waysofreading10eIM

Questions and Assignments for Edward Said’s “States”

Read Edward Said’s essay “States.” Below, you’ll find some questions that invite you to work further with the selection.

QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND READING

The first three paragraphs provide a “reading” of the opening photograph, “Tripoli, Badawi camp, May 1983.” Or, to put it another way, the writing evolves from and is in response to that photograph. As you reread these paragraphs, pay close attention to what Said is doing, to what he notices, to what prompts or requires commentary. How would you describe and explain the writing that follows? What is he doing with the photo? What is he doing as a writer? What is he doing for a reader? (How does he position a reader?)

It might be useful to begin by thinking about what Said is not doing. It is not, for example, the presentation one might expect in a slide show on travel in Lebanon. Nor is it the kind of presentation one might expect while seeing the slides of family or friends, or slides in an art history or art appreciation class.

Question

Here is another passage from the introduction to After the Last Sky:

Its style and method — the interplay of text and photos, the mixture of genres, modes, styles — do not tell a consecutive story, nor do they constitute a political essay. Since the main features of our present existence are dispossession, dispersion, and yet also a kind of power incommensurate with our stateless exile, I believe that essentially unconventional, hybrid, and fragmentary forms of expression should be used to represent us. What I have quite consciously designed, then, is an alternative mode of expression to the one usually encountered in the media, in works of social science, in popular fiction. (p. 6)

And later:

The multifaceted vision is essential to any representation of us. Stateless, dispossessed, de-centered, we are frequently unable either to speak the “truth” of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us. An additional problem is that our language, Arabic, is unfamiliar in the West and belongs to a tradition and civilization usually both misunderstood and maligned. Everything we write about ourselves, therefore, is an interpretive translation — of our language, our experience, our senses of self and others. (p. 6)

And from “States”:

The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at. Particularly in fiction, the struggle to achieve form expresses the writer’s efforts to construct a coherent scene, a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present. (para. 38)

Question

The final chapter of After the Last Sky ends with this:

I would like to think, though, that such a book not only tells the reader about us, but in some way also reads the reader. I would like to think that we are not just the people seen or looked at in these photographs: We are also looking at our observers. (p. 166 of the print book)

Read back through Said’s essay by looking at the photos with this reversal in mind — looking in order to see yourself as the one who is being looked at, as the one observed. How are you positioned by the photographer, Jean Mohr? How are you positioned by the person in the scene, always acknowledging your presence? What are you being told?

Question

ASSIGNMENTS FOR WRITING

Compose a similar project, a Said-like reading of a set of photos. These can be photos prepared for the occasion (by you or a colleague); they could also be photos already available. Whatever their source, they should represent people and places, a history and/or geography that you know well, that you know to be complex and contradictory, and that you know will not be easily or readily understood by others, both the group for whom you will be writing (most usefully the members of your class) and readers more generally. You must begin with a sense that the photos cannot speak for themselves; you must speak for them.

Question

While “States” does not present itself as polemical writing — an argument in defense of Palestinian rights, an argument designed to locate blame or propose national or international policy — it is, still, writing with a purpose. It has an argument, it has a particular project in mind, and it wants something to happen.

Write an essay that represents the argument or the project of “States” for someone who has not read it. You will need, in other words, to establish a context and to summarize. You should also work from passages (and images) to give your reader a sense of the text, its key terms and language. And write about “States” as though it has something to do with you.

Question

The final chapter of After the Last Sky ends with this:

Question

MAKING CONNECTIONS

Edward Said talks about the formal problems in the writing of “States” (and for more on this, see the second of the “Questions for a Second Reading”):

The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at. Particularly in fiction, the struggle to achieve form expresses the writer’s efforts to construct a coherent scene, a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present. (para. 38)

And here is a similar discussion from the introduction to After the Last Sky:

Edward Said’s sense of his project as a writing project, a writing project requiring formal experimentation, is similar to Gloria Anzaldúa’s in Borderlands/La frontera. In the chapter represented in Ways of Reading, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (p. 24 of the print book), Anzaldúa is also writing (and resisting) “interpretive translation.” In place of the photographs in “States,” she offers poems, stories, and myths, as well as passages in Spanish.

Question

There are several writers in Ways of Reading whose writing could be called unconventional, even experimental. A short list includes Gloria Anzaldúa, Anne Carson, Susan Griffin, and John Edgar Wideman. (We can imagine arguments for several other selections as well.)

Question

Said says,

All cultures spin out a dialectic of self and other, the subject “I” who is native, authentic, at home, and the object “it” or “you,” who is foreign, perhaps threatening, different, out there. From this dialectic comes the series of heroes and monsters, founding fathers and barbarians, prized masterpieces and despised opponents that express a culture from its deepest sense of national self-identity to its refined patriotism, and finally to its coarse jingoism, xenophobia, and exclusivist bias. (para. 41)

This is as true of the Palestinians as it is of the Israelis — although, he adds, “For Palestinian culture, the odd thing is that its own identity is more frequently than not perceived as ‘other.’”

Citing Benedict Anderson and what he refers to as “imagined communities,” Mary Louise Pratt in “Arts of the Contact Zone” (p. 315 of the print book) argues that our idea of community is “strongly utopian, embodying values like equality, fraternity, liberty, which the societies often profess but systematically fail to realize.” Against this utopian vision of community, Pratt argues that we need to develop ways of understanding (noticing or creating) social and intellectual spaces that are not homogeneous or unified — contact zones. She argues that we need to develop ways of understanding and valuing difference.

Question

In Edward Said’s essay “States,” he theorizes about the notion of exile in relation to Palestinian identity, offering a study of exile and dislocation through his analysis of photographs taken by Jean Mohr. Consider the following passage:

We turn ourselves into objects not for sale, but for scrutiny. People ask us, as if looking into an exhibit case, “What is it you Palestinians want?” — as if we can put our demands into a single neat phrase. All of us speak of awdah, “return,” but do we mean that literally, or do we mean “we must restore ourselves to ourselves”? (para. 31)

When Said talks about being looked at as though in an exhibit case, we might understand him as being concerned with the problem of dehumanization. After all, to be in an exhibit case is to be captured, trapped, or even dead. In her essay “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy” (p. 112 of the print book), Judith Butler might be understood to be considering a similar problem. She writes, “I would like to start, and to end, with the question of the human, of who counts as the human, and the related question of whose lives count as lives, and with a question that has preoccupied many of us for years: what makes for a grievable life?”