Late Said

by Fakrul Alam

Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European. With an Introduction by Christopher Bollas and a response by Jacqueline Rose. Verso: published in association with the Freud Museum. London, 2003

——-. On Late Style. London: Bloomsbury, 2006

In the long, and characteristically eloquent, interview Edward W. Said gave a few weeks before he died on September 25, 2003 —an interview now available on videotape—the Palestinian-American critic talks about the difficulty he was having in reading, writing, talking, and even coping with the simplest demands of everyday life; the twelve-year struggle with leukemia had apparently drained the sixty-seven year old intellectual of all energy. And yet what strikes anyone watching the video is his alertneness and the effortlessness and compulsiveness with which he wants to tell posterity about his life and his works. Undoubtedly, Said was losing out in his battle with cancer, but obviously too here was a man determined not to go gently into the night and bent on explaining what he had been up to in a lifetime devoted to Palestine, art and culture, as well as the profession of English and comparative literature.