Note: wordpress is Not opening new texts on my Samsung Chrome in the last month. Maybe I need a better laptop. Untill then, minimal editing on the saved drafts.
Exiles often have conflicting feelings about their adoptive society, and Edward Said was no exception.
As a Palestinian in the United States, he recognized the country’s pervasive racism and violence, but he also knew its educational system made his career as a renowned and prosperous thinker possible.
His life was indeed filled with paradoxes and contradictions. He was one of the twentieth century’s most influential anti-colonial writers, who mostly studied his colonizers’ literature; a proponent of Palestinian liberation who wrote in English and mostly for English-speaking audiences.
Few statements capture his embrace of such tensions more than his surprising claim in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he was now the only heir to the Jewish tradition of radical criticism.
“I’m the last Jewish intellectual,” he exclaimed. “You don’t know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires.… I’m the last one.”
Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Saidby Timothy BrennanBuy on BookshopFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $35.00
As comical as this statement can seem, Timothy Brennan’s new biography, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, suggests it captures Said’s unique place in public life: a Middle Eastern exile who provided an original explanation for American imperialism, powerfully condemned it, and successfully reached mass audiences.
By telling Said’s life, from his childhood in British-ruled Palestine to his death in New York in 2003, Places of Mind seeks to explain his unique ability to blend intellectual production and public activism.
Impressively researched and powerfully written, it charts Said’s many triumphs: his revolutionary scholarly writings, which became classics and are taught decades after their publication; his rise as a media celebrity (an unusual fate for an academic); and his role in making the Palestinian national movement a source of international fascination.
For Brennan, who was Said’s student and is an accomplished literary scholar in his own right, his teacher was everything a humanist should be.
By embracing his status as an “outsider”—an exile, a Palestinian, an “Arab”—he successfully infused America’s mainstream with new ideas and political visions.
Yet by claiming to be a “Jewish” intellectual, Said was doing more than placing himself in the company of giants like Franz Kafka or Theodor Adorno.
What he recognized, and what Places of Mind sometimes misses, was the tragedy of his career: how by his life’s end, the causes for which he fought were ultimately defeated.
The Palestinian liberation movement, whose cause animated so much of Said’s writing, was headed toward ruin (a reality that he was among the very few to realize).
(Fateh, the signatory to the Oslo treaty, was displaced by more radical movements in Gaza, and currently a new wave of reactions from every mixed towns and villages in the West Bank)
And the humanities, whose flourishing made his career possible, were entering a downward spiral from which they show no sign of recovery. Reflecting on Said’s life is not only a chance to celebrate groundbreaking achievements: It is also an invitation to recognize, soberly, some of our era’s heartbreaking misfortunes.
Colonialism is a brutal business, and this was certainly true of British rule in the Middle East and mandated France in Syria and Lebanon. Whenever locals protested the empire’s authority, as Palestinians did during the so-called “Great Revolt” of 1936 to 1939, British troops responded by demolishing entire neighborhoods, imprisoning thousands of civilians in concentration camps, and putting hundreds to the gallows.
(The British had to dispatch 100,000 troops to squash this civil disobedience movement that had a source the refusal of the British to have municipal elections on the ground that the Jews constituted only 20%)
Like many other colonialists, however, the British also sustained their rule in the region by offering alluring opportunities to some of their subjects. Those willing to cooperate could gain access to British markets, find jobs in the colonial bureaucracy, and send their children to European-run schools. These were the carrots that Europe’s “civilizing mission” dangled in front of its subjects’ noses: Submit to us, colonialists promised, embrace our language and culture, and maybe, one day, some of you would control your own fate.
This was the duality that made the young Said. Born in British-ruled Jerusalem in 1935, much of his childhood took place in the shadow of the Palestinian national trauma. While his parents, Hilda and Wadie, rarely talked politics at home, other relatives often protested their people’s fate. The price of political oppression was even more apparent once British troops were replaced by the armed forces of the Jewish Yishuv, which decimated the Palestinian national movement.
In 1947, Said’s parents fled to Cairo, which rapidly became home to many hungry and dispossessed Palestinian refugees. At the same time, colonialism helped cushion the Saids from some of this brutality. Not only were they affluent merchants, but they also benefited from being Anglican, a tiny minority that enjoyed preferential treatment by British authorities. Said’s father supplied office materials to the British (which ran the formally independent Egypt), and Said was sent to study in the elite schools of British missionaries.
Nothing demonstrated colonialism’s contradictory imprint on his family more than his regal first name, Edward, which his mother chose because she admired the Prince of Wales—a fact that Said bemoaned his entire life.
When Said’s parents sent him to the U.S. at age 15, he would find a similar pattern of simultaneous subjugation and inclusion. In his years as a student, first at an elite prep school in New England and then at Princeton, Said was alienated by the other students’ oppressive self-absorption. Almost all white, they were confident in the superiority of their Anglo-Saxon heritage and considered Arab culture primitive.
As he put it in a note uncovered by Brennan, “to be a Levantine” in the U.S. meant “not to be able to create but only to imitate.” At the same time, the postwar U.S. system of higher education provided remarkable opportunities. After Princeton, Said enrolled in Harvard’s graduate program in European literature, and in 1963, he was hired as a professor at Columbia. Ivy League prestige, as it often does, opened many doors, and Said quickly learned how to prosper in the world of U.S. letters.
