Edward Said: ‘We were there. You can’t do more than that.’
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Edward Said was always a familiar name at my dinner table. Since I was a child, I walked past our oak bookshelf that carried the spine of his magnum opus Orientalism, intrigued by its cover image of a thick blue snake coiled around the torso of a young boy. My father would listen to Said’s lectures at his home office. Sometimes he would invite me, peering from the doorway, to listen; sometimes I would catch stray phrases. From this early osmosis, I came to a vague yet strong sense that Said spoke about “our part of the world” – whatever that meant to a Muslim Pakistani child raised in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada – in a truthful and crucial way.
In December 2023, jarred by the beginnings of the genocide, my father put on Said’s lecture “The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations” for the two of us to listen to. Said dismantles Samuel P. Huntington’s book “The Clash of Civilizations” by describing in detail the degrading, dishonest portrayals of non-Western civilizations that form its premise. My father had made us apple cinnamon tea, like listening to Said was a cozy movie night. We’d thought of Gaza, cried, and wondered what we might do with Said’s words.
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