 was for me and my family the last year of our residence in Jerusalem."6 He claimed on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour that "I lost - and my family lost - its property and rights in 1948."7
Yet after more than three years of research in archives, libraries, and public record offices on four continents, together with more than 85 interviews, a very different picture of Said's life has emerged. Edward Said in fact created a parable out of the first twelve years of his life and used it to perpetrate a multi-level deception on Western intellectuals and his Palestinian admirers alike.
Edward Said actually grew up in Cairo, Egypt. His childhood friend Professor Hoda Gindi of Cairo University, who lived downstairs in the same apartment house, confirmed that Said was the scion of a wealthy Cairene family. As was discovered, his father was an American citizen who moved to Cairo from Jerusalem a decade before Edward was born. Living in Cairo until his departure to attend prep school in America in 1951, Edward Said resided with his family in luxurious apartment buildings in the exclusive Zamalek neighborhood, played with childhood friends in the manicured private gardens of the Aquarium Grotto, attended private English and American schools, was driven around in his father's large black American cars by his chauffeur, and enjoyed the facilities at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the son of one of its only Arab members.
Said's father was the owner of a thriving office supply business, the Standard Stationary Company, based in Cairo. In 1952 a revolutionary mob burned his flagship store (and a branch) to the ground, and several years later the nationalization program instituted by Egyptian President Nasser ultimately forced Said's father out of the country. Thus, the truly devastating financial losses suffered by Said's father were in no way connected to Israel.
Evicting Martin Buber
In a speech at Birzeit University in 1998, Said publicly charged that the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, known as an apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews, had lived in the Brenner Street house and "did not mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced."8
Once again, the truth involves a very different story. The house at 10 Brenner Street was built in the early 1930s and its registered owners were Said's grandfather and later his aunt and her five children. There is no record in the Land Registry of Edward Said's parents ever owning any interest in the house. The building was initially divided into two apartments which were rented out from 1936 onwards. After 1938, one apartment (and a downstairs storeroom) was leased to Martin Buber and his extended family, all of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany. The Bubers, relying on the long-term nature of their lease, made major improvements in the apartment and landscaped the garden.
In early 1942, Edward Said's aunt broke the lease and reclaimed the premises for her family's personal use, winning a judge's ruling in favor of eviction, and forcing Buber to vacate together with his library of some 15,000 books.9 Given the shortage of housing in Palestine during World War II, their eviction could not have come at a worse time. Curiously, this event occurred during the very period when Edward Said was himself allegedly growing up in the same house, and long before Israel's War of Independence in 1948, but Said never mentioned the presence of Martin Buber or his library in "my beautiful old house" during those years.
Said's Network of Friends
As responses to my article began to pour in, an obvious dichotomy emerged. First, there was the network of Said's friends whose names had come up frequently in my research into his writings. Their articles, editorials, and book reviews regularly lauded Said the man and often even Said the icon. Interestingly, the admiration was mutual as Said had written favorably about them (or their writings). For example, in 1986 Salman Rushdie reviewed Said's book After the Last Sky in the Guardian; then Said wrote favorably about Rushdie in the Washington Post and reviewed his book The Jaguar Smile in the London Review of Books. On at least three other occasions Rushdie and Said have engaged in mutually flattering conversations which were later published. Since the current controversy broke, Rushdie has jumped in on Said's side with an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail (Canada) which also appeared in The Age (Melbourne).
Next there is Christopher Hitchens, who in 1988 co-edited Blaming the Victims with Said and later wrote a laudatory foreword to Said's book Peace and Its Discontents. Recently, Hitchens has devoted two of his columns in The Nation and a review of Said's Out of Place for the (Canadian) National Post to vitriolic attacks on me and my critique of Said's intellectual dishonesty. In a recent radio interview, Said referred to Hitchens as "my defender."
Said's close connection with Alexander Cockburn goes back to at least the early 1980s, when a scandal broke concerning an undisclosed $10,000 "grant." In 1982, the now-defunct Institute of Arab Studies secretly gave Cockburn a $10,000 "grant" to write a book on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.10 When the payment was exposed, Cockburn, who had never disclosed it to his editor or readers, was sacked from the Village Voice. Meanwhile his friend Edward Said, Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Arab Studies, under questioning arising out of the scandal, defended its work in the New York Times.