He published a book on Joseph Conrad, built ties to the New York literary world, and began contributing essays to magazines like The Nation. For all the whiteness and Euro-centrist ethos of American academia, Said cherished his success in it. To his parents’ dismay, he preferred to spend most of his summers in New York, feverishly churning out academic writings.
These paradoxes of imperial power do not get much attention in Places of Mind, and its first chapters say frustratingly little about the colonial Middle East or the Cold War U.S. This is a missed opportunity, as the similarities between the two systems would later become crucial to Said’s intellectual and political agenda. Most important, both the British and Americans elevated certain minorities (Christians in the Middle East, Jews in the U.S.) to justify their subjugation of others (Muslims under British rule, Black people and other people of color under white U.S. hegemony).
The two cultures also similarly viewed their elites’ culture as universal, a sacred trust they had to bestow upon humanity. Both British and American elites were therefore eager to demonstrate that “outsiders” like Said, who appreciated the brilliance of Western culture, could join their club, as long as they fully assimilated and “overcame” their non-Western origins. It is likely that these parallels informed Said’s later insistence that the U.S. emulated European empires.
And it is clear that his effective navigation in both inspired his later claim that colonialism was not just oppressive but also creative, that hegemonic cultures could possess a certain allure even for their victims.
Said’s career up to the mid-1960s was headed in a predictable direction. Groomed by and for WASP institutions, he was on the path to become a footnote in their history, yet another scholar who studied the European canon and reproduced elites in his teaching.
But the convergence of two revolutions, one intellectual and one political, soon upended this trajectory. Harnessing their energies, Said went on to produce one of the twentieth century’s most important intellectual events. Be the most informed person you know: 3 months for $5Subscribe
In its most impressive chapters, Places of Mind reconstructs Said’s participation in these two revolutions. The first was post-structuralism. Under the influence of philosopher Jacques Derrida, a group of French scholars launched blistering attacks on Europe’s intellectual traditions. Even after the Enlightenment, they claimed, Europe remained obsessed with enshrining hierarchies and binaries (between men and women, “primitive” and “civilized”); the most urgent task was to dismantle those.
While Said is not always associated with this school today, he was among the first to embrace it in the English-speaking world.
He took part in the early conferences on post-structuralism in the U.S. and was one of the first to utilize its concepts in his writings. He borrowed especially from Michel Foucault and his provocative depiction of the link between knowledge and power. Artists and thinkers, Foucault claimed, were rarely individuals who challenged authority. Most of the time, they reproduced and reinforced their society’s structures of authority, making them seem natural and even benevolent.
The second project that Said joined, and for which he became especially famous, was the Palestinians’ renewed struggle for self-determination. After the shock of the 1967 war, which initiated Israel’s military rule over large Palestinian territories, Palestinian activists and leaders sought to make their cause the center of international attention. They appealed to international institutions and launched multiple violent attacks on Israel to keep their struggle in the headlines.
While Said had little personal interest in returning to Palestine (by that point he considered his exile a permanent condition), he joined this campaign and quickly became its most prominent international figure.
He published fiery essays that compared the Palestinian struggle to other anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa and helped launch organizations that called for an end to the West’s support for Israel. His eloquence and rare status as a Palestinian at the center of U.S. letters made him into an icon. Palestinian politicians and leaders, some of whom he met in person during a prolonged academic stay in Beirut, sought his advice; in 1974, he helped edit and translate Yasser Arafat’s historic address to the United Nations, the first by any Palestinian leader in that forum. Three years later, Said became a member of the Palestinian National Council, the coordinating organization of the Palestinian national movement.
Bringing these two projects together was hardly an obvious undertaking. Post-structuralism’s philosophical musings, with its notoriously impenetrable jargon, seemed worlds apart from the blood and sweat of daily Palestinian resistance.
Yet in his monumental Orientalism (1978), Said fused these two projects to provide a new understanding of Western attitudes toward the Middle East. Drawing on his own experiences as a beneficiary and victim of colonialism, Said claimed that Europe’s colonial domination in the Middle East did not rely merely on military or political might. Rather, it was a vast intellectual project, in which countless scholars and novelists voluntarily rushed to explore, interpret, and explain why Europe had to dominate the “Orient.” Said further argued that the Orientalist project was in fact foundational to Europe’s own self-understanding. As Europeans sought to define themselves as rational, industrious, and self-controlling, they simultaneously identified the Orient’s people as emotional, lazy, and pathologically obsessed with sex.Said, in short, exposed how knowledge and art worked in the service of oppressive power.
This claim about colonialism’s centrality to Europe’s identity would have been enough to make Orientalism an intellectual bombshell. But Said went even further, using his literary study to explain the aggression of modern American diplomacy. Said argued that the collapse of formal European empires after World War II did little to diminish the orientalist mindset. Rather, orientalism continued to flourish in the U.S., where journalists, artists, and scholars conflated their country with a “civilization” that they contrasted with the Middle East’s alleged primitivism and fanaticism.
Indeed, Said maintained that U.S. diplomacy in the region, and especially its unwavering support for Israel, reproduced Europe’s earlier racism, arrogance, and myopia. U.S. diplomats and their Israeli allies inherited the view of Arabs as inhuman and thus dismissed their political demands as emotional and even animalistic outbursts. Said’s most scorching invective was directed at Middle East specialists like Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, whom he acidly described as the intellectual foot soldiers of U.S. imperialism. Their writings about the Arabs’ supposed fanaticism, he wrote in a related essay, provided “not history, not scholarship, but direct political violence.”
