استشراق إدوارد سعيد: مراجعة — الترجمات والمترجمون

Edward Said’s Orientalism revisited: translations and translators

Edward W. Said, Orientalism, London, Penguin Books, 2003, 396 pages, ISBN 978-0-14-118742-6

There is a growing and flagrant paradox about Orientalism.

With the years, the book seems to have been endowed with a life of its own, divorced from the rest of its author’s life and intellectual development. More, Edward Said’s masterpiece is too often read and presented in contradistinction with the author’s subsequent intellectual development, hijacked by dominant trends in post-colonial studies, by local nativists not to speak of cultural and social parvenus in the Arab World objecting to the way the Arabs and Muslims are ‘represented in the west’.

In this review, we would like to situate Orientalism in relation to the intellectual development of its author and the subsequent corrections he made to his major early work; and to place Edward said himself in time and place in his Arab context

The three moments of Edward Said’s work

Edward Said’s intellectual development proceeded contrapunctually – as he would have liked to say- in three moments.

His ground-breaking critique of Orientalism is but the first moment. A re-reading of the book, thirty years after its publication, confirms the work more as a critical history of a discipline than the vaunted theoretical exercise with the concept ‘knowledge/power’.

1. Orientalism records the birth and development of a doctrine, which claims monopoly over interpreting and representing the East, to Westerners and Easterners alike, intimately linked to and contaminated by the interests, strategies and policies of EuroAmerican imperialism. Said equally links the discipline to the discoveries, theories and concepts of the social and natural sciences of its time, noting the highly partial and selective manner in which these were chosen. Important western schools of thought – such as Historicism, Marxism, New History, and others – were rarely taken into account.

However, Said’s encyclopedic documentation is not restricted to the production of the academic discipline itself; it engages authors, politicians and belles-lettrists who have made a large contribution to the Western creation of The East. His brilliant and trenchant arguments reveal a number of dogmas that dominated Orientalist discourses. They are: i) essentialism: East and West are two fixed and mutually exclusive essences not without hierarchy (one is rational, developed, humane, the other spiritual, irrational, underdeveloped and inferior); ii) generalization: each particular part of the Orient tells about the whole Orient and vice versa; iii) stereotyping: e.g., Arabs and Muslims are irrational; pre-Newtonian (the real world almost completely internal tp the Oriental observer) etc.; iv) the Orient is unchanging; v) the Orient is unique: there is only one religion, one Islamic society; one Arab mind, one Arab psyche, one Arab-Islamic culture, etc.; vi) culturalism: Orientals are defined and determined by their culture, generally reduced to their Muslim religion (Said, 2003a:24-48).

Said concludes with two warnings, one against the ‘modern Orient… participating in its own Orientalizing’ and the other that ‘the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism.’ (Said, 2003a: 328)

The two warnings cannot be reduced to one. To be Orientalised here implies internalizing the dominant Orientalist discourses by Orientals. Occidentalism, on the other hand, is seen as an insufficient reactive set of notions that accept the basic East-West essentialist divide while at the same time revaluating the weaker and subservient partner in the persisting and reconstructed imperialist relations of domination and control. In other words, Occidentalism is a mirror-image of Orientslism incapable of producing adequate knowledge about itself and its object – the imperialist West- a failure that weakens the liberation struggle of the peoples and societies concerned, or delivers them to neo-imperialist domination.

2. Culture and Imperialism (1994), opens the second moment in Edward Said’s thought. It corrects and complements Orientalism all the while presenting a critique of Occidentalism, that is, of the various ideologies by which the colonized have waged their struggles against colonialism.

Said had already taken his distances from Foucault whom he criticised for “neglecting the role of economics, the role of insurgency and rebellion in the societies he discusses” (Said, 1983: 244). Colonialism, he asserted, is also and primarily about “control of overseas markets, raw materials, cheap labor, and highly profitable land” (Said, 1994: 13-14). In addition, Said critiqued Occidentosis – the tendency to blame all ills on the West- and rejected conspiracy theories (be it said that REAL conspiracies by colonial powers are more fantasmagoric than the flights of the imagination of conspiracy ‘theorists’!)

Nuanced in his critique of nationalism, Said joins Frantz Fanon in calling for the transformation of national consciousness -in post-colonial societies- into social consciousness, by achieving the transition to liberation. However it is nativism that appears to Said as the most problematic aspect of Occidentalism:

“…to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism: the racial, religious and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself. To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam or Catholicism is to abandon history for essentializations that have the power to turn human beings against each other” (Said, 1994: 276)

As if to leave no room for any misinterpretation of his position, in his posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Critique, Said agrees with James Clifford’s critique that Orientalism “relapses into the essentializing modes it attacks’ (Said, 2003b, p 8-9). Finally, the couple East-West, with its domination, hegemony and resistances, is subsumed in a call for the ‘discovery of a world not constructed out of warring essences’.

