The Dishonest Origins of Decolonisation (Part I)

The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanising ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny.             —Edward Said, in Orientalism, 1978

If the major tribune of the Palestinians has lied about his roots, then all Palestinian claims must be fraudulent.       —Timothy Brennan, in Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, 2021

The concept of exile is one of the pillars of the over-arching notion of victimhood that today rules identity politics and the academic study of the humanities. Exile ideology recounts the struggle of victims, real and imagined, against oppression and discrimination, of how they challenged their exploiters, and how the purpose of education in the Western world should be to empower these victims. Its ideological offshoots today include critical race theory, postcolonial studies, settler colonialism and decolonisation. Founded in the universities of Europe and America in the 1960s, its academic objectives are not scholarly but political.

In Australia, the most prominent display of the concept has been the recent failed attempt to change our Constitution to serve the interests of an Aboriginal elite against what they call “the white settler society”. As one of the prominent Aboriginal activists, Mick Dodson, has declared: “We remain de facto exiles in our own country.”

This concept was not confined to colonialism but arose in other academic fields at around the same time. This was especially true of what were then the two main fields in the humanities: history and literature. One of the definitive texts of Australian radical feminism, for example, was the 1981 study of women writers by Drusilla Modjeska titled Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945.

In the United States, by far the most effective display of the thesis was by Edward Said, a literary and cultural critic who became a leading figure of the movement. In 2000 Harvard University Press celebrated Said’s lifetime output by publishing a 656-page collection of his articles, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, and naming him “the most impressive, consequential and elegant critic of our time”. The publishers observed that Said’s own life experience as a Palestinian paralleled those of the people of the region: “the fact of his own exile and the fate of the Palestinians have given both form and force to the questions Said has pursued”. Those young people on campus today who tear down statues of once great historical figures and who in recent weeks have pasted vile anti-Semitic posters on university walls are, whether they know it or not, the intellectual offspring of Edward Said and all he stood for.

In his seminal work Orientalism in 1978, Said not only defined the people of the Middle East as the victims of Western imperialism, but included himself among those who suffered. He claimed the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 had seen his extended family expelled from their home in Jerusalem. Along with thousands of other Arabs at that time, they became refugees, forced to migrate and re-establish themselves in other countries. And although his own future was subsequently secured by the American education system, he still promoted himself as one whose suffering persisted. “My own experience of these matters,” he said in Orientalism, “is in part what made me write this book.”

This stance was the ticket for Said’s rise to both academic success and political influence. It saw him become professor of literature at Columbia University and visiting professor at Harvard, Yale and Stanford. By 1999, he was president of the Modern Language Association, the professional association of American university teachers of literature.

He was a prominent critic of American foreign policy in the Middle East and for a time served on the Palestinian National Council, the de facto Palestinian parliament in exile. In the 1970s, he applauded the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, then the most prominent sponsor of Middle East terrorism.

However, in 1999 his life story underwent some serious scrutiny. He published an autobiography titled Out of Place, reinforcing his then well-worked meme of victimhood, but filling out details of his childhood and education that had not been publicised before. He still insisted he was an exiled Palestinian but also admitted he was the son of an Egyptian businessman and had spent much of his youth in Cairo.

In 1999, the American/Israeli lawyer Justus Weiner investigated these claims and published his findings in Commentary magazine in September that year. He said Said’s claim to be a Palestinian refugee was bogus. While it was true he was born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said’s birth certificate gave his permanent address as Cairo. He had not lived in the alleged family home in Jerusalem during his childhood, nor had he in 1947 enrolled in the local school, St George’s in Jerusalem, as he once claimed. According to Weiner, who inspected the school’s class lists, Said was not listed as a student that year, or any other year.

Said had also claimed his earliest memories were of playing in the garden of “our family home” in Talbiya, West Jerusalem, that is, the home of his aunt and his cousins. He does not specify the dates but in Out of Place he says he was younger than eight or nine at the time. However, Weiner found that between 1936 and 1942, when Said was aged between one and seven, the house was not the “family home” of anyone. It was an investment property leased out to others. According to the legal documents, its successive occupants were the Iranian consulate, the philosopher Martin Buber, and the consulate of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

There is now, twenty years after Said’s death, a new source that casts more light on his claims. Written by one of Said’s former students at Columbia University, Timothy Brennan, the book, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, is more hagiography than biography. Weiner’s research is one of its targets. Brennan labels those findings “malicious articles” that “play on cultural difference”. He nonetheless admits that, if they were true, they would be very damaging not only to Said himself but to his political cause, since one instrumental creator of the story of Palestinian grievance could not be trusted. However, Brennan’s attempted defence is feeble. He fails to offer any documentary evidence to refute Weiner’s findings. Moreover, Brennan’s own book provides enough detail in its early chapters to show that Said did, indeed, tell blatant lies about his roots.