Apparently undeterred by the uproar, Cockburn's book Corruptions of the Empire was reviewed by Edward Said in the London Review of Books under the title of "Alexander the Brilliant." Said wrote, "Why, in the desert of today's journalistic mediocrity and cowardly trimming, anyone with Cockburn's gifts and courage should be modest, or mock-modest, I shall leave to others to discuss." Cockburn later provided a blurb for the inside cover page of Said's Representations of the Intellectual. He has on at least two occasions touted Said in his column in The Nation, and recently devoted his column in that magazine to a no-holds-barred attack on my research. Cockburn also published similar attacks in his columns in the Los Angles Times and in the New York Press.
The Response of Independent Journalists
Fortunately, there exist many dedicated journalists who took the trouble to investigate and ascertain how the parties' claims stood up to analysis. This group, none of whom I have ever had dealings with, includes Daniel Johnson of the Daily Telegraph, Jeff Jacoby syndicated in the Boston Globe, Dan Kennedy in the Boston Phoenix, Premen Addy in The Hindu, Charles Krauthammer in Time, Mark Berley in the New York Post, Neil Seeman in the (Canadian) National Post, Hillel Halkin in The Forward, and David Horowitz at salon.com. Despite their efforts, judging from what appeared in print, not a single journalist succeeded in pinning down Said on even one of the direct quotes which I included in my article. I was repeatedly told that he became angry and simply dismissed any effort to address the key evidence of his duplicity.
Generating a Smokescreen
In the months since the publication of the article, Said and his followers have never attempted, in any systematic way, to refute the evidence. Instead, Said's network of friends echoed and amplified his attacks, publishing suspiciously similar criticisms of my work. Not only are the specific points of attack frequently identical, but similar phraseology suggests common parentage.
One of the most curious allegations that occurred in the aftermath of the article was Said's accusation published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (August 26, 1999) that I had threatened his cousin Robert Said, a man whom I have never met or even spoken with. Actually, it was my Belgian research assistant, Paul Lambert, who is half my age, who conducted the interview with Robert Said in his office in Amman on January 23, 1997. According to Lambert, today a cadet in the Belgian diplomatic corps,
Robert Said met me in his impressive office, on the second floor of a large office supply company. Although initially gracious - I was offered a cup of coffee - once I began asking basic questions about Edward's childhood and the house [on Brenner St. in Jerusalem], Robert Said refused to answer. He then turned verbally abusive, shouting insults and gesticulating with his hands....At no time did I...threaten him saying anything like "it would be better if you answered questions." This claim is manifestly factually incorrect, I would even say grotesque: if one should have felt threatened it was me. Indeed, Robert Said called in one of his bouncer co-workers and went on shouting at me unpleasant things like "why did you really come here?," "you are a tool," "you have been brainwashed," and eventually he stated that "the Jews are the worst people in the world." [Lambert is a Flemish Catholic.] Frankly, I was rather concerned about my own safety than about the interview. Please note my position: 25y old, alone as a non-Arabic speaker in the middle of unknown Amman - not exactly a position to threaten anyone.11
Should Intellectuals Lie?
This controversy raises larger questions than simply the myth-making and selective memory of Edward Said. As a world-class intellectual, it would be revealing to pose to him the following questions: Should intellectuals lie? Should they deceive or misrepresent personal or historical facts? Should they remember and forget selectively? Is such conduct ever justified? While some radical intellectuals go so far as to claim that all knowledge is a form of duping and others deny the very existence of "truth," Professor Edward Said, despite his radical politics, has taken a traditionalist approach to this topic. Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, Said has noted that "there is a great difference between political and intellectual behavior. The intellectual's role is to speak the truth, as plainly, directly and as honestly as possible....the intellectual's constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth unadorned."12
Indeed, in his new memoir Out of Place (1999), published after he became aware of my investigation, Said presents a radically revised version of his life in which he describes his Cairo childhood in great detail, and we learn that his schooling from age 6 to 16 took place in three different Cairo institutions. The publication of Said's new memoir a month after my article appeared in Commentary placed his defenders in an untenable situation, because without admitting to the inconsistency with his previous autobiographical writings, Said completely confirmed the core discoveries of my research.
