The lives of Edward Said and Xabier Gorostiaga will remain a tremendous source of inspiration for progressives and liberals the world over - just as Elia Kazan will be remembered for embodying the moral confusion of the intellectual turncoat.
IT is only a coincidence that three eminent personalities, each brilliant, original and distinguished in his own field, all died last month: Palestinian spokesman, activist and scholar Edward W. Said, Nicaragua's "red priest" Xabier Gorostiaga, and Broadway and Hollywood director Elia Kazan. All three men exercised an exceptional degree of influence and commanded tremendous respect - or derision and hatred - depending on one's ideological and political inclination.
All of them were global and cosmopolitan in their outlook and range of interests, and lived and worked outside the lands of their origin. But that is about all that they had in common. In their work and life and in their intellectual trajectory, they were as different as any three individuals could be, except that Said and Gorostiaga belonged to the same part of the political spectrum.
Gorostiaga came to the political Left from the Christian church. A Jesuit, he was born in 1937 in Spain where he read philosophy and theology. He then moved to Cambridge, England, where he studied economics. He arrived in Nicaragua in 1979 soon after the Sandinistas had overthrown the dictator Somoza. Since then, Gorostiaga's career became inseparable from the history of Central America, in particular Nicaragua and El Salvador. He worked with the Sandinistas' Planning Ministry and set up a major think tank.
Gorostiaga was a philosopher and strategist of revolution, a brilliant political analyst and a scholar-activist of the global justice and peace movement, who bridged the divide between radical theology and broadly Marxist left-wing politics, and between academic research and social activism. Gorostiaga remained a major force in the World Social Forum process even after he was struck by brain cancer a year ago. Many activists attributed the WSF's slogan "Another World is Possible" to him.
In contrast to Gorostiaga, Elia Kazan moved from the Left to the Centre-Right and the politics of cynicism and defeatism. Born to Greek parents in Istanbul, Turkey, he emigrated to New York as a child. By the 1940s, Kazan came into his own, staging plays by outstanding writers of his time, including Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder and Arthur Miller. He was part of the theatre and film avant garde and a significant player in the progressive new theatre movement of the U.S.
A Communist Party member in the mid-1930s, Kazan gained notoriety in 1952 when he deposed against his own friends, colleagues and former comrades before Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee and gave it the names of eight other party members, ruining their careers and setting off a wave of fear in Hollywood that drove many actors and writers underground.
As for Said, his journey was not so much from one kind of politics to another, as from an emphasis on one set of concerns to another set, or if you prefer, from essentially theoretical analysis to political activism, and analytical writing within the activist mould, especially after the Six-Day War of 1967 and Israel's occupation of Arab territories. Said spoke for the cause of Palestinian statehood with exceptional eloquence, as perhaps no one else did. A giant figure in literary criticism as well as in political debates about West Asia-North Africa and the future of Palestine and Israel, Said was one of the tallest public intellectuals of our time.
Said's role is exceptionally important not least because the question of Palestine is arguably one of the greatest unsolved problems, if not the greatest unsolved problem, left over from the 20th century. It is the site of many intersections: between the Age of Imperialism and its legacies, on the one hand, and the contemporary present, on the other; between religion and the politics of nationhood; and between the geo-political interests of the U.S. and the aspirations of the Arab peoples, in particular the Palestinian urge for nationhood. Further complicating it is Israel/Palestine's location at a vantage point in West Asia, where 70 per cent of the world's oil lies, in which global capital has such a huge and obvious stake.
Said will be remembered not just as a brilliant theorist with such important works to his credit as Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, but even more for his excellent "popular" contributions like Covering Islam, Reflections on Exile, Politics of Dispossession, his memoir Out of Place and his collection of essays, The World, the Text, the Critic.
No less important is his text After the Sky, with photographs by Jean Mohr, which is a remarkably unsentimental yet penetrating discussion of the Palestinian tragedy. Indeed, it is possible to argue that while original and extremely influential (partly because of its appearance at a propitious moment in 1978), Orientalism is in some sense an incomplete work, drawing largely on Western stereotypes of the Arab world, but ignoring the equally important distorted depiction of India and China in colonial scholarship.
Said's political writings were always incisive and hard-hitting. His influence was not confined to the U.S. or the Western world. In many ways, after joining in the Palestinian National Council (PNC) in 1977, Said played an important role in moderating its stand on Israel. (For long years, PNC and the Palestine Liberation Organisation refused to accept Israel as a legitimate state, and preferred instead to call it the "Zionist entity".) Said contributed significantly to moving the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the direction of a two-state solution.