Said, in short, exposed how knowledge and art worked in the service of oppressive power. And in so doing, he forever transformed the meaning of the word orientalist: Rather than a term for a scholar of the Middle East, it now became an adjective describing a racist and paternalist worldview.
Orientalism’s sweeping claims could hardly leave readers indifferent, and Brennan masterfully traces both the admiration for and backlash to Said’s masterwork. Conservative commentators predictably dismissed Said as an ignorant trespasser who failed to understand the West’s greatness as he downplayed the orient’s failings.
In a lengthy review, Lewis lambasted the book as “insouciant,” “outrageous,” and “reckless,” inaugurating a rhetorical dual with Said that would continue for decades. Even more sympathetic readers highlighted the book’s limitations. Scholars like the French historian Maxime Rodinson noted that Orientalism was far too sweeping in approach. The study of the Orient, he noted, was a diverse field, and many of its proponents hated empire.
Other supportive readers questioned the book’s focus on ideology and representation. Wasn’t colonialism ultimately driven by economic exploitation? The critique that stung the most came from Arab and Pakistani Marxists, who lamented that Said unintentionally strengthened Muslim conservatives. The Syrian philosopher and activist Sadiq Al Azm, for example, argued that by depicting European knowledge as hopelessly tainted, the book “poured cold water” on the effort to popularize Marxist ideas in the Middle East and bolstered lazy anti-Western sentiments.
These misgivings, however, did little to diminish Orientalism’s impact on the international republic of letters. Appearing in 30 languages, it was widely celebrated as a fresh and sophisticated assault on Western arrogance, one equal to anti-colonial classics like Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961). “Here for the first time,” Palestinian historian Tarif Khalidi wrote, “was a book by one of us telling the empire basically to go f— itself.” In a world reeling from the manifold disasters perpetrated by the U.S. in Vietnam, understanding the connections between Western self-righteousness and violence seemed more urgent than ever.
Said helped inspire the work of countless literary scholars, philosophers, historians, and political scientists who mapped colonialism’s intellectual legacies in the present. He was the founding figure of what in the 1980s became known as “postcolonial studies.” The impact of this intellectual project spilled beyond academic circles. After Orientalism, theater programs, museum catalogs, and Hollywood films began to adopt less Western-focused perspectives.
According to Brennan, Said in fact infused the humanities with renewed significance. Works like Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism(1993), which expanded its insight to more novels, demonstrated the centrality of literature and art to political discourse. Said turned the traditional Marxist view of culture on its head. He claimed that novels and images were not mere expression of social domination but their very heart; they informed how journalists covered world affairs, how citizens thought about politics, and how politicians enacted policies. Countless students and scholars came to view the study of stories, movies, and representation as political action, and journalists the world over courted Said, endlessly asking for his take on political matters.
Places of Mind’s last chapters trace Said’s rising prominence to the position of celebrity. As a testament to his triumph, they catalog the mind-numbingly abundant prizes and honors he received, describe his never-ending stream of interviews on radio and TV, and depict his collaborations with many famous artists, such as the conductor Daniel Barenboim. Yet along with the rapid ascent came frustration. Said’s publications may have made a splash, but they were unable to materially advance the Palestinian national cause, which suffered defeat after defeat.
For Said, stories were essential to the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. If Americans so enthusiastically lavished Israel with weapons and supported its cruel occupation, he claimed, it was not out of some hard-nosed calculation, but because they bought into a particular narrative, one in which persecuted Jews had heroically defeated their evil Arab neighbors.
According to Said, this story was sustained not only by relentlessly pro-Israel politicians, magazines, and TV shows but by the fact that Americans were rarely exposed to Palestinian perspectives. Said noted that this was true even for those who were deeply critical of Israel’s actions. Noam Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle(1983), for example, condemned U.S. diplomats and Israeli politicians for enabling the horrific massacres of Palestinians in Lebanon, but it, too, relied on Western sources and did not include Palestinian testimonies.
Alongside his campaign against the orientalist tradition, Said therefore launched an effort to open new spaces for Palestinians in the Western imagination. As he wrote in the essay “Permission to Narrate” (1983), the task was to forge “a socially acceptable narrative” that would allow people to empathize with Palestinians and view them as fellow humans. Venturing beyond European literature, Said sought to integrate Arab perspectives into the Western literary canon.
While most of his academic work remained focused on English and French authors, he also began studying Palestinian writers like Mahmoud Darwish and helped facilitate their translation into Western languages. And he collaborated with photographer Jean Mohr onAfter the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), a collection of images and short texts that depicted Palestinian people in everyday activities.If Said’s words still resonate today, it is because the evils he helped expose are as powerful as ever.
Yet readers largely ignored After the Last Sky and similar projects, and most certainly did not lavish it with the prizes and honors that were showered on Orientalism. They were mostly interested in the analysis of the West’s colonialism; oppression’s victims were an afterthought. Said was painfully aware that this part of his work had limited impact, and during the 1980s and 1990s he became progressively despairing about the prospects of Palestinian liberation. “The road forward is blocked,” he ruefully wrote, “the instruments of the present are insufficient, [and] we can’t get back to the past.” His gloom only grew after the Palestinian leadership signed a tentative peace agreement with Israel in 1993 (the so-called Oslo Accords), which Said predicted would not lead to statehood but to deepening occupation. By the end of his life, he was politically isolated; his books were even banned in the Palestinian Authority over his criticism of Yasser Arafat’s authoritarianism.
