Edward Said's Concept of Exile

Identity and Cultural Migration in the Middle East

Rehnuma Sazzad

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784536879
• eBook ISBN: 9781786722607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

Edward Said was an exiled individual – the 'out of place' Palestinian in the USA. He saw the consequences of the 1948 dismantling of Palestine and the establishment of Israel through his parents' experiences and through the collective statelessness imposed on the Palestinians. His own personal experience of exile intensified when he moved to the USA. Yet despite the significance of exile to Said's lifeand work, no scholarship has yet focused on this theme in his writings or traced its ongoing applicability and importance. Rehnuma Sazzad fulfils this pressing need in literary and cultural research by providing the first comprehensive definition of Said's theory of exile and reveals its legacy in relation to five Middle Eastern intellectuals: Naguib Mahfouz, Mahmoud Darwish, Leila Ahmed, Nawal El Saadawi and Youssef Chahine. By selecting a novelist, poet, feminist, filmmaker and essayist, Sazzad shows how, for Said, the ideal intellectual is a metaphorical exile, demonstrating a willing homelessness. This book creates a portrait of redoubtable intellectual practice and in the twenty-first-century context, when the frontiers of belonging are being constantly redrawn, Edward Said's Concept of Exile adds new depths to discourses of resistance, home and identity.

1

Exile and Intellectual Practice

Edward Said (2001b: 186) presents displacement through effective natural imagery when he explains that ‘[e]‌xile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is “a mind of winter” in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable’. He contrasts three seasons of nature and the feelings surrounding them with the mono-seasonal standing of exile. This denotes life inside homeland as a natural event and life outside it as a strange phenomenon, which does not follow the known rhythm, familiar feelings or settled ways of living. A frosty expanse dominates the landscape of an exile’s mind, because it remains separated from the sights and sounds it surveys. Even if an exile yearns for the warmth of summer and autumn or the joys of spring to vivify the mind’s landscape, they refuse to settle there permanently. Nevertheless, the frosty mind does not suggest misery of non-belonging alone. The Stevensian image implies a mind made motionless through contemplation so that one may observe nature more intently. Winter, snow and ice act as symbols of quietude and reflection (Stevens 2007) in this context. Through listening to the innermost core of oneself, one differentiates between the illusory and transcendental reality. Therefore, exile evokes a complex phenomenon. It is cold, colourless and dismal. Paradoxically, these create an occasion for profound thoughts.

To Said, exile is similar to the Arabic manfa, which denotes banishment. However, Juliane Hammer (2005) points out that another Arabic term, ghurba, has been more prevalent in Palestinian literary writings to denote displacement. Hammer adds that ghurba highlights the sufferings of dislocation but manfa depicts the cause of uprootedness – expulsion from one’s native land. This indicates that Said’s model of deracination is based on the history of the Palestinians, whose winter of estrangement started with the Nakba. Besides, manfa as exile not only invokes the historical cause of Palestinian homelessness but also conjures up a picture of contemplation. Therefore, Said chooses the term exile to describe the loss of a homeland and represent an occasion for reflection.

Being an exile himself, Said is unwilling to accept the feeling of loss as an ultimate reality of being separated from a homeland. Instead, he reads estrangement as a representative feature of modern culture. In fact, the critic believes that Western modernity has taken shape due to the work of émigrés and exiles to a great extent. Said (2001b: 173) clarifies that the intellectual and aesthetic vistas of America have been majorly formed by ‘refugees from fascism, communism, and other regimes given to the oppression and expulsion of dissidents’. The critic observes that exile is designed to diminish the dignity of an individual obtained through a secure identity by being part of a specific group, culture and locale. If anything can ameliorate the loss of dignity in the insecure condition it is the creative work of writers and artists, who put the anguish into positive use. Said reiterates that the uprooted intellectuals do not obfuscate the dreadful sufferings of exile. On the contrary, their disjointed state inspires them to reconfigure their shattered life, which appears to be the operative value of the onerous phenomenon. In this way, self-reflection becomes the paradoxical benefit of exile for Said.

