Edward Said, My Grandfather, and the Problem of Home

Advertisement Dejar todo atrás debe ser lo más parecido a la muerte (Leaving everything behind must be the closest thing to death). —Jeovanny Benavides Bailón, Las palabras del aire vacío. La novela de Kafka Barcelona, winter 2004: a young man from Massachusetts sits behind a stack of books. Rain patterns the roof of the library as darkness extends in all directions. Alone and in silence, he rubs his face. Two years in Ecuador and three in Spain brought him to a place where, perceptibly and imperceptibly, the core parts of being—language, dreams, insights, and a sense of awareness—had been remade in ways unexpected and at times unfamiliar. When months turn into years and years become existential questions, winter weather can bring a special kind of despair. It’s a solitude that evokes loneliness, but also a distinctive form of openness to thought and ideas, to words and people, to questions and experience. As that long day journeyed into night, he turned a page and saw this: Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. —Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile” I first read those words when I was 25 years old. Hard to believe that over two decades later, a single paragraph can maintain the same power, force, and relevance to one’s existence. Displacement is a kind of condition, one that Said acutely understood: if my exile was chosen (if it could even be called exile), Said distilled its complexity to 39 words, a way to understand silence. “Reflections on Exile” summoned to mind the only seven words my grandfather ever said to me about Ireland, where he had cousins he never knew: “I don’t think I’ll go back there,” he muttered one day in the 1990s, in response to my prodding. He had visited, seen family, kissed the stone, and got in a car accident (my parents said he was distracted). I wondered what Herlihys in Cork thought of how he pronounced our surname. What they thought of Puerto Rico and Martha’s Vineyard, the islands where he chose to live. The reaction in their eyes and in his, the confusion wrought by exile and empire, Americanization and the impossibility of return. Seven words linger of his story—but maybe they comprise it. Edward Said and my grandfather had different approaches to exile (one used words, the other silence). Both were fluent in the hollowness of relocation, the inconsequence of acculturation. They had new languages and accents, lived in different climates and cities; they were surrounded by the deception of success. The jealousy, depression, confusion, and misunderstandings wrought by diaspora and imperialism were shot through their very existence. Part of Said’s genius was the knowledge that it’s too easy to blame empire for all of that. Places and the Mind: The Scars of “Americanization” It’s hard to think directly about identity, be it shaped by places or blood or language—especially when multiple are involved. Among the more toxic aspects of “American” life is the idea that family history begins in the US. In my youth, no one talked about why we heard Portuguese at recess and on the bus, at the bakery and playing soccer. We never heard what happened to the Wampanoag language (in a classroom half-filled with Wampanoag kids) or why English is the only possible way to communicate in public. If other tongues make it into the synagogue or church, their blockage (or absence) in the media, in schools and in courts, long predates Donald Trump. The US imperial treatment of “other” languages dooms their philosophies, histories, experiences, and emotions—at least in theory. In the “American” story, grandparents and their traditions are “old world,” “superstitious” and “not modern.” You see, Jeffrey, “success” or at least participation, involves abandoning all that. The surroundings say to “Americanize” oneself, one’s words, thoughts and maybe feelings, without regard to how scarring that concept is; without regard to what it requires of a person, of a family—without regard to how it destroys relationships, languages, friendships and history. It also destroys people. If suicide is more common among displaced people, seven words from William Francis Herlihy don’t say how he lost his father and a brother, five days apart. Two Herlihy death notices arrived at once to a military outpost in the South Pacific in spring 1945. (I always wondered—but never asked—which envelope he opened first.) I would like to think my grandfather’s silence about suicide but also about Ireland and his first years on Martha’s Vineyard (our surname meant he couldn’t purchase a home) were to protect people around him. After decades of “success” amid Massachusetts’s exclusions, he eventually lived in a two-room home on the extreme northwest corner of Puerto Rico. Here he found happiness that was maybe impossible elsewhere, one that “success” and “Americanization” could not and did not bring. My wife says of his partiality for Aguadilla: “en Puerto Rico tu abuelo podía vivir sin que nadie le jodiera.” (“In Puerto Rico your grandfather could live without anyone messing with him.”) Almost 20 years ago, when I was hired in Mayagüez, my father helped me move. I drove the rental car to my grandparents’ home, and we parked at 164 Calle E. I put the windows down. After a moment in silence, my father looked back at the hospital, then ahead toward the school. While it had been over a decade since I’d been to that spot, it was in my mind six months earlier as I wrote my grandfather’s eulogy: Drop a clover from the shoreline of Punta Borinquen, as the tide goes out, it will float north with the Gulf Stream, pass a few miles off Martha’s Vineyard, and wash up on the shores of Ireland. My grandfather’s life took him on that path, from island to island to island, and now he will be laid to rest by the sea with his beloved Hope. Then in the early phases of the sickness that would take his life, my father showed me where his parents would go to the market; their favorite place for coffee and bread; the backstreets and curiosities of Aguadilla, Isabela, and Mayagüez, and the UPR-M campus. These are places I now know very well, places where I play with my sons and show them what he showed me. My sons sometimes ask about our surname, about Ireland, about Massachusetts, and about their ancestors. It’s hard to explain that the books available for these things are often misleading. That maps and words can’t hold everything. “I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do,” comments James Joyce in the guise of Stephen Dedalus. “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.” What makes the silence and the words of James Joyce, of William Francis Herlihy, and of Edward