Said’s high hopes for literary studies—that they would lead the expansion of the world’s political options—also proved fleeting. Said’s career, in fact, was not only a rare exception but also a product of broad intellectual sources. It emerged from the 1970s and 1980s, when debates about the literary canon roiled institutions of higher learning and figures like Paul de Man and Alan Bloom were famous.
But by the early twenty-first century, the humanities began to decline. Students were beginning to abandon them, a trickle that would soon become a flood. In such a world, Said was quickly becoming a monument for a passing era. He was one of the last literary scholars to gain the public’s attention; when he lamented being the “last Jewish intellectual,” he in part recognized he was not likely to be followed by others. His increasing alienation from his adoptive country was reflected in the location of his grave. At his request, it stands not in New York, where he spent most of his career, but in Beirut, where he was only an occasional visitor.
If Said’s words still resonate today, it is because the evils he helped expose are as powerful as ever. In the two decades since the 2001 attacks, orientalist sentiments have only intensified: Western politicians still treat Muslims and Arabs as fanatical terrorists, and Western media still perpetuate those narratives. As historian Maha Nassar recently noted*, of the thousands of pieces run by TheNew York Times and The Washington Post on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, barely 1 percent were written by Palestinians.
The grip of orientalism on U.S. knowledge production has in fact only tightened since Said’s passing. In 2002, the historian Daniel Pipes, who began his career with a campaign against Orientalism, founded the organization Campus Watch, which has targeted scholars who express sympathy with Palestinians. The case of Fresno State University in California was probably the most on-the-nose expression of Said’s lasting relevance. In 2016, the university’s leadership posted a job ad for its newly created Edward Said chair in Middle Eastern studies, only to abruptly call off the search by summer of 2017.
Just like his life, Said’s legacy is a paradox. His ideas are relevant exactly because their political impact was limited: The vast campaign he launched in scholarship, the media, and political activism could not dislodge orientalist bigotry. Similarly, Said looms so large in the humanities because a career like his is now hard to imagine. Rather than blazing a path for other literary scholars to become influential political commentators, he turned out to be among the last humanists with a public presence. Those who share in his quest for a more equal and humane world still face the question that always vexed him: If one has a humanist story to tell, how to make others listen?
“J’ ai ecrit un nom tout pres du reseau d’ecume, ou’ la dernière onde vient de mourir; les lames successives ont attaqué lentement le nom consolateur; ce n’est qu’au seizième déroulement qu’elles l’ont emporté lettre a lettre et comme a regret: Je sentais qu’elles effacaient ma vie” (Chateaubriand avait écrit le nom de Mrs. Récamier)
Il ne reste plus qu’une foule de gens qui troublent le monde, une petite tache sur le monde. Peut-être qu’une brise planera quand on passera par le Port de Beirut.
A new reality seems created when we adapt our dreams to the previous reality.
We seek a catchy singing rime, a catchy mantra…to summarize our new found purpose in life.
The Druze sect in Lebanon is in a far worse situation than the various “Christian” sects. The Jews in Israel are working on letting the Druze believe they are Half Jews. The various Muslim sects barely believe the Druze are Half Muslims. They created their own paranoia 800 years ago. They still hang to the illusion that England will come to their rescue in bad periods. No political organization is willing to believe in their “allegiance”, even in the short-term
The problem with the Ego, (and it is real), it’s that we identify with it to the extent that we forget there’s other parts of us. We get lost in certain habitual identities and then we stop looking. So we’re learning to be present with the manifestation.
The pleasure of reading history, (and history is more likely to be biased for the victors), like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about. (And to give us ground for daydreaming stories and project?)
“Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work; not the starting point.” — Frederick Maitland. (The relevant question is: How simple is simple and how accurate it still describes the phenomena).
The uprisings of the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia and Egypt have so far produced anarchy in Libya, a civil war in Syria, greater autocracy in Bahrain and resumed dictatorial rule in Egypt. (All these failures thanks to US/Saudi Kingdom/Israel/France ) who don’t want changes and democracy in the region)
Civil disobedience means you decided to adopt the strategy of confronting the system instead of running away from problems to easier alternatives.
Last night I was watching Hezbollah channel Al Manar. It told of the route the Umayyad army travelled with the “sabayat“, the prisoners of what was left of Hussein army. It said that most of the semi-nomadic tribes living in Syria withdrew with the defeated Byzantine army. It failed to say that the barely 7,000 fighters who came from the desert could Not defeat the Byzantine army if the tribes in Syria didn’t join it. A historical decision to ally with an army with No urban laws and civilization. Humanity civilization degraded as it reverted for 1,500 years to Law and Order based on religious dogmatic concepts and absolute monarchies, both Christian and Muslim.
L’Immortalité de l’âme est un problème attachant pour le genre humain. Si on apprend a concevoir une âme a toutes les autres genres qui vient et pullulent la terre, le racism aurait-il pris racines?
Il faut du courage pour oser braver les cris du vulgaire.
Le dernier moment (de la mort) s’arrête toujours pour nous tromper
Ce n’est que dans l’exile qu’on évoque l’enfance et qu’on essaie de restituer la réalité’ perdue. Pas d’autobiographie sans être exilé dans l’espace et le temps.
“Les idéologues du Christianisme n’ont-ils pas voulu en faire un système d’astronomie?” (Napoleon). En fait, toutes les religions antiques relève d’astronomie, même en ce jour des religions des peuple isolés.
