Summary
Colonial writer from Trinidad read in two essays in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays — “Bitter Dispatches from the Third World” (essay 10) and “Among the Believers” (essay 12) — as a gifted writer whose subject was extraterritoriality, whose later work renders the postcolonial world without tenderness for an audience of disenchanted Western liberals, and whose reading of Conrad exempts Europe from the ironies he sees elsewhere (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.114-119, 126-129).
Details
- In an early essay, a flower in British Guiana: “We call it jasmine.” The word and the flower had been separate in his mind too long and did not come together (PDF p.114).
- He wrote in 1965 that “to be a colonial is to be a little ridiculous and unlikely”, and that for the colonial there can be no true return (PDF p.114).
- His fiction treated the play of adjustments when a remembered India fell away for East Indians after World War II, from Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur to Biswas in A House for Mr. Biswas (PDF p.114).
- In the final section of In a Free State (1971), set in Luxor in 1966, he confronts a man camel-whipping children — “I will report this to Cairo” — and retreats feeling “exposed, futile” (PDF p.115).
- Irving Howe, in a Times review of A Bend in the River (1979), held him free of romantic moonshine, supposedly without “a trace [in him] of Western condescension or nostalgia for colonialism” — a judgment Said’s reading of the Michael X essay and Guerrillas disputes (PDF p.115, 117).
- In his essays there is not real analysis, only observation: he does not explain, he only regrets sarcastically (PDF p.116).
- He reads Conrad as “the writer who is missing a society”, but does not see that Conrad exempted neither himself nor Europe: London is no less a “dark place” than the Congo (PDF p.118).
- Among the Believers records a 1979–1980 visit to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia; its thesis, in the Khomeini passage, is that Islam was “to be rejected: at the same time it was to be depended on.” (quoted PDF p.126).
- The book sums up the entire existence of 800,000,000 people (as printed) in the claim that “the life that had come to Islam had not come from within” (PDF p.127).
- He would not make a trip to Israel, in Said’s account, because his audience knows Israel is OK and “Islam” not; he writes about Muslims from the Atlantic Monthly, with no dialogue (PDF p.128).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said, Joseph Conrad