Had leukemia not stolen him from us fifteen years ago, one could feasibly presume that, were he still alive today, Edward Said would have had a field day with the people still being passed off as “intellectuals” in the West.
Said provides us many visions of what the intellectual should be in Representations, a slim but powerful volume- originally delivered orally for a televised BBC lecture before later being condensed into book form- which probes the role and responsibility of thinking in a world ripe with injustice.
Said, a Palestinian writer, critic and literary theorist whose works illuminated the gaps between Eastern and Western cultures, dedicated his life with a singular devotion to the defense of the oppressed Palestinian people. He wrote books on the history of Palestinian expulsion, spoke and lectured on the beleaguered people’s behalf, and used his powers as a writer and historian to cast light towards oceans of suffering which, in many cases, would have remained otherwise hidden in darkness.
Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, a breathtaking journalistic journey into the world of India’s indigenous Naxalite guerrillas, does not open with a primer on Maoist ideology or the corruption of the Indian State. Veering clear of that kind of dry, inhuman introduction, the ever-effervescent Roy- a Booker Prize-winning novelist who has spoken about the inability of non-fiction to convey truth in the way fictive storytelling can- instead opens up her expose with a vignette. Whether it’s true, no one can say: though I would argue that in this case it actually doesn’t matter. In four pages of brisk, lucid prose, she relates to us a scene whose haunting imprint resonates like a persistent note throughout the entirety of the volume, and whose very essence contains the seed of all the injustice she attacks.