Edward Said: Between Worlds
(USA, 107 min.)
Dir. Maiken Baird
Prod. Maiken Baird, Sarah Mowaswes, Razan Ghalayini
Program: TIFF Docs (World premiere)
Public intellectualism is all but dead these days. People turn less and less to intelligent, complex thinkers for ideas, preferring clickbait and opinions expressed in the short bites that make them empty and reductive. Sure, podcasts can be a source of decent discourse, but the conversations don’t take place in an arena that’s truly public.
Maiken Baird’s profile of Edward Said, who taught comparative literature at Columbia, then toured America as a pro-Palestinian activist, makes you wish there were more people like him: intense, passionate, awesomely articulate and, most impressively, someone not unyielding, but, rather, a man who could surprise when he shifted his point of view.
Tapping into a trove of archival footage – among the treasures are Said’s father’s home movies, taken in the ’40s– and interviews with Said throughout his life, Maiken maps out the academic’s life journey from Palestine to Egypt to the United States, from apolitical academic to fully engaged pro-Palestinian activist, from two-state solution proponent to supporter of a one-state in which Palestinians and Jews could live peacefully together.
Said, who passed in 2003, was born in Jerusalem in 1947 into a household of privilege and vibrant ideas – his father invented the Arabic typewriter. When tensions began deepening between Palestinians and Zionists, the family decamped to Egypt, then to America. In high school there, Said’s political awareness was awoken as he noticed that Black and Indigenous history had been erased. This observation came back to him during the six-day war in 1967, when U.S. media reports made Palestinians invisible, just as they were when Israel was established, while demonizing Arabs in general. At the same time, Americans, including non-Jews, were positively identifying Israel’s settlement by Jews with America’s settlement by British colonizers.
So began Said’s rethink of his identity. Once politically neutral, he became a full-on pro-Palestinian activist supporting a two-state solution, determined to change the accepted narrative about the Middle East conflict. His writings began to concentrate on public perceptions of Arabs, beginning the with his iconoclastic book Orientalism (1978), which challenged the academic norm fabricated by the “imperialistic history,” of constructing non-western people as the other. The outrage within academia that followed, boosted by the fact that Said helped translate Yasser Arafat’s speech to the United Nations in 1978, only made him more determined. He became less the comp lit scholar and more the go-to spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian movement, sought after by American media.
This segment of the film is one of the most fascinating. Everywhere Said appeared, he was thoroughly lambasted by hosts and audiences in situations that would have cowed most commentators. (Sometimes his interlocutors didn’t appear at all; during the first Intifada, the name for the organized Palestinian resistance to occupation in 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., refused to be in the same room with him.) Said was astonished by the toxic hatred directed at him in the U.S., declaring it was way easier to talk to Israelis. These sequences have resonance today, when many observers say the discourse in Israel is more complex than the debates in America.
On the subject of his relationship to Israelis, it’s worth noting that Said, who was also an excellent pianist and influential music critic, was a close friend and collaborator of Israeli classical music star Daniel Barenboim, with whom he wrote four books, including Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002). But director Baird pays almost no attention to Said’s connection to the music world, which makes the film a less rounded take on Said than it could have been.
This is Said’s story, told from his point of view. There are no voices, other than those recorded during those brutal media encounters, to counter his perspective. But that doesn’t make it hagiography per se. Embedded in the narrative is a useful timeline of the events leading to the creation of Israel and the conflicts and all-out wars that ensued. It’s also a documentary driven by ideas. Said asked good questions: how do we overcome divisions without destroying difference? Why celebrate the 1993 Oslo Accords when the West Bank settlements continued to burgeon and the Israeli occupation continued unabated? It was this query that last led to his break with Accords-supporter Yasser Arafat.
Surprisingly, Said never considered a resolution to the conflict in the Middle East to be a lost cause. Toward the end of his life, he supported a one-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians lived in peace and equality. Nevertheless, this doc will doubtless be considered controversial by those vexed by any criticism of Israel. But this is not a polemic: it’s a portrait.
