Heroes To Millions

Said has been coping with cancer for the last three years, while continuing to teach at Columbia. His workload used to reflect the demands of the lecture, seminar and workshop circuit in addition to the high standards demanded by Columbia of its professors. It was a standing joke that Said made more stopovers on a routine London-New York flight than a US presidential candidate attempting to squeeze in a little baby-kissing between summits. Some were unscheduled halts, such as the time when he was detained by a Caracas customs official who disagreed with some of his conclusions in Orientalism.

Over the last few months, Said has steadily whittled down his classes to the point where he now takes a few tutorials a month with select Ph.D students. "How many of these I can manage depends on whether it's been a good or bad chemo week," he said in a recent interview. It's one of the few admissions he's made about the impact cancer has had on his life.

 

August was a bad chemo month for Said. "Last week he had us alarmed," says Caroline M'Ba, one of his students. "We were getting into a discussion about Fukuyama and Edward was listening with his eyes closed, which he does very often, and suddenly he stood up and left." Unlike several star professors, Said is not given to delivering his critical opinion on a subject through dramatic gestures, so the group went looking for him. They found him doubled over in pain in the corridor and summoned medical assistance.

"It's gotten worse over the last four months," says M'Ba. "He's still active, but there've been a lot more times that he's rescheduled tutorials." Said has published papers and delivered many lectures since his illness, but has shelved plans to write a book that would have extended the arguments made in Culture and Imperialism.

For most Comp. Lit. students today, it would be difficult to imagine a pre-Said syllabus. Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism both redefined the way literature is read. Said was not the first to point out that the West's view of the orient was irretrievably skewed, but he was the first to delineate exactly how that worked in terms of western literature.

Orientalism caused a furore in academic circles; 'political correctness' was not a term in vogue on the campus at that time, but Said was accused of taking the early '80s equivalent to extremes. The first wave of criticism was followed by a tsunami of acclaim, however, and orientalism as a philosophy became firmly entrenched in history and international relations, as well as comparative literature.

The Master of Balliol summed up Said's impact on literature in a speech he made in 1993: "It is possible