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| THE HANDSTAND | DECEMBER 2003 |
| http://mondediplo.com/2003/11/05said Mahmoud Darwish's Farewell  to Edward
Said
I CANNOT
quite say goodbye to Edward Said, because he remains so
present among us and alive in the world. He was our
conscience and our ambassador to the world, who never
tired of resisting the new world order and defending
equity, humanity and the sharing of civilisations and
cultures. But he has finally tired of the long and absurd
fight with death. For 12 years he was heroic in his
battle with illness, heroic in his constant creative
renewal, through writing, music, chronicling the humanist
spirit, continuing the vital quest for meaning and
essence and the intellectual appeal for rigour. Palestine fathered him, yet his fidelity to the values of justice that are so terribly undermined in his homeland and his defence of its children’s rights to life and liberty make him one of the symbolic fathers of the new Palestine. Edward Said was an indivisible whole. The man, the critic, the musician, the thinker, and the politician were brought together in him, never contradicting each another. He was a charismatic personality with worldwide fame, a rare example of someone both an intellectual and a star, both elegant and eloquent, deep, scathing, and yet a gentle aesthete of life and language. We are uneasy at saying farewell to him because we want to deny his absence. The universe converges on Palestine for a precious moment. His family now is the world. Our loss is shared, and so is our sorrow. He set Palestine at the heart of the world and brought the world into the heart of Palestine. * Mahmoud Darwish is Palestine’s national poet Translated by Gulliver Cragg ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2003 Le Monde diplomatique |
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