‘Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said’ review: In exile, rooted to Palestine

A new biography of Edward Said maps his Arab and American selves and illustrates how his writings on Palestine, music, public intellectuals, and literature intertwine

Every child that dies due to wars in West Asia disappears from the world without knowing that the shell that hit the roof came with a long history — the contest over a territory, the problem of imagined communities, colonial chicanery, and above all, the chasm of religious faith among several other threads. In such times, what does it mean to read Timothy Brennan’s intellectual biography of Arab-Christian-Palestine Professor of English literature Edward Said, who was an advocate of Palestine’s rights? If Said’s life can be read as a novel, as his friend Dominique Edde formulates in her Italian biography, translated into English as Edward Said: His Thought as a Novel (2019), two themes dominate the story of the professor — a sense of place and the politics of representation. Dislocation of human beings from places and dispossession of land that belongs to a people not only animate his writings but also they are the source of his larger intellectual concerns. Brennan’s biography tries to capture this theme by making a distinction between places of mind and the place he lived. According to Brennan, Said was a man rooted “imaginatively in Palestine and actually in New York”.