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Your editorial about Edward Said, and JoAnn Wypijewski’s wonderful remembrance of the great engagé thinker [“Edward Said,” “Mementos,” Oct. 20], brought to mind my own encounters over the years with his inspiring, independent radicalism of thought and practice. The first was an interview with him in 1981 for an alternative weekly. He had recently published Covering Islam, his critique of the monolithic and distorted image of Islamic societies perpetuated by Western mass media and how this coverage dovetails with US policy. During our conversation, he denounced the Ayatollah Khomeini as a “fanatic” and condemned the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran while also deploring the skewed media coverage that denied Americans the means to comprehend the context and history of Iranian outrage against the United States. At a time when much of the (Marxist) left embraced the latter stance, Said’s position demonstrated a characteristic independence of thought and what Wypijewski calls his “allergy to power.”
A year later, at a Manhattan teach-in against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, after a Workers World Party representative urged activists not to criticize Arab regimes because they were “victims of US imperialism,” an obviously irritated Said took to the podium to denounce those Arab regimes for failing to do much more than issue rhetorical hot air in defense of the Palestinians.
And, two years ago at a New York conference of the Italian American Writers Association, where he was a keynote speaker, Said made a startling comparison between stereotypical representations of Italians as Mafia gangsters and pervasive images of Palestinians as terrorists. Our challenge as Italian-American writers, he said, was not only to protest inaccurate representations but to think critically about our history and culture, and create compelling new narratives to replace “reductive and stereotypical” images of ourselves as sons and daughters of Vito Corleone.
I’ve tried to meet Said’s challenge in my own writing about ethnicity, including the book I am currently working on. I had hoped to send him a copy, and it saddens me that I’ll never know whether he thought I succeeded in deconstructing both the “Mafia myth” and the conservative politics behind much Italian-American antidefamation advocacy. But the immeasurably greater loss, of course, is that of his critical voice on Israel, Palestine and Western relations with the Arab and Islamic worlds, which we need now more than ever.
