Abstract

Mementos

The author, a former editor of "The Nation," pays tribute to contributor Edward Said, who died on September 25, 2003. We gave him cufflinks fashioned out of typewriter keys for his sixtieth birthday. I had selected the keys, an exclamation mark and a semicolon, and Alexander made the little speech that night explaining the choice. The exclamation mark--of course, the exclamation mark! Who knew Edward, who saw Edward for an hour, perhaps an instant, without recognizing the vivid force of the man? The semicolon is another story altogether. Curiosity of the punctuation world, neither showy nor strictly utilitarian, it is the symbol of unapparent linkages, the iconic gesture casting back at one thought while drawing it forward, finished yet unfinished, into the next. I remember sitting beside him one day, going over galleys of a piece he'd written on the second anniversary of the Oslo Accords. Everything had gone to hell, as he'd predicted on the day of the famous handshake. I never got the feeling Edward took pleasure in the accuracy of his predictions. For all his erudition, all the easy references to Adorno or Vico or ones more obscure, Edward did not write in the clogged, remote style of the academic. And for all his acquaintance with elites, he had an allergy to power. His objection to the war on Iraq sprang from the same source as his opposition to Zionism and his contempt for Arab despots, including Arafat. As the most prominent advocate for the Palestinian cause, as a Palestinian exile, he was in psychic proximity to one of the most excruciating instances of collective suffering in the postwar period. The best tribute that night of the sixtieth birthday was delivered by Edward's daughter, Najla.