The critic’s writing elaborates on the process of reflection that leads to dissociation from the prevalent ideas of identity, belonging and security. Said (ibid.: 185) asserts: ‘Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prison, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity.’ In order to counteract the imprisoning influences of home, he underlines the urgency of realising its non-final nature. He repeatedly quotes a twelfth-century German monk, Hugo of St Victor, whose perfect man is a spiritually homeless person. Such an individual investigates her/his attachment to familiar places and overcomes the unquestioning love for them. Said invokes St Victor’s notion of the entire world as an unknown place to illustrate a secular process of being in exile that enables intellectuals to accomplish independent criticisms of home and host cultures.

The love of homeland is not banished from such an idealistic intellectual’s heart but s/he ceases to see home as a given idea. Said’s ideal intellectual stops unquestioningly accepting the homogenous culture as delightful. Rather, s/he distances him/herself from a comfortable loyalty to it that begins with an automated delight in home culture. In fact, the geographical, physical or metaphorical conditions of the intellectuals are such that they cannot recapture the auto-generated veneration, even if they want to. They then critically decide what aspects or practices of their home cultures to give up and what values to sustain. They judge ‘alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance’ (Said 2003: 259). This is how they remain in a permanent state of non-belonging through which, however, they are free from being engulfed by the dogmas or illusions of home, the natural divisiveness of identity formation (‘us’ versus ‘them’), and the narrow perspectives on foreign cultures. Therefore, Said insists on intellectually transcending the existential sufferings of any form of separation from homeland in order to cultivate what George Lamming (1960) famously calls ‘the pleasures of exile’.

The benefits of forming new thoughts and welcoming unknown experiences tell us why Said’s exile is essentially an intellectual, not an ordinary citizen or a refugee. By no means does Said (2001b: 175) undermine, though, the sufferings of ‘the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created’. On the contrary, he wants his model intellectual to perceive that the condition of being torn from one’s familiar environment is ‘like death but without death’s ultimate mercy’ (ibid.: 174). Said further asserts that the condition of refugees is invariably grounded in worldly realities, which bear the unfortunate traces of injustice towards one group of humans by another. The perception of the acute sufferings of the uprooted people and the systems of injustice working behind the phenomenon leads Said (1993: 332) to confirm that ‘it would be the rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that the bravura performances of the intellectual exile and the miseries of the displaced person or refugee are the same’. Surely, no one in his/her right mind can claim that individuals remain undeprived by the upheaval of deracination. However, Said inspires us not to accept the privation as a totality. Instead, he urges intellectuals to comprehend the transformative power of exile and cultivate the paradoxical blessings of their physical or metaphorical disjunction from the home and the world.

Said’s life and works exemplify a powerful transformation of the loss into an intellectual existence, which is determined not to be defeated by the forces that impose the loss on ordinary individuals. I will soon illustrate that Palestine remained the central trope in the formulations of his thoughts regarding exile throughout his oeuvre. Naturally, he believes that gifted intellectuals should endeavour to stop the systems from generating injustice both inside and outside the homeland so that human beings in general can benefit from their stance against oppression and compartmentalisation of all kinds. As I explained above, Said views the writings, films and photographs created out of ‘unhoused exilic experiences’ (ibid.: 330) as a revitalising force for Western modernism. More importantly, he believes that the pressing duty for today’s intellectual is twofold. First, they have to connect the histories of dislocations with the socio-political interdependence of human beings around the globe. Secondly, they must resist the monopolisation of cultural histories by bringing forward the complex and intersecting points among them.

Arguably, Said’s parallel thoughts on exile as a lived experience and as a model for political dissent and cultural diversity have remained ambiguous, despite the fact that a lot has been written on his vocation of exile, as will be evident from the discussion below. The comprehensive view of the term neither dissociates exile from its contextual realities nor places it on an idealised realm as a figurative form of criticism. Instead, my analysis of Saidian exile shows how a committed intellectual is cut off from his/her homeland, whether or not s/he actually migrates from its ambience. The discussion further elaborates the paradoxical benefits of the disconnection, which are not limited to oppositional thoughts alone. As I suggested above, Said urges the unhoused intellectual to incorporate a constructive worldview involving connections and comparisons among vastly different cultural practices.