His father, Wadie Said, was the one who had grown up in Jerusalem and enrolled in St George’s School. Later, as a young man during the First World War, he moved to Cairo where he escaped conscription into the Ottoman army by migrating to the United States. Brennan says Wadie was part of a more general movement of Arabs to the West at that time. There were enough in Manhattan alone for one precinct to be known as Little Syria. Moreover, Wadie was not averse to joining the American Expeditionary Forces, which he did soon after he arrived. He was active not as a fighting soldier but in the provision of food and other supplies. His military service earned him American citizenship and, later, allowed his children to become American passport holders. Wadie returned to Jerusalem in the 1920s at the request of his dying mother. The family home passed to his sister and Wadie returned to Cairo. There he married Hilda, the daughter of a Syrian minister of the Church of England, who served a small Egyptian congregation.

Hilda remained a devout Christian all her life. Brennan records that “she was always seen with her black, leather-bound Arabic Bible, a habit she formed as the daughter of the first Arab pastor of the nascent Protestant community of historic Syria”. She had her son Edward baptised and confirmed in the Church of England. Every night before bed, the mother and her children recited the Lord’s Prayer. In other words, rather than the label he adopted as an angry dispossessed Palestinian, Edward Said was born and grew up as a secure, devoutly Christian, Egyptian.

In 1935, Hilda had travelled to the old Said family home in Jerusalem to give birth. This was because Hilda had previously experienced a disastrous confinement and labour in the Greek hospital in Cairo that resulted in the death of her first child. Wadie’s sister persuaded her to come to Jerusalem for her second confinement where she could have the services of a trusted local midwife. After the successful birth, mother and baby Edward returned to their own family home in Cairo.

For the first two decades of Edward Said’s life, his father owned a business providing stationery and office supplies to the British Army in Cairo and to local schools of the city. The family lived in an apartment in Zamalek, an elite district on Gezira Island in the middle of the River Nile, linked by bridges to downtown Cairo. Its insulation from Cairo’s poverty-ridden local fellahin allowed Said to ride horses and bicycles across the island, which he called his family’s “own private playground”. He learned to play tennis at a private club and practised piano at home on the family’s Blüthner baby grand.

His father sent him to the most expensive private schools in Egypt: the Gezira Preparatory School, the Cairo School for American Children, and then to Cairo’s Victoria College. The last regarded itself as “a training ground for Middle East Etonians”, that is, Egypt’s future colonial elite. However, Said disgraced himself by refusing some school assignments and then getting into a physical fight with the teacher concerned, an action that got him expelled. The American passport arranged by his father came to his rescue and in 1951, at fifteen years of age, Edward was shipped off to Mount Herman, a private boarding school in rural Massachusetts (now Northfield Mount Herman). However, he soon found he detested this school too, since it was “extremely repressive”. Brennan repeats all this dutifully, as told to him by Said’s sisters, but with little sense of the overall portrait he is painting, which most readers will recognise as that of a badly spoiled brat.

Nonetheless, Said performed well enough at Mount Herman to get into Princeton University in 1957 and went from there to Harvard where, by 1964, he completed a master’s degree and PhD in English literature, which gained him a teaching position at Columbia University, New York. Brennan quotes one observer: “Until 1967, Edward Said was basically an Anglophile professor of comparative literature … [with] no commitment to Arab nationalism.” But like many of his academic generation, Said succumbed to the emerging radical zeitgeist. He became a convert to 1960s ideology and its academic grab-bag of fashionable French and German theorists.

