I loved Said. For, as Nietzsche puts it;

“I love him which [sic] makes of his virtue his inclination and his destiny: for thus for his virtue's sake he wills either to live or to cease to live.

… I love him which [sic] strews golden words before his deeds and performs yet more than he promises: for seeks his own down-going.

I love all them which are as heavy rain-drops falling one by one from the dark cloud that lowers over mankind: they herald the coming lightning, and they perish as heralds.” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

Said existed in the minds of countless Arabs and Muslims not as an author, neither was he just an academic. He was present as an ethos. Where human life is that of the self in a world of thought, a blind of anecdote and exegesis, Said was a grand part of many of our worlds. If there is anything that he stood tall for it was, no doubt, dignity, coming from an unapologetic and enthusiastic ‘human’. If there is a lesson we should learn from his life-despite many of such lessons-it is to never accept any less than the upper grounds, moral, intellectual, and ‘human’. He left us all orphaned and near to the ground.

As it is known about him, he was against the idealization of any figure, even himself. But what can we do if the ‘cause’ itself, with all its insufferable weight, was lifted on his shoulders and rooted itself into his purposefulness and intellect? And then he was transformed to be an expression of the cause itself? What do you do if the man and cause become on a par? He structured the epistemology of Palestinian struggle for liberation, of the Arab and Muslim struggle against the vehement tides in seas of arrogance and ignorance, of the all human intellectual quest. His human generosity is stretched out to all, academia, literature, art, music, activism, political struggle, family and as a many great thinkers, to his friends.

He squeezed a vision of a dignified ‘present’ to Palestine, out of a history (disfigured by Zionist myths and viciousness) and a future (suffocating from uncertainty and apathy), that was his individual life. He pressured both the ‘space’ and ‘time’ of the relativity of his life next to the impossible. Exile, Leukemia, polemics, occupation, 9/11, Oslo, the existential tragedy of his fellow Palestinians-all that could not put out his always-ignited fire. Still, he died without seeing his most essential dream realized; the liberation of Palestine. He truly stood his own ground and flew with the power of his mind and action to the space of the free. His life was dedicated to the ‘Palestinian memory’ which structured, despite all the storms of falsehoods trying to vacuum Palestine out of the world. His actions and struggles for liberation are better expressed here:

“… This is the use of memory:

For liberation-not less of love but expanding

Of Love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past.

Thus, Love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Through never indifferent. History maybe servitude,

History maybe freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could,

Loved them

To become renewed transfigured, in another pattern.” (T. S. Eliot, from Little Gidding)

Born in Jerusalem, yet Christian; in Cairo, yet a Palestinian; an American, yet an Arab; the story of being out of ‘place’. Against American triumphalism and Zionist pathological propagandas, he was a sun of integrity. Although a Palestinian, he uncompromisingly stood against Arafat and his absolutism, the dishonor of Oslo, and the “suicide” bombs, an issue which he was always against. Still, with his eyes fixed on the danger of Zionist immorality, he always denounced the Holocaust.

I met the man once a few months ago. It was a series of three lectures, and of all the famous people I met, he was the only figure I can think of who was not less than expected and somehow idealized. He looked drained by leukemia. His eyes set very close to each other, leaving a narrow space for a long old nose, showed both the exhaustion of leukemia and the shrewdness of his mind. His hands, big with distinctive knuckles, especially when he used to hold his pen, were always in the air, not excessively though, showing both the mannerism of a modestly giant intellectual mind and the artistic strokes of a gifted pianist. The projection of his deep voice was effortlessly mesmerizing, nay hypnotizing.

Away from all that, that power of the poetic which he mastered was truly genius. This small excerpt from the last paragraph from his autobiography, Out of Place, which a friend showed me and got me to read, is written with great human delicacy and command. This is a taste of his thoughtful night and a graceful portrayal of insomnia. Our worlds are darker without him and longer are our nights (emphasis added):

“Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost: there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night's loss, than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely few hours earlier. I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the theme of one's life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are "off" and may be out place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, the contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I'd like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.” (Said, Out of Place)

Tarek A. Ghanem is a staff writer and editor of the Contemporary Issues page of IslamOnline.net. He is specialized in comparative politics and contemporary Islam. You can reach him at t.ghanem@islam-online.net

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