The cause of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, to which so many of Said's friends assert their devotion, is not well-served by historical lies. The fact is that the "best-known Palestinian intellectual in the world" (as he was recently described on the BBC) made wholesale political use of the supposed circumstances of his childhood, weaving an elaborate myth of paradise and expulsion from paradise out of one or two circumstances and a raft of inventions. Edward Said was never a refugee from Palestine, but he is certainly a refugee from the truth.
* * *
Notes
Edward Said, "Palestine, Then and Now: An Exile's Journey Through Israel and the Occupied Territories," Harper's Magazine, December 1992, p. 47.
Edward Said, "Between Worlds: Edward Said Makes Sense of His Life," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998, p. 3.
Commentary, September 1999.
Edward Said, "Fifty Years in the Wilderness: A State of Dispossession and Violence," The Guardian, May 2, 1998, p. 21.
Bryan Appleyard, "Reflections from the Tightrope," The Independent (London), June 23, 1993, p. 23.
Edward Said, Lecture on "The Tragedy of Palestine" at Rice University, Houston, March 26, 1998.
Interview with Edward Said, Educational Broadcasting and GWETA, the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, August 1, 1991, Transcript #4129.
Edward Said, Lecture at the Fifth International Conference for "The Scenarios of Palestine," Birzeit University, November 12, 1998.
Interview with Barbara (Buber) Goldschmidt, November 10, 1996.
The incident was reported in the Boston Phoenix (January 10, 1984), New York Times (January 12, 1984), and Washington Post (January 13, 1984).
Letter to the Editor, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 1999.
Edward Said, "Israel-Palestine: A Third Way," Le Monde Diplomatique (Aug-Sep 1998).
* * *
Justus R. Weiner is an international human rights lawyer and a member of the Israel and New York Bar Associations. He is currently a Scholar in Residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and an adjunct lecturer at Hebrew and Tel Aviv Universities. The complete version of the research on Edward Said (with 141 footnotes, two charts, and a photograph) is available at http://www.commentarymagazine.com/9909/weiner.html. See also letters and responses on the article in Commentary (January 2000). The author wishes to express his appreciation to Judy Shulewitz and Zev Kanter for their assistance.
The Jerusalem Letter and Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints are published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 13 Tel-Hai St., Jerusalem, Israel; Tel. 972-2-5619281, Fax. 972-2-5619112, Internet: jcpa@netvision.net.il. In U.S.A.: 1515 Locust St., Suite 703, Philadelphia, PA 19102; Tel. (215) 772-0564, Fax. (215) 772-0566. © Copyright. All rights reserved. ISSN: 0792-7304.
The opinions expressed by the authors of Viewpoints do not necessarily reflect those of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
One article about Said's memoir controversy
this is taken from The New York Times Books online:
August 26, 1999
Israeli Says Palestinian Thinker Has Falsified His Early Life
By JANNY SCOTT
dward W. Said, the literary critic and intellectual who has long been one of the most eloquent proponents of the Palestinian cause, has been accused by an Israeli scholar of misrepresenting his early childhood in order to lend poignancy and power to his political stance.
In an article in the September issue of Commentary, which Mr. Said disputes, Justus Reid Weiner accuses him of cultivating a moving personal story of an idyllic childhood spent in Palestine that was abruptly shattered by exile to Cairo shortly before Israeli independence in 1948. In fact, Mr. Weiner says, Mr. Said's childhood home was Cairo. Although Mr. Said was born and baptized in Jerusalem, Mr. Weiner says he found no evidence that Mr. Said's parents owned the house there that he has reminisced about living in and no record that he attended fulltime the school he seemed to suggest he had.
In an interview late Tuesday, Mr. Said denied ever having misrepresented his past. He insisted he had always made it clear that he had grown up not only in Jerusalem but also in Egypt and Lebanon. He said his family had frequently traveled between Cairo and Jerusalem.
He said his father, Wadie Said, ran the Cairo branch of a family business; his cousin, Boulos Said, ran the Jerusalem branch. He said his father was a ''partner'' in the house in Jerusalem where Boulos Said lived with his wife, who was Wadie Said's sister, and where Wadie Said's family often stayed.
As for the school, St. George's preparatory school -- where a profile of Mr. Said in Current Biography Yearbook said his extracurricular activities included riding, boxing, gymnastics and piano -- he said Tuesday that he was enrolled there ''for a few months in 1947.'' Otherwise, he was in school in Egypt.
''I have never said I am a refugee,'' said Mr. Said, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of more than a dozen books. ''Never in my life. On the contrary, I go out of my way to say I had a very privileged life, we had a house in Cairo.''
On the other hand, he added, ''The fact is that of the rest of my family -- not my immediate family but all of my cousins and aunts and uncles -- not a single member of my family remained in Palestine after 1948. They were all, without exception, evicted. That's the central point.''
However, in an article published in 1998 in The London Review of Books quoted by Mr. Weiner, Mr. Said wrote, ''I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt.''
Mr. Said, who is 63, is widely admired as one of the most influential literary critics alive. He is also despised by many conservatives. He writes frequently about the Palestinian cause, was a member of the Palestinian National Council until 1991 and is a relentless critic of Israeli policy on the Palestinians and of the Oslo peace accords.
Mr. Weiner is a lawyer and scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which describes itself as an independent think tank. He emigrated from the United States to Israel in 1981 and spent 12 years working in the human rights department of the Israeli Ministry of Justice.
In an interview, Mr. Weiner said he spent three years investigating Mr. Said's life, looking through everything from baptismal and tax records and business directories to student registration books in Jerusalem and Cairo. He even toured the Jerusalem house to see whether two large families could fit.
He did not interview Mr. Said. He said he left one message with Mr. Said's assistant at Columbia two and a half years ago, explaining what he had found and asking Mr. Said to call. When Mr. Said did not call, he said, he never tried again. Mr. Said says he never received any such call.
Mr. Said's memoir, ''Out of Place,'' in which he describes his childhood in Cairo in great detail, is scheduled to be published by Alfred A. Knopf next month. Mr. Weiner suggests Mr. Said, who learned in 1991 that he had leukemia, wrote the memoir to ''camouflage and backfill,'' having caught wind of Mr. Weiner's research -- a suggestion Mr. Said dismissed as ''rubbish.''
In the article in Commentary, a neoconservative magazine that has an interest in Jewish affairs and that once published an article on Mr. Said entitled ''Professor of Terror,'' Mr. Weiner cites numerous instances in which Mr. Said seems to have left the impression that he had spent his early years in Jerusalem.
For example, Mr. Weiner describes a 1998 documentary entitled ''In Search of Palestine'' that Mr. Said helped make for the BBC, which included recent footage of him and his son outside the house in Jerusalem and footage of Mr. Said touring St. George's preparatory school.
But Mr. Weiner says the title deed of the house listed only the family of Boulos Said. He says he found no listing of Wadie Said in Jerusalem's telephone and commercial directories. Having gone in and measured the house, he says it was too small to house two large, prosperous families together.
Asked whether his time in Jerusalem might have been overstated, Mr. Said said, ''I had a very itinerant life.''
''And I don't think it's that important, in any case. It doesn't make that much difference to the case I'm representing. I never have represented my case as the issue to be treated. I've represented the case of my people, which is something quite different.''
August 26, 1999
Israeli Says Palestinian Thinker Has Falsified His Early Life
By JANNY SCOTT
dward W. Said, the literary critic and intellectual who has long been one of the most eloquent proponents of the Palestinian cause, has been accused by an Israeli scholar of misrepresenting his early childhood in order to lend poignancy and power to his political stance.
In an article in the September issue of Commentary, which Mr. Said disputes, Justus Reid Weiner accuses him of cultivating a moving personal story of an idyllic childhood spent in Palestine that was abruptly shattered by exile to Cairo shortly before Israeli independence in 1948. In fact, Mr. Weiner says, Mr. Said's childhood home was Cairo. Although Mr. Said was born and baptized in Jerusalem, Mr. Weiner says he found no evidence that Mr. Said's parents owned the house there that he has reminisced about living in and no record that he attended fulltime the school he seemed to suggest he had.
In an interview late Tuesday, Mr. Said denied ever having misrepresented his past. He insisted he had always made it clear that he had grown up not only in Jerusalem but also in Egypt and Lebanon. He said his family had frequently traveled between Cairo and Jerusalem.
He said his father, Wadie Said, ran the Cairo branch of a family business; his cousin, Boulos Said, ran the Jerusalem branch. He said his father was a ''partner'' in the house in Jerusalem where Boulos Said lived with his wife, who was Wadie Said's sister, and where Wadie Said's family often stayed.
As for the school, St. George's preparatory school -- where a profile of Mr. Said in Current Biography Yearbook said his extracurricular activities included riding, boxing, gymnastics and piano -- he said Tuesday that he was enrolled there ''for a few months in 1947.'' Otherwise, he was in school in Egypt.
''I have never said I am a refugee,'' said Mr. Said, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of more than a dozen books. ''Never in my life. On the contrary, I go out of my way to say I had a very privileged life, we had a house in Cairo.''
On the other hand, he added, ''The fact is that of the rest of my family -- not my immediate family but all of my cousins and aunts and uncles -- not a single member of my family remained in Palestine after 1948. They were all, without exception, evicted. That's the central point.''
However, in an article published in 1998 in The London Review of Books quoted by Mr. Weiner, Mr. Said wrote, ''I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt.''
Mr. Said, who is 63, is widely admired as one of the most influential literary critics alive. He is also despised by many conservatives. He writes frequently about the Palestinian cause, was a member of the Palestinian National Council until 1991 and is a relentless critic of Israeli policy on the Palestinians and of the Oslo peace accords.
Mr. Weiner is a lawyer and scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which describes itself as an independent think tank. He emigrated from the United States to Israel in 1981 and spent 12 years working in the human rights department of the Israeli Ministry of Justice.
In an interview, Mr. Weiner said he spent three years investigating Mr. Said's life, looking through everything from baptismal and tax records and business directories to student registration books in Jerusalem and Cairo. He even toured the Jerusalem house to see whether two large families could fit.
He did not interview Mr. Said. He said he left one message with Mr. Said's assistant at Columbia two and a half years ago, explaining what he had found and asking Mr. Said to call. When Mr. Said did not call, he said, he never tried again. Mr. Said says he never received any such call.
Mr. Said's memoir, ''Out of Place,'' in which he describes his childhood in Cairo in great detail, is scheduled to be published by Alfred A. Knopf next month. Mr. Weiner suggests Mr. Said, who learned in 1991 that he had leukemia, wrote the memoir to ''camouflage and backfill,'' having caught wind of Mr. Weiner's research -- a suggestion Mr. Said dismissed as ''rubbish.''
In the article in Commentary, a neoconservative magazine that has an interest in Jewish affairs and that once published an article on Mr. Said entitled ''Professor of Terror,'' Mr. Weiner cites numerous instances in which Mr. Said seems to have left the impression that he had spent his early years in Jerusalem.
For example, Mr. Weiner describes a 1998 documentary entitled ''In Search of Palestine'' that Mr. Said helped make for the BBC, which included recent footage of him and his son outside the house in Jerusalem and footage of Mr. Said touring St. George's preparatory school.
But Mr. Weiner says the title deed of the house listed only the family of Boulos Said. He says he found no listing of Wadie Said in Jerusalem's telephone and commercial directories. Having gone in and measured the house, he says it was too small to house two large, prosperous families together.
Asked whether his time in Jerusalem might have been overstated, Mr. Said said, ''I had a very itinerant life.''
''And I don't think it's that important, in any case. It doesn't make that much difference to the case I'm representing. I never have represented my case as the issue to be treated. I've represented the case of my people, which is something quite different.''
"Ice Candy Man," What "Earth" Got Wrong, Lighting
Going off of Jae's blog, ICM became more violent throughout the novel. "Earth" made this seem like both a quick change, and barely a change at all. The creeping toes and dangling Lenny (while in the book it is Adi), are executed as a joke, or even playful flirting. ICM is placed as a viable romantic candidate in the Bollywood love triangle. At Papoo's wedding, ICM and Ayah happily sing and dance together. The tone of these scenes is exactly what is off, or missing from the movie. Papoo was asleep, but not drugged. The bridegroom was a strange choice, but it was for her protection, not her punishment. Nobody really cared. After Lenny is dangled, she is not even afraid of him, instead she tells Ayah that he is her hero.