Far from diminishing the human cost of losing a homeland, therefore, Said emphasises the intellectual values of the exilic vocation. To reiterate, Said’s view of exile appears with a duality, which never allows the critic to forget that ‘it is an actual condition’, while giving him reasons to assert that the term also denotes ‘a metaphorical condition’ (Said 1996: 52; emphasis in the original). The metaphorical dimension is derived from the fact that an intellectual does not necessarily have to migrate to a different country in order to dissociate his/her thinking self from the dominant cultural environment. Said unequivocally states that:

Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities towards the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and the comfortable (ibid: 63).

Therefore, exile is an exemplary situation for a Saidian intellectual, who imagines cultural realities by travelling beyond the existing boundaries and questions the authorities that create the limits to categorise people. Therefore, Said’s exilic intellectual must be able to cultivate the scholarly benefits of voyaging away from customary and convenient thoughts.

As I have been pinpointing, the severance with the customariness will endow Saidian intellectuals with the ability to contemplate and form independent thoughts, be mindful of historical realities, reconfigure markers of identity, master non-fixation with the idea of home, hold non-divisive worldviews and form unhierarchical perspectives on cultures. Said (1993: 332) further confirms that this is a politically conscious position that enables intellectuals to be ‘between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages’. To put it succinctly, Said’s exile is a vocation of bringing together traditions, locations and groups to generate novel perspectives out of the comparisons among the entities without basing the practice on coercion or compartmentalisation.

Said and the executive view of exile

Because he is an upholder of justice and fair play, Said does not minimise the turmoil of exile for its executive value. Bruce Robbins identifies the critic’s dual approach to exile very early on. Robbins (1983: 69) asserts that while Said centralises ‘the chronic ache of exile from origin, tradition, and home culture’ for questioning the boundaries of modernism, his Palestinian background makes him ‘too aware of the psychological and political cost of displacement to exult in its dizzying unanchoredness’. Clearly, Said’s metaphoric narrative of exile is not a celebration of an exorbitant, confounding and insecure condition. Contrary to the simplistic way of conceiving exile, Said introduces the concept as a means of pressing ahead, despite the challenges of circumstances. This philosophy is reflected in his stance on the Palestinian cause. He advocates that no human being should be driven out of his/her homeland; no human being should be forced to cast off his/her native land and culture. Despite the exigency of the Palestinian affair, however, Said refuses to compromise on his indifference to any fixed moorings. The dispersed and fragmented life of the Palestinians, who mostly occupy a non-space in the world map, and whose stories move across historical boundaries, symbolises cubist paintings to Said. ‘The cubist nonplace of the Palestinians bears a strong resemblance to the shifting, interstitial locus of Said’s modernist criticism’ (ibid.: 70), suggests Robbins.

I would argue that the criticism delineates Said’s exilic imagination that influences the arena by urging the reformation of existing ideas about human belonging. If the freedom to spontaneously reassess the ideas composing a secure identity is unavailable, Said cannot be at home in any institutions or places. Consequently, his exilic intellectual practice is fraught with desolation. Nevertheless, Robbins argues that Said’s contribution to modernism begins with his realisation that the feeling of homelessness is not deprived of its operational values. In truth, Robbins asserts that ‘Said’s long meditations on exile … have helped him convert its forlornness and nihilism into vocational energy’ (ibid.: 77). Without the energy, the reconstitution of our identity markers remains decidedly unaccomplished.

