The postponed drama of return
The filmmaker Elia Suleiman and the scholar Edward Said – both Palestinians – each had what the other sought: words that cut to the truth of their experience. Across divides of age, class and aesthetics, the street kid pays tribute to the gentleman.

It was due only to a persistence which wore his personal assistant out, after many failed attempts, was I finally granted a meeting with Edward Said. I was given fifteen minutes and fifteen minutes it had to be, not a second more; less was preferred.

I was around my mid-20s and had acquired the habit of knocking on doors that did not open to the point where it had become almost an end in itself – a motor for energising a conviction that I was not really convinced of: the desire to make films.

And why should any door open? I had no film education, no formal education at all. I barely knew how or what the stuff of film was all about. In short, I had nothing to show for except the synopsis of a film that – I think I knew at the time – I was never going to make. So I carried the synopsis and went off.

I knocked on the door and entered but was arrested immediately. From very far away, at the other end of his giant Colombia University office, Edward Said was sitting behind his desk staring at me from behind glasses lowered to the tip of his nose. “Stay where you are! I don’t know who you are or what you want from me, but I’m sure I will not be able to help you, so why waste your time or waste mine?”

I weighed my options. “Okay...but I consider these fifteen minutes my right after I tried so hard to obtain them. So all I can ask you is that I spend them here in their entirety. When they are consumed, I will leave.” “If that’s what you want, go ahead,” he said, after weighing his options.

I walked towards him and sat on the chair opposite his desk. I looked at my watch to keep watch. I pulled some periodical from a shelf behind me and started flipping through. He, in turn, went back and drowned himself in papers. A silence ensued.

Not for long. Edward unveiled his face from behind his papers, laid them down and declared surrender. “I give up,” he said, smiling. “Did you have lunch? I’m inviting.”
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I'm about half way through Edward Said's The Question of Palestine. I will do a book report on it when I'm done and have been able to digest it. I will say that it does make one want to cry and just generally get pissed off.