Stirrings Still; Or, The Impossibility of Mourning the Deaths of Edward Said

Abstract

[T]hy worldly task hast done . . . / . . . [R]enowed be thy grave. (Cymbeline, IV, ii, 282)So much to write about, and I do not have the heart for it; so much to say about what has happened to us, with the death of Edward; so much to say about what happens after a death we all knew was coming. However prepared we might have been, we knew no act of mourning would console us or diminish the pain of our loss.1 Some griefs are curable, but not this one, which is likely to incline us to a long sadness. Since the death of Edward, and I owe it to him, as I owe it to the truth, to say this, assuming that I might at last be able to do so, since the death of Edward-and what a death-it has been impossible for me to speak as I knew I wanted to, impossible to speak to him, to him, as one does with a true friend without pretense. I thus had to try to relearn everything, and I am still at it. For in attempting to capture his memory, I found myself confining and solidifying it, and in this sense, celebrating its meaning and pride. In the process, the two things that seemed to stand out for me and possibly for others at the time of his death was that Edward stood for energy, mobility, discovery, and risk. He was also able, like no other cultural critic of his generation, se deprendre de lui-meme, to borrow a term from Foucault.Edward was unique in his laughter and in his art, which carry through in the great body of work he has left us. For him, art and laughter were readings of works of art, but these readings were also experiences, pleasures, journeys, and lessons in the magisterial sense of exemplary lecturing or teaching-Edward was a superb teacher, as so many personal affiliations throughout the world can testify. In fine, they [the readings] were lessons in performance, examples of what Edward said through what he did, giving himself, as one might say, with nothing held back, throwing himself into the storm headlong. Like a Conradian hero, he seemed always to be trying to rescue sense and sensibility from the dramas going on around him, as well as from his own strengths and weaknesses.We can have true friendship with only a few, so writes Aristotle who goes on to explore the question of the number of friends it is good or possible to have (2002, 171). He thinks that friendship is a matter of kindly feeling, an amity of sort, not of whether it involves something called painful energy. According to this theory, friendship is essentially related to mourning when one friend dies, leaving the other (friend) behind. For all its formidable coherence, then, there is a fairly simple opposition at work in the Aristotelian theory of friendship, one more sinewy than the universal respect paid to Aristotle. A similar contrast can be found in the following set of questions: What happens when one friend must each time go before the other, when a singular relation with a friend ends abruptly? What comes about when the unique death of a friend such as Edward is taken up into all the codes and rituals of mourning? Can there be other words in which to mourn Edward? To answer this set of questions, one must restore openness to each moment of a long, rich life, which requires a mastery of many different planes of narrative, all unfolding simultaneously, for Edward truly had a multiple self which he did not necessarily seek to simplify.Like Iqbal Ahmad before him, Edward died at the height of his powers: in mid-sentence and mid-style, so to speak. For us (ex-colonials), this is the crudest of deaths. His monumental work is the measure of our loss, but it is also our treasure, to savor and to hoard while he is out there, out there in Culture, in Politics, in Theory, in Literature, in Music, a Ray of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day. Most people with an interest in him and his work have already expressed their grief from New York to New Delhi, Paris to Pretoria, San'a to Sao Paolo. Most of the tributes have lived up to the expectations created by so fine a mind in that they are crammed with a life that comes from its subject's capacity to be at home in the worlds of deep imaginings. …