Despite Robbins’ clarity of thought regarding Said’s dual viewpoint on exile, the specificity of the concept makes it complex. Hamid Dabashi (2011a: 23) states point-blank that the term is dissatisfactory: ‘Contrary to Said, I no longer see the point of being in exile or in diaspora; both these terms alienate and disqualify.’ The assertion results from his discussion of some writers from Arab-African countries, who betray the people from whom they originate by demeaning their native cultures in the guise of criticism, which is encouraged by the distance and security provided by their migration to America. Evidently, Dabashi does not distinguish between the terms ‘exile’ and ‘diaspora’. However, Said (2005) is against using ‘diaspora’ to denote the Palestinian situation, since it was appropriated by the official Zionist discourse to establish a mythical claim on the land. As a result, Said did not utilise the term to suggest an intellectual vocation; rather, he was more interested in a historical rather than a mythical imagination regarding cultural migration and/or nation formation. By conflating exile with diaspora, though, Dabashi concludes that migration to the West is responsible for his chosen writers’ surrender to America’s imperialistic mission, since they produce information to serve its purpose.

The echoing of the American government’s viewpoint by supposedly Middle East experts earned Said’s disapproval too for the elitism and oversimplification involved in their manufactured opinions. Said shows how the supposed specialists fall into the same group of writers Dabashi reviews. To Said (2003: xxi), the expert’s stance against his own people is nothing less than what Julien Benda (2007 [1927]) calls a ‘trahison des clercs’(2003: xxi). When Dabashi (2011a: 39) suggests that ‘[i]‌n the shadow of Said’s exilic intellectual, however, has always lurked a parasite called the comprador intellectual’, it becomes apparent that the intermediary intellectual should be regarded as a treasonous one. Furthermore, Dabashi notes that ‘comprador’ etymologically means ‘house-steward’ (see ibid.). Understandably, the writer is discussing an insider and an aye-sayer, not a Saidian exile. In order to take up the Saidian mission, intellectuals have to be ‘at odds with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honors are concerned’ (Said 1996: 52–3). By thinking of exile as a spatial phenomenon, Dabashi obliterates the fact that Said introduces the concept as both a geographical condition and a principled position.

Interestingly, Dabashi recognises part of the figurative aspect of being a Saidian exile by dint of the intellectual’s courage to challenge the established systems of recognition. Dabashi (2011a: 39) writes that Said’s prototypical intellectual ‘is a sort of amphibian character who has left the colonial site of his upbringing for the presumed center of capital … to dismantle its ideological edifice and subvert its claim to political legitimacy’. Problematically, Dabashi does not underscore that migrating from the colonial centre is not a prerequisite for the subversive role Said’s exilic intellectual carries out. As a result, he misses out on Said’s ideational rendering of belonging. As explained above through Hugo of St Victor, belonging for an exilic intellectual is not automated. It requires the intellectual to be aware of the multiplicity of cultural strands that need to be weighted and negotiated for creating a metaphorical disconnection with the locale s/he inhabits. Therefore, Dabashi’s belief that ‘[h]‌ome is where you hold your horses, hang your hat, and above all raise your voice in defiance and say no to oppression’ (ibid.: 23) is not entirely applicable to the exilic intellectual; because location is primeval in this definition. For Dabashi, home is a place where an intellectual is adversarial. For Said, home is a place that an intellectual is disconnected from either actually and/or metaphorically in order to question the unjust system as well as offer a more humanistic view of the socio-political structure.

In this connection, I reiterate that homelessness is no condition for celebration in Said’s exilic vocation. Having assessed diasporic intellectuals in the American context, Timothy Brennan (2012) concludes that the post-World War II cosmopolitans in New York held onto the idea of migration as an opportunity for liberation, and expanded the horizon of modernism by including the knowledge of the non-West to the static cultural industry of the country. However, the discourse of the displaced writers excluded migrant labourers, who are alienated from the cultural activities and embittered by the forced dislocation due to their pressing need to find a satisfactory wage and improved working conditions. Unlike diasporic writers, labourers cannot negotiate the irremovable differences between their foreign and native lands. In this context, it might appear that Said’s exilic vocation also overshadows the non-intellectual aspect of dislodgement by focusing on human capabilities of turning the pain of uprooting into intellectual privileges. However, far from withdrawing to an imaginary realm where one concentra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Exile and Intellectual Practice
• 2 Middle Eastern Artists as Exilic Intellectuals
• 3 Exile as Resistance
• 4 The Place of Writing in Exile
• 5 Exile in the Contexts of Postcolonialism and Postmodernism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography