Edward Said’s Poetry: “The Wide, Honest Plain” and the Crumbling Castle

Remember the Poets

Most people know of Edward Said’s ground-breaking work, Orientalism, but few know about Said’s poetry. For years, I studied Said’s book and read postcolonial theorists who relied on Said’s work. My generation of scholars and activists studied Said to understand the nature of colonialism and how it used its legitimacy to displace and erase cultures. I learned how to look at literary texts and see how they either bent toward hegemonic ideas or negotiated with them to find a way toward decolonizing from dominant tropes. By the 21^st century, I, like my peers, had Said embedded in our psyches.

But it was only recently that I happened upon his poetry, published in an unassuming slim volume called Songs of an Eastern Humanist that one can easily miss on the shelf of your public library. The poems were collected from his hand-written and typed manuscripts from his papers housed in the library in Columbia University, writes Timothy Brennan in his introduction to this volume. Brennan points out that Said’s intellectual life began with poetry and music, and although his discussion of poetry in his prose output is sporadic, he had an abiding interest in Hopkins and Yeats.

Poetry as moral truth-telling or inviting us to look inward seems to be esoteric compared to the logical analysis in critical theory, but we witness Said’s inward gaze in Songs. The title itself is a repartee to the orientalist myth of western humanists bringing civilization to the barbaric east. Said’s work dismantles the colonial project and sets the record straight regarding Palestine.

I near his prophetic voice when I read “The Castle,” which describes the seat of power in orientalist language (scimitars and Saracens and Crusaders). But Said’s authentic voice emerges when he writes, “it stands, /…/A threatening giant, with weapons brandished and ready; / Internally, …/Cave of corruption and rot.” The mansion becomes a “clay idol” that he proclaims will erode. How? Nature, he says, will be that destroyer. As I read through the poems, I wonder if it is Nature or the long arc of justice. Nature, not in the physical sense of wind and water and dust, but the progression of history in which we play a role and poetry becomes the moral template.

He recreates vignettes of Palestine, the busy marketplace, names—Hussein, Mohammad, Khadija--a chant in rhythm with the beauty of nights and sherbet. I look through his eyes at landscapes that exist in story books, but when he hits the note that speaks to the moral core of us, I sit up and take notice: In the third section of “A Celebration in 3 Movements,” he writes—

We could jump into the pond of esoterics

Or the teacup of rebellion

But the battle of knowledge must be fought in the sea of jam

In silk suits and space helmets.

I think these are the most original images in the entire book. Most memorable is the image of us wading in a sea of jam. Yes, we are lured by the market but its sweet stickiness will drown us even though some become aware and fight to conquer this economic and governmental reality. Said repeats the image in “Little Transformation,” where he describes chicanery as a sticky, clingy thing that is dropped on us through “molasses and cotton.”

When we look at the unfolding of the last 12 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the full-scale repression of people in the US being forced to accept lies masked in molasses and honey, we know that this is not a new thing. Said had witnessed it. All of us recovering from colonial domination (and still going through it in newer forms) have witnessed it for more than 200 years.

So, like Said, we have bold people like Ta-Nehisi Coates who continue to speak the truth. No helmets and space suits for him! Coates says, “Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”

Wow. That is a bold statement cutting through drivel.

And here is another jab from Coates at everyone who screams “antisemitism” when we critique the Israeli government or US foreign policy toward Israel: “They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth — that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”