Bonaparte a dérangé jusqu’à l’ avenir. L’esclavage que Napoléon avait façonné la société a l’obéissance passive, et son despotisme descendra sur nous en forteresses.
The greatest mass gathering for welcoming exiled Leader Antoun Saadi in the Near-East: People flocked from Syria, Jordan, Palestine and even from Iraq to meet Saadi at the airport. Saadi founded the Syria National Social party in 1933 under the French mandated power to Lebanon
This version is published in Lebanon daily Al Akhbar
المكان: مطار بيروت في منطقة بئر حسن
الحدث: طائرة قادمة من القاهرة تحطّ في المطار وعلى متنها أنطون سعادة ومن بين ركابها فوزي القاوقجي وفريد الأطر.
في ذلك اليوم، توافدت حشود ضخمة لم يسبق لبيروت أن شهدت مثيلاً للترحيب بسعادة القائد العائد من المنفى القسري الذي استمر حوالى تسع سنوات في أميركا الجنوبية.
بداية، منعت الحكومة اللبنانية الحشود القادمة من لبنان والشام وفلسطين والأردن من دخول بيروت،
فجرى تحاشي الصدام وتجمعت الجماهير في منطقة الغبيري حيث ألقى سعادة خطاباً عُرف فيما بعد بـ «خطاب العودة».
وبعد ساعات قليلة من إلقاء الخطاب، قررت الحكومة اللبنانية تأديب الخطيب فأصدرت بحقه مذكرة توقيف لأنّ رئيس الحكومة اعتبر أن في الخطاب «هنات»
لم تكن بالهينات بالنسبة له كما صرح في اليوم التالي:
الطبقة السياسية من مختلف الطوائف توافقت على التأديب، هذه الطبقة هي التي سبق لها أن نشأت وترعرعت في أحضان الفرنسيين والإنكليز، بعضهم كانوا خدماً عند الاحتلال الفرنسي والبعض الآخر نكاية أو لعدم اختيار الفرنسيين له قرروا مبايعة الإنكليز وفي مقدمة هؤلاء رئيس الحكومة.
أما الملاحق، فهو قائد ومفكر شجاع حارب الاحتلال بدون هوادة، واعتقل ثلاث مرات ما بين 1935 و1937 واضطر إلى مغادرة البلاد سراً وبسرعة بعدما كشف مؤامرة لاعتقاله للمرة الرابعة.
ورغم نفيه القسري حيل بكافة الوسائل السماح له بالعودة، وكانت التقارير عن نشاطه القومي في المغترب تصل تباعاً إلى المخابرات الفرنسية والأميركية كما ثبتت الوثائق السرية التي أصبح بالإمكان الاطلاع عليها في البلدين.
لن أستفيض في شرح الملابسات والوساطات التي رافقت رفض السلطات عودته،
والحيلولة دون تسلمه جواز سفر بأوامر من رئيس الحكومة رياض الصلح. لكن في نهاية الأمر، نجحت الوساطات المتعددة، وأذعنت الحكومة وجرى تسليم جواز السفر له في البرازيل. وبهدف تطويق انعكاسات وصوله، جرت محاولات في القاهرة لإقناعه بأن الأمور تغيرت، والبلد أصبح «مستقلاً»،
وليس من المستحب إعادة التأكيد على الثوابت القومية التي أعلنها طيلة فترة وجوده في لبنان في مطلع ثلاثينات القرن الماضي.
لم تتراجع الحكومة اللبنانية عن مذكرة التوقيف إلا بعدما اضطر أقطاب السلطة المتنازعون فيما بينهم والمتخالفون ضده إلى التفاوض معه بهدف الحصول على تأييد القوميين الاجتماعيين لهم في الانتخابات التي كان من المزمع إجراؤها.
بعد عودته إلى ساحة الجهاد كما أعلن وانتهاء الانتخابات،
بدأت مرحلة جديدة من المفاوضات والتحرشات. كان الوضع خطيراً، أعلن قرار تقسيم فلسطين سنة 1947 وقامت الدولة اليهودية في أيار 1948،
وابتدأت الجلجلة الفلسطينية وتدفق آلاف الفلسطينيين إلى كيانات جوار فلسطين. على الفور،
منعت الحكومة مظاهرة للقوميين ضد قرار تقسيم فلسطين في 2 تشرين الثاني (نوفمبر) 1947.
وألغي امتياز جريدة «صدى النهضة» الناطقة باسم الحزب السوري القومي الاجتماعي.
وأصدرت الحكومة بلاغاً منعت فيه «الأجانب» من القيام بأي نشاط سياسي. و«الأجانب» هم بالطبع الفلسطينيون.
وفي تلك الفترة كان الفلسطيني فايز صايغ «عميد الإذاعة في الحزب السوري القومي الاجتماعي». أخيراً ضاقوا ذرعاً به وبطروحاته وبنشاطات حزبه،
فجرى التخطيط لتفجير الوضع برمته في 11 حزيران (يونيو) 1949 عندما هاجمت كتائب بيار الجميل مكاتب جريدة الحزب «الجيل الجديد» في الجميزة وأحرقتها.
(ما أشبه هجوم كتائب الجميل هذا – بهجومهم لاحقاً سنة 1975 وقتلهم ركاب باص عين الرمانة).
بسرعة البرق، صدرت الأوامر باعتقال سعادة وبدأت حملة قمع واعتقالات مكثفة من قبل السلطة ضد أعضاء وقيادات الحزب.