Said incredible, crucibles of life and existence, of agony and understanding, is not merely what they achieve in sound and message, about the exclusions and pain and misunderstandings of exile: It’s what they doso outside that limit, beyond description and the elucidation of things lived. Words have the power to create experience for others. I believe in that power and in its capacity to do good. Words can be more important than money and power, and they can bring together ideas with the ability to lower physical things like walls and guns. A few months after that rainy night in Catalunya, I reached out to Edward Said via email (ews1@colombia.edu is still in my Hotmail sent folder). I wanted to meet him, to ask questions, to talk about literature and art, the disruptions of exile; its impact on thought and being and writing and creativity. A cordial note eventually came back from a secretary handling his account. As I clicked, my expectation was to see his words in relation to mine. But I got a gut punch: a critical north but also a hero in a profession that lacks them. Gone. “I regret to inform you that Edward Said passed away on September 25, 2003. This email account is currently being monitored on a limited basis for essential matters.” I wonder what Edward Said would think of AI, of Donald Trump, of October 7, of PROMESA and Puerto Rico, of Sinn Féin and the long and slow fall of the House of Paisley. Corcaíoch Irish Republican Michael Collins (my father and eldest son’s namesake) believed that before insurmountable power and violence, our only weapon is refusal; it is what “gives us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire … but the freedom to achieve it” (1922). Edward Said refused “paralyzed gestures of aestheticized powerlessness” in favor of action, but what action? There is much in his words from Dublin in 1999: “I am so grateful to Ireland,” he said. “Especially for its literary and cultural example. You have had many more years of imperialism than we have had, and you have produced a fabulous culture of resistance and an extraordinary spirit …. [a] cultural effort which I think is much more important than arms, and armed struggle.” Said envisioned Ireland as a benchmark for decolonization. After the Free State (1922) came the Republic of Ireland (1949) and European Union citizenship (1973). Net emigration would shift to immigration in the 1990s, while divorce (1996) and same-sex unions were legalized (2015), the Good Friday Agreement (1998) effectively ended the Troubles. Today, Ireland has excellent public health care, free higher education, very little crime, and no right to bear arms. Do Dublin, Derry, and Cork have a case vis-à-vis Boston, London, and Zurich to experience something like what Michael Collins imagined? Would James Joyce return? Déanta na fírinne, caithfidh mé amhras a bheith orm faoi sin. (Perhaps a homecoming would be marked by car accidents and distraction.) Albeit incomplete, Ireland’s decolonization has changed things in the diaspora, too: while our family life in Massachusetts once deflected any mention of Ireland (after all, we are “Americans” now, right?) saoránacht Éireannach has been reclaimed in a new generation. In this, Said saw not just an Irish triumph, but a decolonial template for places like Puerto Rico, Palestine, Catalunya, Xinjiang, Basque Country, or Western Sahara. Edward Said asks the colonized and the colonizer to take each other seriously. He believed in the power of culture and experience, and promoted music and language as bridges. What Said recognized about Ireland—cultural gifts, intellectual leaders, committed people—are applicable beyond a single colonized island because they are human strengths, repeatable in example. Are Lost Causes the Only Ones Worth Fighting For? Long before I thought about the strange, irrational links between privilege, empire, talent, exclusion, and opportunity, as a boy on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, I could sense how the whims of summer people (“some are not,” as the Eel Pond Bridge graffiti says) overwhelm the needs of townies: needs like affordable food, housing. Soccer, I thought, was a method to connect to them. A cultural effort for them to take me seriously, or at least to make a conversation possible. My commitment to their sport (fútbol would become my own) didn’t achieve much for townies in Falmouth, Mashpee, or Oak Bluffs. But lost causes can be worthwhile: soccer and music and words are gestures that can embody a vision for a future with shared parts. There is an integrity to this when it fails: shared cultural passions may not challenge injustice, but they can make mutual experience possible. After moving from Montevideo to New Jersey at age 11, Tab Ramos said “soccer was my friend”—he fought, lived, and communicated through the game—and for young people, that symbolism can express complexities and layers of meaning beyond the comprehension of adults and their governments. Many believe that in places like Derry, New Jersey, and Al-Quds Ash-Sharqiya, the real border is in people’s minds. “At the moment that they were playing,” said Said of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, “their personal identities and histories sort of dropped away; they became sort of irrelevant. What’s relevant is what they are doing towards you.” A few years ago, the Modern Language Association had an Edward Said retrospective. I mostly listened in silence, hoping that Said’s memory would alleviate the politics and tensions of the day. My question for the panel was about Said as a person, as a colleague, and as a friend. What struck me about Bruce Robbins’s response was how his voice faltered as he began to speak. Those are important moments. Having dedicated much of my life to teaching, writing, and thinking about the organizational power, the emotional charge, and the restorative and revelatory capacity of words, to say nothing of their mis/understandings, sometimes what surrounds them (a pause, a stutter, a gasp) can outline part of the enormity that lies beyond language and its narratives. If exile is feeling like you are outside a narrative, words can create experiences with depths to replenish part of that emptiness. But the emptiness of exile is part of a design: worlds are planned, people in them are excluded. As Western governments create new forms of exile, Said’s understanding of that fact is yet a rudder: We should strive (even if it is a lost cause) to undo exclusion through democratic participation and forms of citizenship that diverge from the old ways, the ways that have commitments to borders instead of people. Maybe words can do that much. This article was commissioned by Ben Platt.