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Edward Said: Between Worlds

A new film biography depicts the Palestinian writer as still out of place—and ahead of his time. 

In the spring of 1991, Edward Said and his wife, Mariam, traveled from New York to South Africa, where the Columbia professor had been invited to deliver a lecture on academic freedom. Although Nelson Mandela had been released from Robben Island a few months earlier, apartheid was still in force—as was the academic and cultural boycott administered by the African National Congress, which had approved Said’s visit.

On arriving in Johannesburg, Said met briefly with Mandela, and was then taken for a much longer conversation with the ANC’s deputy president, Walter Sisulu, in what Said later described as “a deeply illuminating discussion” of the history of the South African struggle, with the ANC “now for the first time in its history in the ascendancy…with obvious points of difference and comparison with the Palestinian struggle, then, as now, very much not in the ascendancy.” The cordiality of the encounter, however, was marred for Said by the ostentatious display in the ANC leader’s office of a copy of Jerusalem: Sacred City of Mankind—a coffee-table book by Teddy Kollek, the city’s longtime mayor and international symbol of liberal Zionism.

Their conversation was not filmed, and is not featured in Edward Said: Between Worlds, the new documentary that serves both to introduce one of the 20th century’s most important writers and thinkers to a new audience two decades after his death in 2003 and as a deeply personal history of the Palestinian struggle in the 20th century. I mention it here not to fault the filmmakers, who have used their unprecedented access to the Said family archive (including a trove of 8mm home movies filmed by Edward’s father, Wadie Said, showing the writer’s childhood home in West Jerusalem) to assemble a deeply moving portrait, but to underline both what Said was up against—and how often even those who regarded themselves as sympathetic to his cause misunderstood him.

Both of these themes—opposition and misunderstanding—are of course central to Said’s 1999 memoir, Out of Place, which remains the essential text for anyone curious about the origins and evolution of this seminal figure, whose literary criticism, from Beginnings (1975) through Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), changed not only the way we read canonical texts from Dante to Conrad but also the way we view the interplay of politics, history, and culture. At the same time, beginning in the late 1970s, Said became (second only to his sometime ally, sometime enemy, Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization) the face of the Palestinian cause—certainly in the West.

Although much of this material has been covered before—in Out of Place, but also in the 1998 BBC documentary In Search of Palestine, and Edward Said: The Last Interview, a lengthy series of filmed conversations with the journalist Charles Glass that I produced and Mike Dibb directed, released shortly after Said’s death, not to mention Places of Mind, Tim Brennan’s 2021 authorized biography—Edward Said: Between Worlds offers a new, and more robust, narrative framework in which to situate a man who, as he says in the film (quoting Whitman), was never unaware of his own contradictions, or that he contained multitudes.

Edward Said was born in November 1935 in Talbiyya—at the time a prosperous, mostly Christian (Arabs and Armenians) neighborhood of imposing villas on large lots. His father, whose family belonged to the city’s tiny Anglican minority, ran a stationery and office supply business with outlets in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Alexandria. His mother, Hilda, was from Nazareth, where her father was a Baptist minister. That background, plus an American passport (acquired thanks to Wadie’s service in the US Army during World War I), nurtured a lifelong identity as an outsider—a sensation that secondary school in Cairo, where the family fled in 1947 as rising sectarian violence made Talbiyya unsafe, did nothing to assuage. But if Said felt out of place at Victoria College—sometimes described as “the Eton of the Middle East,” whose teachers were all British expats, and where his classmates included Omar Sharif and the future King Hussein of Jordan—he was even more isolated at Mount Hermon, a boys’ boarding school in Northfield,........

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