أخيراً في صبيحة يوم 8 تموز (يوليو) 1949 قتلت السلطة اللبنانية سعادة بعد محاكمة سرية استمرت بضع ساعات، إثر تسليم ديكتاتور دمشق حسني الزعيم السلطات اللبنانية سعادة ليل 7 تموز وبضغوط عربية.
هذا مختصر سريع للأحاديث، لكن أود أن أعود إلى ما جاء في خطاب العودة وقرأته مجدداً على ضوء الأوضاع التي عاشها لبنان منذ تلك الفترة حتى يومنا هذا. لعله بالإمكان أخذ العبرة والتخلي عن التمسك بالأوهام وكشف الوضع على حقيقته المرة. ماذا قال الرجل في ذلك الخطاب الذي استفز أركان السلطة؟
ما فعله غورو هو ما خطط له الضباط الفرنسيون الذين أنشأوا دويلات طائفية في سورية
في البدء ذكّر سعادة جموع المحتشدين وكان معظمهم من ضيوف سجون الاحتلال الفرنسي قائلاً:
«في حالة الاستقلال الحاضرة خرجت الأمة من «القواويش» التي كانت فيها، خرجت الأمة من الحبوس داخل البناية التي أعد لها الاستعمار ولكنها حتى الآن لا تزال ضمن السور الكبير الذي يحيط ببنايات السجن. نحن الآن خارج القواويش ولكننا لا نزال ضمن السور، الأبواب مفتوحة، التي من الداخل، أما التي إلى الخارج فلا يزال عليها السجانون، وهم دائماً منّا في الغالب». وأيضاً: «لعلكم ستسمعون من سيقول لكم إن في إنقاذ فلسطين حيفاً على لبنان واللبنانيين، وأمر لا دخل للبنانيين فيه، إن إنقاذ فلسطين هو أمر لبناني في الصميم، كما هو أمر فلسطيني في الصميم.
إن الخطر اليهودي على فلسطين هو على سورية كلها، هو خطر على جميع هذه الكيانات».
منذ ذلك اليوم وحتى الآن، السجانون وأحفادهم باعوا واشتروا، أثروا ونهبوا، تآمروا وخانوا، ذبحوا ودمروا، وهم باستمرار يعرضون خدماتهم للبيع لأي قنصل أو سفير يقبل استعمالهم. وثائق موقع ويكيليكس هي القليل القليل من إنجازاتهم.
ولا يزال اللبنانيون حتى يومنا هذا يعانون من جور زعماء الطوائف وأجهزتهم القمعية. نضالهم للوصول إلى السلطة لا تأتي ثماره إلا عبر أسلوبين: الأول محلي وهو عبر تغذية التوتر المذهبي والصراع الطائفي.
والثاني أجنبي في حال رضي سفير دولة ما وأجهزة مخابراتها تجنيده. في السياسة اللبنانية التقليدية الأولوية للمال،
كل شيء قابل للبيع والشراء،
المصالح الشخصية هي الأساس، النفاق السياسي والزئبقية في المواقف هي مبدأ. الناس عبارة عن حطب في معارك الزعامات، تارة ضمن الطائفة الواحدة وتارة ضد طائفة أخرى، شراستهم فيما بينهم لا يمكن وصفها، ترتكب المجازر وبعد فترة يتوافق المتقاتلون في «سبيل الوطن» بالتأكيد. وإذا حاولت نبش تاريخهم الأسود يتذمرون ويقولون: «لماذا نبش القبور، الوحدة الوطنية هي الأساس وعفا الله عما مضى»
هذه هي المعزوفة التي لم تتبدل منذ المجازر الأولى في أواسط أربعينات القرن التاسع عشر إلى مجازر 1860، إلى المجازر المتنقلة في القرن العشرين.
لكن من المؤكد أنّ طلقة واحدة ضد العدو الصهيوني فيها فتوى التحريم.
ما قاله سعادة في خطبه ومقالاته ورسائله هو النقيض لهؤلاء العرّابين (God Fathers). قال بفصل الدين عن الدولة، وإلغاء الحواجز بين الطوائف،
ونادى بالوحدة السورية. في عمره القصير جداً (1904-1949) أمضى في أرض الوطن بضع سنوات فقط، لكن ما قاله وأسسه وحّد ضده المحتلين الفرنسيين وجميع الطبقة السياسية التي حكمت لبنان.
والآن بعد مرور كل هذه السنوات على استشهاده، نستطيع بسهولة تذوق الحصاد المرّ الذي جلبه عداؤهم له وجريمتهم بحقه وحق رفاقه على هذا البلد. من على أيديهم أنهار من الدم هم الأسياد وأصحاب القرار.
هنا يحضرني قول لشكسبير استهل به سعادة مطلع قصة كتبها بعنوان «فاجعة الحب» جاء فيه «البعض يرتفع بالخطيئة والبعض يسقط بالفضيلة».
اليوم وفي بحر التمزق التي تشهده بلادنا، وبالتحديد في الكيان اللبناني من هجرة، وبطالة، واصطفاف طائفي، وحقد مذهبي دفين، نفايات، تلوث، انعدام الكهرباء وشح الماء،
نهب منظم من قبل بعض أهل السلطة والمصارف وكبار الرأسماليين وغيره وغيره، ناهيك بالانكفاء عن حفظ أيّ كرامة لهذه الأرض ومن يسكنها والتي تزورها يومياً طائرات الصهاينة.