Said was acutely aware of the uniquely brutalising experience of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and boldly recognised Israel's legitimate right to exist. The rethinking he encouraged in the PLO/PNC was to lead to the "Historic Compromise" of 1988, when the PLO and the PNC "conceded" to Israel 78 per cent of the land area of the old "Mandate" territory of Palestine, and vowed to build a new Palestine state on the remaining 22 per cent land.
Perhaps the greatest political tribute that can be paid to Edward Said is that he understood the horribly compromised nature of the 1994 Oslo Accords and stood up against them with singular courage - thanks to his own clarity about the nature of the Palestinian struggle, its strategy and methods. He saw Oslo as being simply incompatible with a just and fair solution to the Palestinian question. The Accords would concede no more than municipal powers and limited sovereignty to the Palestinian Authority, with no autonomous economy, no contiguous territory, and no control over entry or exit points. They would create a series of Bantustans - a cruel mockery of an independent, sovereign Palestine.
Said had the courage to resign from the PNC and criticise the Arafat leadership for its corruption and despotism. This alienated him from the Palestine Authority; a huge chasm opened up between him and PLO leaders, who would denounce him as an extremist living in exile and hence out of touch with the Palestinian reality. Some of them wanted his writings banned altogether. Yet, Said remained "Public Enemy Number One" for American Zionists.
Today, much of what Said said about the "peace process" - largely mediated by a less-than-honest broker the U.S., whose closest ally in West Asia is none other than Israel - stands vindicated. Even Yasser Arafat ultimately could not bring himself to betray completely the case of Palestinian statehood and accept Washington's dictates although his own perspective assumes, indeed is based on, a strong mediatory role for the U.S., as distinct from a truly multinational agency.
The second Intifada that began three years ago after Ariel Sharon's infamous march upon a holy shrine in Jerusalem fully bears out the validity of Said's assessment that the will of the Palestinian people is indomitable; no amount of armed repression can break it. What they need is leadership. In this sense, Edward Said's death is a grievous, indeed irreparable, loss to the Palestinian cause.
Among the best of Said's own reflections on the role of the public intellectual are to be found in his Reith Lectures for BBC (1993), published as Representations of the Intellectual. Broadly, he sees the public intellectual as a fiercely independent spirit, continuously subjecting evolving reality to a sharp critique, rejecting all orthodoxies, speaking to and defining itself through the public interest and universal values.
This means confronting the powerful with unpleasant truths and shaking the public out of its apathy and complacency. As Said once said, he belonged to "an establishment of sorts", and knew what that world was all about. "They (the establishment) feel they can bring me back to the fold because they say, `You're really one of us, not one of those people'. I become enraged and I become even more inflammatory, and I reveal even more of their horrible secrets."
What emerges from Said's discourse is a picture of the engaged or committed intellectual who accepts his/her responsibility to the larger cause in unflinching terms, but who is at the same time independent and free, and who never hesitates to knock down shibboleths, and subjects even organisational affiliations to the test of rationality.
Contrast this with the brilliant, erratic, yet vengeful, personality of Elia Kazan. Kazan was highly acclaimed and won 20 Oscars for seven of his films. They include, most famously, On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, and East of Eden. He also won a number of best-director awards for plays like All My Sons and Death of a Salesman (both by Arthur Miller). But Kazan lacked the commitment of a public intellectual. He often imagined he was speaking for the underdog, but he was only being erratic and quirky.
In his autobiography, Kazan compares himself to a black snake: "I've shed several skins in my time, lived several lives and known violent and cruel changes. Generally I've understood what happened only after it happened... I've repeatedly astonished people by what seem to be total reversals of positions and attitudes". As he once said, he felt like an outsider and faced discrimination as a child and young man: "Revenge began to be a motive in my life."
For Said, exile was the experience of the intellectual having to separate herself from what is given to her; to look at it critically, as if it were "foreign to oneself". For Kazan, exile involved avenging the wrong done to him: "A lot of critics refer to me as an outsider, and I suppose I was, wasn't I?... Being a foreigner, being an immigrant."
Kazan was no doubt a genius. Some of his work is astounding, aesthetically superb and insightful - in the same way that even ultra-conservatives and fanatics can be brilliant. Take the case of, say, Leni Riefenstahl, the powerful film-maker who glorified Hitler, or the great novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wanted Ronald Reagan to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons! But Kazen's vengeful trait was to impel him to betray his own colleagues and wipe out much of the good work he had done at the Actors Studio and greatly acclaimed radical Group Theatre with their avant garde agendas and emancipatory ideas.
At the end of the day, Said and Gorostiaga will be remembered because they contributed to the cause of human emancipation. Kazan will be recalled as much because of his capitulation to McCarthyism at a critical juncture, as for his brilliant but troubled mind and work.
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