[size=40]Edward Said: a legacy of speaking truth to power[/size]
There are no easy answers. Edward Said knew that when he joined forces withDaniel Barenboim to form the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999. The Palestinian intellectual and the Israeli conductor never suggested that bringing young Arabs and Israelis together to make music would engender peace or political solutions. But both believed that the creative venture held its own merit. Said and Barenboim found support and met with criticism; the men formed a partnership that the world noticed. Their dialogue, their harmonies and dissonances, formed the basis of a hugely ambitious project.
Four years later, Said died of leukaemia, leaving behind a gaping hole in an institution that was conceived as the sum of these two disparate parts.
“Of course I wish Edward was still alive,” says Mena Hanna, dean of Berlin’s Barenboim-Said Academy. “I need his mentorship, and I need his strength and resolve. But now we need to push forward. We need to be self-critical. We need to be self-aware. And what it means for us to be self-aware is to discuss Edward’s legacy publicly.”
And so Hanna has initiated the Edward W Said Days, opening next weekend at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal with a focus on late style — the subject that preoccupied Said in his final years. For the first time since the tertiary music institution that bears his name was founded six years ago, the Academy will host a weekend of events that place Said at the centre of the public eye.
Hanna is quick to point out that Said’s legacy has in no way been diminished over the years, even though simple longevity has led Barenboim to dominate public perceptions of their institution.
“Daniel is a person of political character, one of the most principled people I’ve ever come across, and I understood why Edward was close to him,” Hanna says. “That’s what attracted me to take this job. Their ability to speak truth to power is why I became dean of this institution.”
By mixing lectures, chamber music and open debate, Hanna hopes that the Said Days will challenge the traditional notion of the classical concert, addressing the challenges posed in Said’s benchmark works Orientalism andCulture and Imperialism. “The way we play classical music today is a construct,” says Hanna. “It is focused on a period that is quite limited in its scope; it comes from the 19th century, which was the time of the great European imperialistic project. And it still has that power structure built into it.”
For Hanna, an Egyptian-American musicologist and composer, the Barenboim-Said Academy offers a means of challenging that structure from within. In particular the festival, he says, “is about trying to create a new form, about blurring the distinctions between performance and discourse.
“Late style is the unifying element. Because we’re talking about late style in terms of music, literature, understanding of thought, and Edward’s understanding of late style itself. Edward’s late style is political activism.” Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh is the speaker for one of the weekend’s concerts, discussing the concept of “late Palestine” in an evening that also includes Beethoven’s string quartet Op 130 and Grosse Fuge, works central to Said’s thesis of late style as an expression of intransigence and unreconciled contradiction.
This in turn overlaps with Said’s reflections on exile, which, he argued, could be either external (like his own) or internal (like that of composer Richard Strauss, who did not flee the Nazis but withdrew in his musical output into a world of lavish historicism). For Shehadeh, Said’s description of internal exile as a possibility was critical to his own survival after what he saw as the bitter disappointment of the Oslo Accords of 1993: despite Shehadeh’s best legal efforts, Israeli settlements remained in the occupied territories.
“I thought that intellectuals had failed in our struggle, and the only thing left was the striving, the will of Ramallah to go on,” he explains. “That our only hope really is through staying put, persevering. It’s coming to terms, deciding to become an inner exile — and also thinking that, ultimately, as Edward Said was also saying, it’s through knowing our own history and coming together in recognition of each other’s histories which is the only hope.”
The Barenboim-Said Academy, says Shehadeh, will not solve the problems of Palestine, but it represents a vital form of hope for him. “I don’t think dialogue is the way out. The two sides are not equal. The occupation has to end, and that doesn’t end through dialogue, because there are vested interests. But I think that despite that, the Barenboim-Said Academy and the orchestra are important things to hold on to in this very dark time.” Educator and writer Mariam Said, Edward Said’s widow, says that the new festival is a valuable step towards keeping her late husband’s memory alive. Her personal favourite of the topics to be addressed, she says, is the link between exile and counterpoint about which Said often talked.
In his view, the exile lives with concurrent layers of place and memory, just as a fugue weaves together disparate yet equal melodic lines. Counterpoint holds together coexisting themes which exist in harmony with each other even when there is tension; to Said, this was an ideal image for the resolution of conflict.
“Counterpoint was a musical term that he also applied to literature in Culture and Imperialism,” Mariam Said says. “The idea of counterpoint was always somewhere in his work. And maybe what we are doing here is the counterpoint to Edward.
“We all carry a lot of garbage from the past. He once said that at some point one has to unlearn everything that you knew or believed or grew up with to be able to start again, to begin again. He always liked the idea of beginning. You begin again. You don’t end.
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