.. نعم في خضم هذا الوضع الذي هو بمثابة حشجرة الميت. كل الحلول للأزمات تولد ميتة لا قوانين انتخابات عصرية سواء كانت نسبية أو غير نسبية أو كونفدرالية تنفع، ولا محاولات تجنيس المغتربين (بالمناسبة جرت محاولة مماثلة سنة 1937 بهدف زيارة عدد المسيحيين وفشلت).
كل ذلك لا يمكن أن يكون علاجاً لمريض في مرحلة النَزَع الأخير. جميع تلك المشاريع التخديرية لا أساس واقعياً لها، فالأساس الذي بنى عليه الفرنسيون هذا الكيان بوصفه «وطناً قومياً للمسيحيين»؛
هو أساس مبني أصلاً على الرمل والانهيارات لا محالة.
منذ اليوم بدأ السياسيون بالحديث عن تحضيرات تجري للاحتفال بقيامة «لبنان الكبير» بمناسبة مرور مئة عام على إعلان جنرال محتل هو غورو- هذا الاستقلال السخري في أول أيلول 1920. هناك حقيقة تاريخية موثقة لا تقبل جدلاً:
إن فكرة لبنان الكبير هي في الأصل فكرة فرنسية تعود على الأقل إلى سنة 1860. كانت تلك الفكرة حلقة ضمن مخطط استراتيجي فرنسي لتقسيم سورية إلى دويلات طائفية. ردد تلك الفكرة كتّاب وأساقفة لبنانيون كانوا ممولين من الفرنسيين (هذا الأمر موثّق بوثائق فرنسية) أمثال شكري غانم، أو قبله فردينان تيان أو بولس نجيم وغيرهم (3)
الضباط الفرنسيون الذين جاءوا إلى سورية مع القوات الفرنسية سنة 1860 بهدف «إنقاذ المسيحيين»؟؟ هم الذين وضعوا خريطة لبنان الكبير سنة 1862 كما تبين الخريطة المرفقة دون أي مواربة. (انظر الخريطة المرفقة).
ما فعله غورو هو بالضبط ما خطط له الضباط الفرنسيون الذين أنشأوا دويلات طائفية في سورية، ولكي يتم الإخراج نوعاً ما بشكل مقنع، جمع غورو في صبيحة الأول من أيلول سنة 1920 البطريرك الحويك والمفتي نجا، واحد على اليمين وآخر على اليسار،
وانطلق المشروع بعد اعتقال مجلس إدارة لبنان ونفيهم جميعاً إلى كورسيكا ومن بينهم سعدالله الحويك شقيق البطريرك الذي كان من المعارضين مع زملائه للمشروع برمته ومن المطالبين بعدم الاستقلال عن سورية.
ختاماً ما أشبه الوضع الآن بفيلم سينمائي طويل، انتهت مشاهده وملّ الناس واحترق المسرح، ولا يزال الممثلون وورثتهم أحياء كما يقول نزار قباني،
وعلى الشاشة أمامنا سرد لتاريخ فرضه علينا ضباط فرنسا سنة 1860 وهو مستمر حتى الآن، لكننا بانتظار كلمة النهاية في ختام هذا الفيلم- الطويل. وبعد ذلك لنا طلب واحد فقط لا غير من السياديين الطائفيين، يا سادة تواضعوا قليلاً، وداعاً، ابدأوا بتقبّل التعازي.
* المصادر:
1- انطون سعادة، الأعمال الكاملة 1944-1947، الجزء السابع، مؤسسة سعاده للثقافة، بيروت 2001، الصفحات 204-205.
2- Spears, Edward: Fulfillment of a mission to Syria and the Lebanon, 1941-1944, London, Leo Cooper, 1977
3- الأسماء الواردة هي جزء يسير من سلسلة مقالات وكتب نشرت في فرنسا في الأساس من قبل العديد من الكتاب اللبنانيين الذين كانوا أبواقاً للفرنسيين. أكتفي بالإشارة إلى المصدرين التاليين فقط وهما:
• Tyan, Ferdinand: The Entente Cordiale in Lebanon, London; T. Fisher Unwin, 1917
• Tyan, Ferdinand: Sous les Cèdres du Liban: La nationalité maronite, La Chappelle- Montigeon, 1905
Witold Gombrowicz wrote in his Journal, 1953, on Homeland and Exile.
On Homeland:
Be assured that your homeland is neither Grójec, Skierniewice, nor the entire country!
Let a forceful blood irrigates your face and colors your cheeks at the thought that You are the Homeland.
Are you no longer living in Grodno, Kutno or Jedlinsk ?
Has a person ever traveled anywhere else but in himself?
You are at home, even as you live in Argentina or Canada: Your homeland is not a location on a map, but the life essence of man.
Come on, no need to cry. Don’t forget that as you lived daily in Poland, Poland never meant mush to you.
Today, you don’t live in Poland, and Poland lives ingrained in you.
This new Poland that you have to define as the deepest of your humanity, the labor of many generations.
Everywhere the eyes of a male discover his destiny in the eyes of a young girl, a homeland is born.
Every time you feel angry or in ecstasy, let your fist rises against infamy, and a new homeland is created.
Every time the words of the wise, or the music of Beethoven inflames your soul to the highest celestial spheres, in the Equator or in Alaska, a homeland is born.
In the square of Saxe at Warsaw, or in the Market of Cracow, you will be but poor bums, gatherers of miseries without fire or place, ambulating for small money, if you allow vulgarity kills the beauty in you…”
Question: Do you currently feel that you are at home and comfortable among the Silent Majority?