As the book progressed ICM not only became more violent, but fell into deeper identification as a Muslim nationalist. As the group watches the fires of Lahore, ICM is not only exhilarated, but when the petrol fireman come he is laughing and grinning, uninhibited by the Hindus in his presence, excited to find they men are Muslim. In the movie, Masseur is a Muslim, making it less of a big deal that Ayah chooses him over ICM. In the book, this draw to violence even incurs before his family's death.
Earlier in both the book and the film, ICM pretends to be a Muslim "holy man" putting on a show in the park much like the bird trick he pulls on English ladies. He is casual telephoning Allah, and the whole thing is a scam. He had little respect for his religion, until the violence was being divided on those lines. In the film, this scene has a quick clip where the contrast levels are up and the scene looks dark and stormy, unlike the previous hazy glow of the scene (and most of the film). In class we touched on lighting in the film as a way to cue the viewer into spaces (or places?) of safety. During the sex scene, a miraculous glow of light covers the the couple's bodies. By miraculous I mean it is night outside and it is not coming in from either of the windows, there is no light source. In these brief instances of lighting extremity, ICM is places as a dangerous man. Little else in the film suggests this before Ayah is kidnapped.
Ayah's kidnapping scene was also poorly done. ICM asks Lenny in front of the entire staring crowd and she tells him like the bland bratty child the film made me believe she was. In the book I at least felt like she was manipulated. Then the film ends with Lenny brushing off the consequences. She relates how it affected her, but gives three drastically different rumors of Ayah's fate: ICM's wife, a prostitute, home with her family. The ending is self involved, taking away the significance of the kidnapping, and its emotional affect.
The film didn't capture of the creeping darkness of the book. Each piece of horror was a joke, or forgotten. The film had only one pace, and no set up. The characters weren't given much time to change. The family felt "whiter" and more stuck up, and the badass female characters (Mother, Electric Aunt, Godmother) were replaced with Victorian domesticity or were not existant. What does this say about partition? It made the violence seem doomed, like friends were always going to kill friends. No one tried to find Ayah. The film almost felt apathetic. This is not solely because the women were ripped from this film, but because the adaptation of tone failed. If Ayah (and maybe Lenny) are India, then ICM is nationalism. In the book we gather this from the change of his character over time. (Where are his captivating stories in the movie?) In conclusion, there were issues with the craft of the novel, but its relaying of content and emotive pull were successful. The movie proved "it could be worse."
Monday, October 4, 2010
Cracking India & Earth: Connections & Conclusions
So I finished Cracking India and I must say that it's a damn good book! Reading the articles on India's partition only go so far with the facts and figures, but reading about how it affected the daily happenings of Lenny an her group of usuals. As the book progressed tree we're a few things that really stuck out to me: the violent progression of Ice Candy Man, the power of Godmother, and the ending descriptions of the park.
In terms of ICM, he was on my shit list as soon as he held Adi and threatened to drop him on his head unless Ayah went out with him. That's just the beginning of disturbing actions on his part; later on when observing the fires of neighboring towns Lenny describes him as having a look of strange exhilaration that she never again wants to see (145). Later while filling in their group on the latest gossip ICM seems to have "acquired an unpleasant swagger and a strange way of looking at Hari and Moti. He is full of Bravado..." (165). He shows up with money from a place he looted - it seems that the trainload of dead passengers has caused this change in him. The next instances of ha new found creepy/violent ways is when we learn that where ever Ayah is, he is.....LITERALLY. Ayah goes to meet up with the masseur and guess who is lurking behind the tiger cage, they goto Electric-Aunt's garden - guess who followed them there. Even after he "has" Ayah to himself and she leaves him for the broken women's center- guess who never leaves the place, breaks out into random professions of love poetry; and once she has the ok to head back to her family...I don't even have to say the words. I understand this man was in love (or seriously obsessed) with Ayah, but he sure goes about getting her in a very strange way. Oddly enough through all of his heartache & new poetic persona I couldn't help but to feel bad or him....just a little, after all he is on my shit list for a reason.