Once he had immersed himself in the literary theories of Lucien Goldmann, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Franz Borkenau and their peers, Said worked on his own contribution to the same cause. The effort paid off very quickly. His forays into continental philosophy earned him the reputation of an “apostle of theory”. In little more than a year, he went from being an observer at academic conferences to sharing the podium with Georges Poulet, Jacques Derrida and Hans-George Gadamer at a symposium at Zurich in 1968 on “The Theory and Practice of Literary Interpretation”. Brennan writes that he was now, in American eyes, “the academic face of Continental theory itself”.

At the same time, the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967 had turned some notable New York left-wing intellectuals, notably Irving Howe and other writers for the radical magazine Dissent, into supporters of Israel against the Arabs. Said broke with them and turned his new-found intellectual celebrity into political activism for the Palestinian opposition. He became a director of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, founded in Chicago in 1967 ostensibly to combat anti-Arab discrimination but which lobbied Arab businesses and UN agencies with grievances against Israel. By 1972, the FBI had a 238-page file under his name, focused mainly on his journalism and academic writings, including abstracts of numerous articles for the New York Times, which the agency regarded as “dangerous, especially to Israel, and would become more so”.

Over the longer term, however, his most influential work was neither continental literary theory nor pro-Palestine propaganda, but his writings in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Brennan credits him as one of the major figures who turned the tide of these contests from conservatives to the Left. “Said was looking to take humanism out of the hands of self-righteous culture warriors,” Brennan writes:

He had in mind, among others, Hilton Kramer’s neoconservative journal The New Criterion, for example, whose contributors were busy pontificating about the same classics of “Western Civilisation” as he was, but for the very different purpose of calling those who exposed the crimes of imperial culture barbarians.

His definition of Western civilisation as the home of cultural barbarians underpinned Said’s two most influential books, Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). The former was a critique of the academic field of Oriental Studies, then a conspicuous product of some of the most prestigious universities in both Europe and America. Rather than an objective and often celebratory study of the societies and cultures of the Middle East and Asia, Said accused the whole field of being the handmaiden of Western imperialism in its conquest of the East in the modern era. Orientalism was welcomed by leftist academics and went on to influence subsequent generations of scholars, especially in the field of cultural history known as postcolonialism. It is almost impossible in universities today for students to learn about the relations between Western and other cultures in the imperial era without their professors deferring to Said and postcolonialism.

His later work, Culture and Imperialism, is even more ambitious. Said calls this book “a history of the imperial adventure rendered in cultural terms” coupled with a study of the resistance to imperialism by the “aggrieved colonised peoples”. Instead of a conventional narrative, his history is a collection of analyses of a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, some short stories and poems, and one Italian opera. Said argues that each of the works he examines reveals the imperial dimension of Western culture. In particular, they show that the Western desire to rule distant peoples has had a “privileged status”. There has been “something systematic” about this imperial culture that was not evident in other empires. Moreover, while Europe’s ability to take over and rule distant colonies might now be a thing of the past, the imperialist imperative lives on today in American foreign and economic policy. It is still driven, as it was in the nineteenth century, by what Said calls the West’s “untrammelled rapacity, greed and immorality”. Said’s target, in other words, is not just the literature of the colonial age but the nature of Western culture itself. For him, the West harbours a fundamentally imperial culture because it has been so strongly influenced by European conquest and settlement abroad.

Before he arrived on the scene, he claims, literary critics overlooked the imperialist dimension of Western culture. Since the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, he says Western intellectual practice has been to separate the cultural and aesthetic realms from the political domain. Said writes:

Most professional humanists as a result are unable to make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of such practices as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction and philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other.

Most of Culture and Imperialism is taken up by the attempt to establish this case, particularly in its extended discussions of the work of six authors: Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, Rudyard Kipling in Kim, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida, the novels and stories of Albert Camus and (for its purported anti-imperialism), the poetry of W.B. Yeats.

Anyone who has not read Culture and Imperialism, and who goes looking for an outline and discussion in Brennan’s biography, will be disappointed. He acknowledges that several authors responded to Said’s case studies with passionate criticisms in defence of their own specialties. Yet Brennan explains none of them clearly. So unless a reader already knows what was said about these cases he will be left none the wiser. In fact, the space that Brennan devotes to each case study is not only short but unreliable. For instance, he claims Said’s opera critics have mistaken the thrust of his case against Verdi’s Aida. Brennan says Said’s critique was not about the opera itself but the staging of its first performance in Cairo in 1871. This is quite deceptive. While Said does pay close attention to the first performance, he uses that to launch into a much wider critique. So, to properly discuss at least one example from Culture and Imperialism, let me fill in here the missing details of Said’s case study of Aida, based on some of the hostile responses it drew from his critics.

Said starts by pointing out that Verdi’s notion of Egypt is not realistic but is an archaeological reconstruction derived from French Egyptology, an “Orientalised Egypt”. The opera contains “imperialist structures of attitude and reference” that acts as an “anaesthetic” on European aud­iences, leading them to ignore the brutality that accompanied their conquest of other countries. It fosters military aggression towards the Orient: “As a visual, musical and theatrical spectacle, Aida does a great many things for and in European culture, one of which is to confirm the Orient as an essentially exotic, distant and antique place in which Europeans can mount certain shows of force.” Hence, “the embarrassment of Aida”, according to Said, “is finally that it is not so much about but of imperial domination” (his emphases). By analysing the politics of this singular piece, Said hopes to accomplish much more. He believes he can not only reveal the imperial dimension of this work but will also implicate the art form of opera itself in the culture of empire: “Aida, like the opera form itself, is a hybrid, radically impure work that belongs equally to the history of culture and the historical experience of overseas domination.”

Despite the ambition, the evidence Said marshals is hardly adequate to the task. He provides no explanation of the links between Aida and the rest of the canon of opera, still less of what connects opera as an art form to overseas domination. He offers only a perfunctory analysis of the libretto of Aida and pays even less attention to the music, with no discussion at all of the score.

Aida was commissioned by the viceroy of Egypt, Khedive Ismail, for the Italian Theatre or Opera House in Cairo, which had opened in November 1869 with a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto. The composer then agreed to create a special opera for Egypt. It was written in 1870 and premiered on December 24, 1871. The initial treatment, or scenario, plus the sets and costumes, were the work of Auguste Mariette, the French archaeologist and Egyptologist. Mariette’s inspiration for the opera, Said claims, was influenced by two sources. The first was his role as designer of antiquities at the Egyptian pavilion in the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, “one of the greatest and earliest displays of imperial potency”. The second was the Description de l’Egypt, the twenty-four-volume account of Napoleon’s military expedition to Egypt in 1798. According to Said, this document amounts to a virtual invitation for a figure like Napoleon to conquer Egypt and to celebrate the fact in opera. “The most striking pages of the Description seem to beseech some very grand actions or personages to fill them, and their emptiness and scale look like opera sets waiting to be populated.” Hence, Said writes, the country they portray is not the real Egypt of the time but a fantasy imperial trophy. “Their implied European context is a theatre of power and knowledge, while their actual Egyptian setting in the nineteenth century has simply dropped away.”

Said then offers his account of the city of Cairo at the time the opera was staged. It was divided both geographically and socially. One section was the Western and modernised part of the city where he later grew up himself, populated by European investors and traders and their Egyptian partners and clients. The other part contained the old, medieval city, inhabited almost entirely by impoverished Arabs. “The Opera House built by Ismail for Verdi sat right at the centre of the north-south axis, in the middle of a spacious square, facing the European city, which stretched westwards to the banks of the Nile.” Hence, Said argues, Aida was alien to most of Egypt. It was “an imperial article de luxe purchased by credit for a tiny clientele whose entertainment was incidental to its real purposes … an imperial spectacle designed to alienate and impress an almost exclusively European audience”. The opera embodied the authority of a European version of Egypt at a moment in its nineteenth-century history when the country was being colonised by Europeans.

Now, Said’s complaint that the opera and composer are indifferent to the realities of contemporary Egypt and alien to the Arabs of Cairo can hardly be taken as a serious criticism of this work. In striving to make a case out of the details of the opera’s original performance, Said disregards the fact that Aida is an opera about ancient Egypt—the Egypt of the Pharaohs. His critique conflates ancient and modern Egypt into one entity. However, the Egyptians portrayed in the opera are not Arabs, a people who arrived in the country in the seventh century AD and who were then a predatory imperial power. The Egyptians of Aida are those who inhabited the country three thousand years before the tribesmen from Mecca and Medina conquered it. The Egypt of the Arabs is no more the Egypt of the Pharaohs than is the Egypt once ruled by the ancient Greeks or the Egypt that was part of the Roman empire in the Christian era.

Moreover, to charge any opera with being unrealistic is a complaint that ought to disqualify its author from the ranks of critics forever. Realism is just about the last attribute opera has ever sought. This is an art form where characters sing instead of speak to one another, in which large women in their fifties can pass as seductive teenage girls, where white men portray black men and vice versa. It is an art form that allows magical events, ghosts, sea serpents, monsters (some of whom sing in Italian), ocean storms, lightning strikes and anthropomorphic gods of various religions to make regular appearances on stage. To try to score a political point out of an opera’s lack of realism is to display how unfit one is to talk about the subject.

It is equally imperceptive to complain that, because its staging and costumes derive from the discoveries of Egyptology, Aida is politically tainted by this. It is true that “Egyptology is not Egypt” but it is still the only field whose archaeological and philological studies provided what was known in 1871, and most of what is known today, about ancient Egypt. Rather than being a European conceit, Egyptology has long provided the principal means through which people of any culture, Egyptian Arabs included, can know the ancient history of that country. If, as Said says, Egyptology is misleading about the “real Egypt”, where else does he imagine our knowledge of the place in 3000 BC could possibly come from?

Said fails to even mention the one issue that readers might expect someone committed to his thesis would discuss. This is the evidence from Verdi’s own political inclinations, plus the belief of one line of critics ever since, that Aida is actually an anti-imperialist opera. Verdi was Italy’s favourite nineteenth-century composer and a hero of the Risorgimento, the political and cultural movement that helped arouse the national consciousness of the Italian people, and led to a series of political events that by 1861 had freed most of the Italian states from Austrian domination. “Va, pensiero”, the Hebrew slaves’ chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco (1842), became the unofficial anthem of the movement. Verdi’s political views were public knowledge: he was a nationalist opposed to Austrian imperialism in Italy and, as a general principle, to all European imperialism at the time. He despised German militarism. He was against British imperialism in India and hoped the Indians would expel them from their country.

The plot of Aida centres on star-crossed lovers: Radames, the Egyptian general, is in love with Aida, the defeated Ethiopian king’s daughter, who is kept as a hostage and slave of Amneris, the daughter of the Egyptian king, at a time when Egypt and Ethiopia have resumed war with one another. Egypt again becomes the victorious military power and the second act of the work contains the most spectacular scene in all opera, the triumphal procession before the Egyptian king and his priests. The most moving aria in the whole opera is “O patria mia”, sung by Aida as she sits on the moonlit banks of the Nile and remembers her homeland. Both words and music of this piece evoke the landscape of Ethiopia. This has led several commentators to argue that the opera itself embodies Verdi’s own antipathy to foreign domination and his support for national liberation.

But, as its better critics point out, Aida is primarily a dramatic exploration of what happens when the power of love comes into conflict with both political authority and patriotism. Verdi was not trying to prove which of these sides were right or wrong. His story was of the fatal dilemmas faced by individuals that not even the greatest political and military power could resolve.

Moreover, the setting of Aida is genuinely spectacular—the Temple of Ammon and the king’s throne at the gates of Thebes. The sheer length of the triumphal procession’s twenty-six-minute duration invites an extended and lavish procession, with performers and animals displaying as many trophies as the production’s budget can bear. There is little doubt Verdi was trying to recreate in operatic form the glories of ancient Egypt, especially its military glory. If the composer had really wanted to create an Oriental world Europeans could dream of conquering, he might have chosen a site less formidable than what was, in its day, the most powerful military force on Earth.

So it begs credulity to claim that the opera’s celebration of the military triumph of this exotic society thereby makes it an opera of nineteenth-century European imperialist domination. It is even less plausible to claim that its parade of ancient Egyptian military power would have encouraged Verdi’s audiences to want to subjugate the modern version of that country. The opera no more “anaesthetised” Europeans to imperial conquest than the same composer’s treatment of revenge, regicide and prostitution in his other works would have inured his audiences to these forms of behaviour. To demonstrate that any work of art has had social consequences, the critic is obliged to offer some empirical evidence that this actually occurred. It is not enough for a literary critic to simply deduce it from the plot, even less from the abstractions of postcolonial academic theories.

This is Part One of a two-part series. Part Two, “The Myths of Culture and Imperialism”, will be published in the January-February edition of Quadrant. Part One is an edited version of an article originally published in the New Criterion, New York, in September 2021