On Exile
The words of Cioran (a French author of the 50’s and 60’s) breath the humid coldness of caves and the dampness of the graves.
His words are too mesquine. Actually of whom this is about? Who should we comprehend in the definition of “exiled authors”? Rimbaud ? Norwid ? Kafka ? Slowacki ?…
As many men, as many exiled people.
I doubt that any single one of them authors will be precisely scared of this kind of Hell…
Let’s us not forget that Art is nourished of elements of solitude and perfect autonomy. It is in himself that the artist finds satisfaction and a reason to be.
A homeland?
All eminent person, from the fact of his eminence, is a stranger, even in his own house.
Readers? These writers never wrote for their audience, always against their readers.
Honor, success, celebrity, glamour?
They have become celebrity because they learned to have esteem for themselves at a higher level than their success.
Theoretically, and all material difficulties set aside, I think that this plunge in the external universe that exile represents must bring to literature a vigorous impulse.
Here you have the elites of a country booted out of their borders.
This elite class can thus think, feel and write from the outside.
The elite class takes its distance. It acquires a spiritual freedom, rarely attained.
All the shackles and links are broken down. We can be much more than ourselves.
In this generalized effervescence, the established forms are relaxed and untied. We are now capable of walking toward the future in a more rigorous manner…
I don’t deny that in order to vanquish solo these difficulties requires plenty of decisions and moral courage.
Should we feel astonished if, scared of our weakness and by the magnitude of our duties, we hide our head in the mud, and replay past parodies for ourselves, run away from the universe in order to remain in our little world?”
(Lack of opportunities to work, education, and health care… are sources of feeling exiled. You tend to go into isolation and shun company…)
“Sachez bien que votre patrie, ce n’est ni Grójec, ni Skierniewice, ni même le pays tout entier ! Qu’un sang puissant vous monte au visage, et colore vo…s joues à la pensée que c’est vous-mêmes qui êtes votre Patrie ! Vous n’habitez plus Grodno, Kutno ou Jedlinsk ? Mais l’homme a-t-il jamais séjourné ailleurs qu’en lui-même ? Vous êtes chez-vous, même en habitant l’Argentine ou le Canada, car la Patrie n’est pas un lieu sur la carte, elle est l’essence vive de l’homme. […] Allons, ne pleurnichez pas ! Et n’oubliez pas que, tant que vous habitiez la Pologne, la Pologne – chose quotidienne- ne vous frappait guère. Aujourd’hui que vous ne l’habitez plus, mais installée en force, elle vous habite, -cette Pologne qu’il faut définir comme votre humanité la plus profonde, le travail de maintes générations. Partout – sachez-le bien – où le regard du jeune homme découvre sa destinée dans les yeux de la jeune fille, naît la Patrie.
Chaque fois que monte à vos lèvres la colère ou l’extase, que votre poing se dresse contre l’infâmie, chaque fois que la parole du sage ou le chant de Beethoven embrase votre âme en la transportant jusqu’aux sphères célestes, alors – en Equateur ou en Alaska – naît la Patrie. Mais, sur la place de Saxe à Varsovie ou sur le Marché de Cracovie, vous ne serez que de pauvres clochards, des colporteurs sans feu ni lieu, des amasseurs de pognon ambulants, si vous permettez que la vulgarité tue en vous la beauté…”
Exil : Les paroles de Cioran respirent le froid humide des caves et le renfermé des tombeaux, mais elles sont bien trop mesquines. En effet, de qui s’agit-il… ? Qui nous faut-il comprendre dans la définition d’« écrivains exilés » ? […] Rimbaud ? Norwid ? Kafka ? Slowacki ?… Autant d’hommes, autant d’exils. Je crois qu’aucun d’entre eux ne serait effrayé précisément par ce genre d’enfer. […] N’oublions pas que l’Art est chargé et nourri d’éléments de solitude et de parfaite autonomie, c’est en lui-même qu’il trouve sa satisfaction et sa raison d’être. Une patrie ? Mais tout homme éminent, du simple fait de son éminence, est un étranger, même à son propre foyer. Des lecteurs ? Ces écrivains n’ont jamais écrit pour les lecteurs, toujours contre eux. Honneurs, succès, retentissement, célébrité ?… Ils sont devenus célèbres parce qu’ils ont su s’estimer eux-mêmes plus haut que leur succès. Il me semble plutôt que –théoriquement parlant et toutes difficultés matérielles mises à part – cette plongée dans l’univers extérieur que représente l’exil doit apporter à la littérature une impulsion inouïe. Voilà l’élite d’un pays jetée hors de ses frontières, à l’étranger. Elle peut, dès lors, penser, sentir, écrire de l’extérieur. Elle prend ses distances. Elle acquiert une liberté spirituelle rarement atteinte. Tous les liens se brisent. On peut être beaucoup plus soi-même. Dans la mêlée générale, les formes établies se dénouent, se relâchent, et l’on peut marcher vers l’avenir d’une manière plus rigoureuse. […] Je ne nie point que vaincre ces difficultés et les vaincre en solitaire- exige beaucoup de décision et de courage moral. Faut-il par conséquent s’étonner si, épouvantés par notre faiblesse et par l’immensité de nos devoirs, nous enfouissons nos têtes sous le sable, et, nous jouant à nous-mêmes des parodies de notre passé, fuyons l’univers pour rester dans notre petit monde ?
Witold Gombrowicz -Journal, 195