3. Secular critique and humanist outlook mark the third moment of Edward Said’s thought based on the belief that men make their own history and that the real world is the main object of knowledge. Hence his devastating critique of identitarian and culturalist problematics and politics in his magisterial On Late Style: “…identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, [my italics] are decreed to be of a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity” (Said, 2006:85) In the same work, he lauds the French writer Jean Genet as a ‘dissolver of identities” (Said, 2006:82)

Translations and translators

In more than one instance Edward Said refers to Orientalism as a school of translation and interpretation (Said, 2003a:203;222) which not only pretends to speak in the name of Orientals who cannot speak themselves, but also claims to possess the only ‘authoritative translation’ of everything Oriental for its compatriots. The whole of Edward Said’s endeavor in Orientalism can be seen as a set of arguments proving that the discipline does not translate. Bound by its euro-American centrism, it is incapable of performing the simple task of putting into one language the words, terms, idioms, syntax and structures of the other. It radically alters the meaning and structure of the ‘other’ and converts the Oriental ‘text’ into something else (Said, 2003a:67)

In contrast, Edward Said can be looked at as a translator in more than one sense.

First, here is an Arab writing in English. The whole story of Edward the author can be resumed in this linguistic duality. The Algerian writer Leila Sebar, daughter of an Arab school director and a French school teacher, who writes in French and never learnt Arabic, says in her L’Arabe comme chant secret, “I translate Algeria, I translate my father into my mother’s tongue” (Sebar, 2007:72) Similarly, Said has spent all his adult life translating Palestine into English, which happens to be the language of the colonizer he learnt at school in Egypt where the family settled after their flight from Palestine occupied by the Zionists. But Said treats language the same way as the major anti-colonialist writers have done by subverting the language and outbidding the ‘natives’ in their own language. Writing in the language of the colonizer becomes an act of resistance in itself. Edward Said, the writer and literary critic, might well be called a ‘vertical invader’ of the West, in the sense that John Berger used to describe the art of that southern ‘invader’ of northern Europe, Pablo Picasso.

Second, Edward Said’s work is one of translation in terms of his relationship to the Arab World. The shock that brought the Arab American professor of literature to look into the work of the Orientalists was that of the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the six-day war of 1967 and the consequent occupation of the whole of historical Palestine in addition to Sinai and the Golan Heights. Edward’s decision to study Arabic, a language from which he had been enstranged in his family and in the colonial schools of Egypt, was his immediate reaction to that traumatic event. From that time on, Edward Said the public intellectual, was in the making.

Third, Orientalism places Edward Said within the tradition of the self-critical Arab intellectuals of the post-1967 period. His ‘translation’ work here was to put the intellectual and travails of the post-1967 Arab World into the conceptual language of Fanon, Gramsci, Williams, Poulantzas and others,

In Edward Said’s everyday intellectual activity and politics, much of his practical critique was directed against the autocratic and dictatorial Arab regimes for their failure to resist imperialism and Zionism. His critique of Orientalism, Zionism and imperialism went also hand in hand with his critique of the ideologies of their victims, the Palestinian and Arab liberation movements. For example, his break with the PLO leadership on the Oslo accords in 1993 (which he brilliantly termed as ‘the peace of the weak’) was a critique of the misreading by a national liberation movement of US and Israeli strategies. On another plane, Said did not spare Arab intellectuals from criticism either, as was the case with those who supported Roger Garaudy’s revisionist writings on the Holocaust (Le Monde Diplomatique: August-September 1998).

Fourth, Edward Said was an indefatigable writer ‘translating’ to his fellow Arab compatriots US strategies and suggesting were and how they should be countered. He patiently analysed the mechanisms of decision-making in the US with the advent of the neo-cons to power and the rising influence of the Christian fundamentalists. He did not fail however to insist on the great potential of the American protest movement against the war in Iraq. One of the last messages of a man who saw himself as both Arab and American was his call, at the Commencement celebration at the American University in Beirut (AUB), for devoting more time and effort to study American society and state in the Arab World, rather than simply teaching Arab students textbooks designed for American students.

It is highly indicative of the dominant tendency in interpreting Said that the institute created by AUB for that purpose and financed by the Saudi billionaire Al-Walid bin Talal, is more focused on American representations of Islam and the Arab World than on furthering knowledge in the Arab World on the United States as such, its history, society, cultures and politics.

References

Edward W. Said: Orientalism, first edition 1987, Penguin, London, 2003.

– The world, the Text and the Critic, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983.

– Culture and Imperialism, Vintage Books, London, 1994.

– Out of Place: A Memoir, 2001.

– Humanism and Democratic Critique, Introduction by Akeel Belgrami, Columbia University Press, New York, 2003.

– On Late Style, Music and Literature Against the Grain, Foreword by Mariam C. Said, Introduction by Michael Wood, Pantheon Books, New York, 2006.

– Leila Sebar, L’Arabe comme chant secret, Paris, Bleu Autour, 2007.