n the opening sequence of ''In Search of Palestine,'' a 1998 BBC documentary about Edward Said's return to Jerusalem, his birthplace, he is sitting at a table in his house in New York, pensively thumbing through a family album. He holds up a wedding picture of his Palestinian parents, reminiscing that they were married in Nazareth, where his mother was born. Many years later, he recalls, his mother, lying on her deathbed in Washington, would moan that she wanted to go back to Nazareth. But she never could. His father, who died 20 years before her, wanted to be buried in Dhur Shueir, a Lebanese mountain village where for years he took the family to spend the summer. His wish was thwarted by Lebanese religious rivalries, and he was buried in a cemetery in Beirut. ''In a way,'' Said says wryly, with a faint tremor in his voice, ''it's sort of the fate of Palestinians, not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.''
Said, a literary theorist and a public intellectual, died this September in New York, where he lived for most of his life. But he ended up, like his parents, ''somewhere unexpected and far away.'' On the 1st of November, friends and family members held what they called a secular service in Said's memory at the American University of Beirut, a couple of days after his ashes were buried, at his wife's request, in Brummana, a small town some 10 miles east. In the packed Assembly Hall, built in 1891 by American Protestant missionaries, his friends and relatives read excerpts from his books, translated into Arabic. There was also a video recording of a commencement speech he gave at the university years before and a talk he delivered in Arabic on another occasion. I arrived in Beirut for a conference the previous night, my first visit to an Arab city, and was standing outside the hall with a friend, watching the ceremony on a video screen, as all seats had been taken. In a daze of jet lag, I was further disoriented by hearing Said's words not in English, the language in which he felt at home, but in Arabic.
Said liked to describe himself, in the words of the novelist Gunter Grass, as an ''intellectual without mandate'': even though he was commonly seen as a staunch political partisan, he never considered himself to belong entirely to any camp, to be fully at home anywhere. Yet that night in Beirut, hearing his work read in Arabic, it occurred to me that Said, in death, had given that predicament a new meaning and achieved a solid mandate. Later in his life, he decided to study Arabic, the language of Palestine, and spent a year in Beirut for that purpose. At the memorial service, a reading from the Arabic translation of his autobiography, ''Out of Place,'' replaced his English original in a moment of sheer magic, giving his life a home of sorts, a posthumous place, a mandate inside his virtual mother tongue. ''In his text,'' the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, in a passage that Said was fond of quoting, ''the writer sets up house. . . . For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.'' Arabic, that night in Beirut, was his house and his mandate.
To watch ''In Search of Palestine'' today is to see, in the most starkly visual manner, what Said meant when he spoke of the ''pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will.'' Equipped with a camera crew and his own internal mental map of Palestine, Said sets out to revisit the shifting personal, national, intellectual, emotional and -- above all -- political landscapes of the lost homeland. In the film's final sequence, an Israeli bulldozer tears apart a Palestinian agricultural plot, and you realize, ever so reluctantly, that the ''search'' in the title is euphemistic. Still, Said, who knew that truth better than anyone, kept going, tirelessly, and kept searching. ''You have to say things are bad and analyze them intellectually,'' he said in an interview in 1993. ''And on the basis of that analysis, you construct a movement forward based on optimism, the ability and the desire and the wish to change things.''
In Said's essay ''On Lost Causes,'' he wrote that ''a lost cause is associated in the mind and in practice with a hopeless cause: that is, something you support or believe in that can no longer be believed in except as something without hope of achievement.'' But unlike some of us, Said never believed that Palestine was ''a lost cause.'' Rather, he believed that the intellectual has an ethical commitment to relentlessly and unflinchingly speak out, against all odds, against all grains and against all hegemonies -- real, imagined and self-proclaimed. Like Adorno, he believed in the individual thinker whose power of expression is a power that enacts a movement of vitality, a gesture of defiance, a statement of hope. And that is quite a place to live.
Anton Shammas, a Palestinian writer and former Israeli citizen, is the author of the novel ''Arabesques.''
Source: The New York Times
