‘Edward Said: Between Worlds’ Review: A Crucial Palestinian Scholar, Revived for a New Generation

In his 1979 book The Question of Palestine, Edward Said, the Palestinian writer and academic, frames the relationship between Palestinians and Zionists as a “contest between an affirmation and a denial.” Making sense of it requires us to “understand what the instruments of this contest were, and how they shaped subsequent history so that this history now appears to confirm the validity of the Zionist claims to Palestine, thereby denigrating the Palestinian claim. In other words, we must understand the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism as a struggle between a presence and an interpretation, the former constantly appearing to be overpowered and eradicated by the latter.”

To criticize the popular interpretation of Zionism, to frame Israel as a settler-colonial project and to recognize the humanity and history of Palestinians was — and, unfortunately in the Western world, often remains — a radical thesis.

Edward Said: Between Worlds

The Bottom Line A fine intro to an important intellectual.

Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF Docs), New York Film Festival (Spotlight)
Director: Maiken Baird
1 hour 48 minutes

In the new documentary Edward Said: Between Worlds, Danish filmmaker and producer Maiken Baird explores, among other things, how the publication of this book and Said’s consistent advocacy for Palestinian self-determination made him both a model of intellectual integrity and an enemy of the United States. The doc carries the legacy of other Said film projects, including Mike Dobbs’ Edward Said: The Last Interview, released in 2004, but Between Worlds still offers a useful political education. Through impressive archival footage (interviews and lectures, home videos and family photos), Baird, who executive produced Icarus and Orwell: 2+2=5, revives the voice of a crucial public figure and indicts the U.S. and its mainstream media outlets for the role they have played — and continue to play — in abetting the annihilation of Palestinians. She wraps these major themes in a poignant narrative about how Said, exiled from Palestine and alienated from his Arab identity, eventually found his way back to both.

Between Worlds, still seeking distribution following well-received showings at the Toronto and New York film festivals, opens with an audio compilation of news anchors describing Said. They refer to him as a Palestinian activist, and remark on his eloquence in a subtle nod to the way he defies the expectations of a public taught to dehumanize Arabs. In one early clip, Said says he would “like to be identified as a professor of literature at Columbia University.” A voice off-camera repeats the title, with an interrogative intonation, and Said responds with humorous exasperation: “That’s right. I mean that’s what I do for a living.” This moment captures a tension that Said faced in battling assumptions that deep political engagement somehow foreclosed the possibility of other interests.

The beginning of Between Worlds functions as a kind of prelude, offering a straightforward primer on Said. Using the scholar’s own words, Baird lays out Said’s role in public life and defines one of his principle intellectual projects. “Whenever there is a Palestinian effort to tell a story, to put in a dramatic and realizable way the story of Palestine, it’s been assaulted and stopped,” he says in voiceover. “So we appear as if we are orphans, as if we have no origins, we have no narrative as a people. We are being told in a certain sense that we don’t really exist.”

A violent estrangement from land, history and culture defined Said’s early years. Between Worlds smartly shapes itself around Said’s intellectual ideas without giving up the ease of a chronological timeline. After the intro, Baird introduces Said’s interest in memory and who gets to define history, focusing on the scholar’s early years. Said was born into a middle-class family in Jerusalem, Palestine, in 1935. In 1947, he and his family moved to Cairo, ahead of the 1948 mass expulsion of Palestinians from Israel widely known as the Nakba. Through archival interviews, Said explains how his parents rarely talked about their home country except when vaguely citing what they lost. As a result, Said grew up rather politically disengaged and with no real connection to his identity.

Despite not having the language for it, the young Palestinian understood his position as a marginalized person very early on. In school, he identified with stories of indigenous Americans and Black people in America, and noticed how much of his education was filled with historical elisions of the harm done to them. Said’s teaching style was informed by this keenness, as he encouraged his students to approach their studies with healthy skepticism and to question historical silences.

When he was further into adolescence, Said was sent to the United States for boarding school, where the severance from his Arab identity was reinforced. He went on to study at Princeton and then Harvard before landing a teaching job at Columbia University. It’s at this institution that Said would go on to formulate his most enduring theses about Arab identity in relation to the West (Orientalism, 1978); Palestinian history and self-determination (The Question of Palestine, 1979); and the afterlives of imperialism (Culture and Imperialism, 1993). It’s ironic that today the university that served as Said’s intellectual home is at the forefront of sanctioning students and faculty advocating for Palestinians.

The most emotionally poignant parts of the film focus on how the intellectual rebuilt his relationship to his Palestinian identity. After he married Mariam, a Lebanese writer and activist, Said traveled to Beirut with her, connected with people involved in the liberation of Palestine, and embarked on an intensive study of Arabic. Through this re-engagement, he began to notice how the Western media participated in disseminating anti-Arab propaganda, and these observations would go on to inspire many of his books.

There’s substantial attention paid as well to Said’s intellectual development after his early writings, notably how he became disappointed with and estranged from Palestinian comrades like Yasser Arafat, who he believed harmfully capitulated to American and Israeli demands. While Between Worlds touches on Said’s evolving politics, particularly his later advocacy for a nation where Israelis and Palestinians could live in equality, it leaves the viewer wanting additional context.

One of the most jarring elements of Baird’s documentary — as with most nonfiction projects about Palestinians released in the last few years — is how much of the language featured in the film echoes the contemporary moment. It can feel uncanny to watch Said, interviewed throughout the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, argue the same issues that are being litigated today. And it’s striking to see how being asked repeatedly to defend Palestinian self-determination wears on the scholar, who also had other intellectual interests. He was a talented pianist, a prolific literary critic and a founder of what we now call postcolonial studies, a multidisciplinary field that examines the cultural, economic and political afterlife of imperialism.

I first learned about Said as an undergraduate studying English literature at Princeton, our shared alma mater. His debut book Orientalism offered me, as well as many others, a renewed understanding of the violent legacy of colonization and reinvigorated my understanding of identity as fluid and relational. If there’s one tension in Between Worlds, it’s the constant reminder that there’s so much more to learn about its subject.