Looking in from the outside: David Gilmour describes the many faces of a writer who has sympathy with the displaced London edition

• Published in: The Financial times (London ed.)
• Main Author: Gilmour, Dave
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) The Financial Times Limited 13.10.2001
• Subjects: Arts & Leisure; Displaced persons; Essays; Imperialism; Orientalism; Writers; United Kingdom > UK; European Union; Europe; Western Europe
• ISSN: 0307-1766

These overlapping identities permeate this large book, a volume of uncollected essays, lectures and reviews from 1967 to the present. Said's familiar subjects are here assembled in strength - writers and texts, critics and theorists, Palestine and Islam - but less familiar topics also abound: bullfighting and belly-dancing, Schumann and Glenn Gould, Tarzan and Gillo Pontecorvo. It is the work of a great mind with a great range, the produce of a real and very serious thinker. Said's work is at its best and most sensitive when he writes about his own experiences or about other people who have shared similar experiences. He hauntingly describes those enforced identities, the exile and the migrant, the problems of distance and adopted language, the sense of estrangement and dislocation. He writes so well about Conrad because he feels affinities with the Polish novelist's rootless- ness, even though Conrad was only transporting his identity from one end of northern Europe to another while he was taking his own from Asia across the Atlantic to the country most responsible for his people's dispossession and exile. With its diffuse, polyglot cultures and communities, New York is the obvious if unacknowledged refutation of the simplistic "clash of civilisations" theory currently so beloved by Ariel Sharon, Silvio Berlusconi and right-wingers on both sides of the Atlantic. For as Said demonstrates in a brilliant last essay that plumbs the shallowness - as well as the political agendas - of those seeking to bamboozle the public with the claim, there are no insulated cultures or civilisations. Western culture above all is a product of the interaction of new and old forces, of the established canons in a constant process of enrichment and extension through the work of refugees and migrants.