In Edward Said’s December 1992 Harper’s article ‘Palestine, Then and Now’, he explains that after 46 years he visited Jerusalem. In an interesting manner he mentions how he could not go back to his own house. If he wanted, he could. But he chose not to. His words were, ‘I pointed out the window of the room I was born, which you could see from outside the house and I said to my children, that there was where I was born.
They said, ‘Daddy. Don’t you want to go in and look at it?
I said, No. I did not. It was as if there was a part of my past which was really over and associated with the fall of Palestine which I could not re investigate. I could not visit once again. It was enough to see it from the outside, somehow. That sort of made the point for me.’
This brief narration makes me wonder if the history of people, or the history of the country, eventually rapes them. Depends totally on how you define rape as. Years of domination and hegemony sometimes creates a burden too difficult for both, the coloniser and the colonised to carry.
Simple yet thought provoking instance is how to universally relate and understand texts, critics and the world. As Said stated, English itself is a foreign language. When the hegemony embarked, it was the weapon of the foreigner, the white man.
In protest, Stephen Daedalus states, ‘My soul frets in the shadow of his language’.
Edward Said also gives another platform to the ‘Question of Palestine’. He does not call it a torn country like Samuel Huntington has used it for several nations like Mexico, Russia and Congo in the ‘Clashes of the Civilisation.’ Nor, does he adopt the opportunistic ideal of V.S. Naipaul in blaming the religion for the outcome.
Rather, Said talks about the history that lives in people, layer after layer, unconsciously delving into their perception and behaviour.
This history which still exists on the faces on the people in Gaza, perhaps the largest political prison in the world.
After a while, it does not matter whether it is right or wrong. Because judgment is for objective relations.
Gianbattista Vico, an Italian philosopher states ‘Human history is made of human beings‘. Quite naturally. But then, History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Great intellectuals of all time have tried to link the history with the present of oppression to come down to something, a solution. But very often, the history which they relate to, is raped and shattered, emotionally marginalizing them from their accurate predictions.
shubhdachaudhary 