In terms of Godmother, who knew she had so much power (as a woman...given the time period and location). It was a bit surprising that she literally turned out to be like the God Father of this story. Hopefully you all know that I'm referring to her sending the police to get Ayah away from ICM. "The reach of Godmother's tentacular arm's clearly evident" - thats definitely true (285).
As for the park, I find it sad that in the beginning it was a happy place for people (no matter their religion or nationality) to come together and simply enjoy the open, green, and beautiful space. In class we talked about how as the tensions of the partition increase, the dynamics of the park change dramatically. So in the beginning it all fun & games, then people started to segregate themselves and their kids (this is where the Adi playing with the white kids happens), and then we hear that the park isn’t much of a gathering place anymore- Hamida goes there with Lenny feels uncomfortable, the color is gone, the Queen’s statue is gone – the beauty of the park in general seems to be gone (249).
*Final thoughts on the book: reading through what happened to Ranna and his family had me reaching for tissues, the idea of betrayal comes back a few more times, and now that Ive dinished the book I can further back up the claim that Lenny's innocence really is tied in with Ayah.
**A question has popped into me head as I've typed this out...thinking of Ayah as India, since she is unable to shake ICM wherever she goes could we think of him as the happenings of the partition that forever haunts India? I don't remember where I read it, but one of our readings says that the partition is forever in the mind of India, a haunting memory.
Earth: I don’t feel like the movie did the book enough justice (but isn’t it usually like that anyways. I was at least happy with the way Ayah and he suitors were cast/portrayed…mainly how ICM and Masseur were the best looking of the bunch and of course Ayah was beautiful. I find it interesting that after having read the book, I knew ICM and Masseur apart because ICM had a sinister look to him (which increased with the tension surrounding the partition and definitely fit his character well) where as Masseur was straight up puppy dog. Going along with the idea of the movie not doing the book justice, there were some good parts and people left out. Doesn’t Lenny have a brother named Adi? And a father who with a heard and long curly hair? Wasnt Papoo a little older, more animated, and with a baby on her hip at all times? What about Slavesister ad Godmother? Lol…I know they all couldn’t be included, but having read the book the movie is so bare boned.
Thats all I can remember wanting to say, so untill next time...enjoy.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Symbolism in Cracking India
The book was filled with metaphors between India and other aspects. I mentioned some of them in my previous post, but it became even more apparent after I finished the novel. This post explains some of the meta
There was a paragraph at the beginning of chapter 7 which described typical behavior from Imam Din. The opinions of his behavior was dependent on the sex of that individual. Though I might be stretching with this one, I believe there are similarities between their reactions and overall reactions of the Hindus, Muslims of the split of India and also their opinions on the overall independence movement.
Also, there were more examples of Lenny being treated differently than everyone else in the novel. The behaviors of two characters stood out to me. Dr Moody and Slavesister in particular teased Lenny excessively and it annoyed her as well as Godmother at times. An instance of this was in chapter 21, when there was a comment being made about Lenny peeing in her bed. Slavesister referred to the fact that she washed the bedsheets and implied that no one else does and thus is unqualified to speak. Godmother then proceeds to go off on her, stating in her rant that Slavesister needs to grow up(p. 175). This on top of making me happy, also explained a lot about the story as well. Indians overall had been mistreated by the British for many years. After years of the same song and dance, Indians were able to break free from the clutches of England and were able to live freely. Alas, the problems did not end there just like they did not end for Lenny. For instance, on her birthday most of the people surrounding her were less than enthusiastic upon hearing about it. This clearly upset her and this was even more evident in the movie.
The beginning of chapter 17 was filled with metaphors, including a debatable one. The beginning paragraph reiterated a quote that was mentioned in the movie Earth by Mr Singh, "Playing British Gods under the ceiling fans of the Faletti's Hotel-behind Queen Victoria's gardened skirt- the Radcliff Commission deals out India like a pack of cards. Lahore is dealt to Pakistan, Amritsar to India. Sialkot to Pakistan. Pakistan to India(150)." This may not be the most accurate of metaphors. When one deals cards, he or she does so without regards to who is getting what cards. The partitioning of India on the other hand was thought out and acted upon on the basis of religious differences. It was not very humane, but it was a planned course of action, not a game of chance.
