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Edward Said's Nazareth Susan Slyomovics (bio) Forty-five years after the Said family was forced to depart Palestine for Egypt toward the end of 1947, Edward Said traveled for his first return visit in 1992, a journey that included a brief stay in Nazareth. In his impressions quickly published that same year in the London Observer, he noted: "Nazareth jolted me startlingly back to life. . . . Of all the Palestinian sites I visited, it is among the richest in significance and the dimmest memory."1 Said's memories and writings about pre-1948 Palestine coexisted in complex heterogeneous ways, with place sometimes recalled incompletely, obviously never forgotten, and frequently a subject of his large, eloquent corpus. Ties to Nazareth were centered on his mother and her illustrious Nazareth-based family: "My maternal grandfather Shukri Musa-Bishouty died (in the late twenties) and is buried there, after having founded and built the Baptist church and brought up a gifted, perhaps even remarkable brood of children: my mother, Hilda and four boys—a doctor, a lawyer, a physicist, and a banker—all charming, all fluent, all musical."2 Although Said would carry on the family inheritance as a music critic and accomplished amateur pianist, this essay considers his interventions in the fields of visual studies and photography exemplified by the ways in which he experienced Nazareth—writing from afar and with no actual physical presence in his mother's hometown. In this essay, Nazareth becomes an object of the photographic eye over decades, but also a way to consider Said's writings in terms of his reflections both about representation as well as the lives of Palestinians before and after 1948.3 In the early 1980s, after thirty-five years of exile and with no foreseeable opportunities of returning, Said was inspired by a "witness," the renowned German-Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, enabling his "interplay of text and [End Page 9] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The family of Rev. Shukri Musa, Nazareth, 1924, in Jean Said Makdisi, Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), photo insert. Reprinted with permission of Jean Said Makdisi. photos" (Said's terms).4 Mohr and Said's joint book and photography project, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, published in 1986, emerged from a novel form of censorship directed against writing about Palestine, but not against displaying images of Palestinians: [End Page 10] The idea of this book [After the Last Sky] grew out of the peculiar circumstances that first brought Jean Mohr and me together. In 1983, while I was serving as a consultant to the UN for its International Conference on the Question of Palestine (ICQP), I suggested that photographs of Palestinians be hung in the entrance hall to the main conference site in Geneva. I had of course known and admired Mohr's work with John Berger, and I recommended that he be commissioned to photograph some of the principal locales of Palestinian life. Given the initial enthusiasm for the idea, Mohr left on a special UN-sponsored trip to the Near East. The photographs he brought back were indeed wonderful; the official response, however, was puzzling and, to someone with a taste for irony, exquisite. You can hang them up we were told but no writing can be displayed with them. No legends, no explanation. A compromise was finally negotiated whereby the name of the country or place ( Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, West Bank, Gaza) could be affixed to the much-enlarged photographs, but not one word more. When Jean and I met it was this strange and inflexible formula that we confronted.5 By engaging with selected images from Mohr's journey throughout historical Palestine, Said produced a fragmented, interpretative text profoundly marked by the fact of absence from what he was looking at in particular and, in general, by his desire to restore critical political engagement to the process of image making. Said's texts—denied exhibition display no less than the anthropological imprimatur of authentic ethnographic presence—took on the functions of an extended caption once in book format, as in the example of words surrounding Mohr's...
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