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In Praise of Bad Readers
In a time of war, there is a danger in surveying the world as if it were a novel.
A simple note informs us that Hammad’s lecture was originally delivered on September 28, 2023 — in other words, nine days before the Qassam Brigades broke through the fence around Gaza and killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel, taking another 251 hostage. On the contrary, one surely needs a literary sensibility to make sense of the Balfour Declaration’s periphrastic mention of “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” or to hold in one’s mind the fundamental irony that Israel is using one genocide to justify another. “Among Palestinians, Said is perceived as a moderate, but for the West he was dangerous: a person who did not mince his words, who did not cow to pieties,” writes Hammad, noting that Said regularly received hate mail and death threats and was “the only person in the university besides the president who had bulletproof windows.” By the end of his life, Said had accumulated an FBI file of at least 238 pages, mostly detailing his political activism, though one of the earliest records mentions a 1971 panel on the “critical spirit.” In 2003, as Said was dying of leukemia, a Hoover Institute fellow would testify before Congress that, by helping to found postcolonial studies while at Columbia, Said had effectively undermined American foreign policy.
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