Finally, the last metaphor that I would like to mention is a quote that is not an explicit, if at all, a metaphor for India. It comes after the climax of the novel when Ayah is taken away and Lenny feels extremely guilty because it was her words which lead to Ayah's kidnapping, "For three days I stand in front of the bathroom mirror staring at my tongue. I hold the vile, truth infected thing between my fingers and try to wrench it out: but slippery and slick as a fish it slicks from my fingers and mocks me with its sharp raspier tip darting as poisonous as a snake. I punish it with rigorous scouring from my prickling toothbrush until it is sore and bleeding. I'm so conscious of its unwelcome presence at all times that it swells unconfortably in my mouth and gags and chokes me(196)." This is a strange way of explaining her guilt, but it probably has been said by other individuals. Maybe the quote is a metaphor for her growing up. She was the golden child for much of the novel, in the fact that she could not do anything wrong even though other characters in the novel may have thought differently. However, the tone changes when she informs the angry mob about Ayah's location. You can sense that she is accessing emotions which she had never expressed previously. She even poses a somewhat retorical question later in the novel about whether the anger of losing Ayah, caused her to grow up. I say yes. And maybe this speaks to a larger metaphor about India's maturity as it separates from England.
There was a paragraph at the beginning of chapter 7 which described typical behavior from Imam Din. The opinions of his behavior was dependent on the sex of that individual. Though I might be stretching with this one, I believe there are similarities between their reactions and overall reactions of the Hindus, Muslims of the split of India and also their opinions on the overall independence movement.
Also, there were more examples of Lenny being treated differently than everyone else in the novel. The behaviors of two characters stood out to me. Dr Moody and Slavesister in particular teased Lenny excessively and it annoyed her as well as Godmother at times. An instance of this was in chapter 21, when there was a comment being made about Lenny peeing in her bed. Slavesister referred to the fact that she washed the bedsheets and implied that no one else does and thus is unqualified to speak. Godmother then proceeds to go off on her, stating in her rant that Slavesister needs to grow up(p. 175). This on top of making me happy, also explained a lot about the story as well. Indians overall had been mistreated by the British for many years. After years of the same song and dance, Indians were able to break free from the clutches of England and were able to live freely. Alas, the problems did not end there just like they did not end for Lenny. For instance, on her birthday most of the people surrounding her were less than enthusiastic upon hearing about it. This clearly upset her and this was even more evident in the movie.
The beginning of chapter 17 was filled with metaphors, including a debatable one. The beginning paragraph reiterated a quote that was mentioned in the movie Earth by Mr Singh, "Playing British Gods under the ceiling fans of the Faletti's Hotel-behind Queen Victoria's gardened skirt- the Radcliff Commission deals out India like a pack of cards. Lahore is dealt to Pakistan, Amritsar to India. Sialkot to Pakistan. Pakistan to India(150)." This may not be the most accurate of metaphors. When one deals cards, he or she does so without regards to who is getting what cards. The partitioning of India on the other hand was thought out and acted upon on the basis of religious differences. It was not very humane, but it was a planned course of action, not a game of chance.
Finally, the last metaphor that I would like to mention is a quote that is not an explicit, if at all, a metaphor for India. It comes after the climax of the novel when Ayah is taken away and Lenny feels extremely guilty because it was her words which lead to Ayah's kidnapping, "For three days I stand in front of the bathroom mirror staring at my tongue. I hold the vile, truth infected thing between my fingers and try to wrench it out: but slippery and slick as a fish it slicks from my fingers and mocks me with its sharp raspier tip darting as poisonous as a snake. I punish it with rigorous scouring from my prickling toothbrush until it is sore and bleeding. I'm so conscious of its unwelcome presence at all times that it swells unconfortably in my mouth and gags and chokes me(196)." This is a strange way of explaining her guilt, but it probably has been said by other individuals. Maybe the quote is a metaphor for her growing up. She was the golden child for much of the novel, in the fact that she could not do anything wrong even though other characters in the novel may have thought differently. However, the tone changes when she informs the angry mob about Ayah's location. You can sense that she is accessing emotions which she had never expressed previously. She even poses a somewhat retorical question later in the novel about whether the anger of losing Ayah, caused her to grow up. I say yes. And maybe this speaks to a larger metaphor about India's maturity as it separates from England.
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