Edward Said - who died last week - never lost touch with Ireland, writesDeclan Kiberd
'Professor Said," asked a young student at the University of Minnesota in April 1985, "would you like to be the first Minister for Education in a new Palestinian state?" Edward Said's eyes twinkled with amusement as he pondered the idea.
"Might be a tough job at first," he laughed. "No, I'd rather go back in order to be that state's first and foremost critic. Humble, am I not?"
This was a reprise of the famous line uttered by James Joyce to his son Giorgio when they heard in 1921 that there was to be a new Irish state. The talk which Said had just delivered as visiting lecturer had been filled with Joycean echoes.
Said compared Joyce's exile to that of his fellow-Palestinians and argued that exiles became obsessive spotters of the same predicament in others.
It was no accident, he suggested, that in Ulysses the young Stephen Dedalus detects "the note of banishment" in every line written by Shakespeare from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to the moment when Prospero breaks his staff in The Tempest.
After the scintillating lecture, which contained many elements of the great future book, Culture and Imperialism (1993), I invited Said to lecture at the 1986 Yeats Summer School.
The result was the marvellous "Yeats and Decolonisation" talk, which later took the form of a Field Day pamphlet and would become part of a major chapter in the 1993 book.
Its impact was explosive - all other events at the school that afternoon were postponed so that a seminar could be held to explore the implications.
For decades, Yeats and his politics had been under attack by radical critics, from Conor Cruise O'Brien's analysis of the fascist tendencies to Séamus Deane's allegation that the poet was an example of "the pathology of literary unionism".
Said's Yeats was very different - the first great artist of the decolonising world. For him, Yeats was exemplary not only in his mapping of the painful transition to independence but also in his constant struggle to remain a poet and a celebrant of beauty under the awesome pressures of war and civil war.
He was in effect the first to walk in darkness down a now-familiar road. Yeats was one of the culture-heroes of the anti-imperial world and, as such, a model for many great poets who followed, from Pablo Neruda in Latin America to Mahmoud Darwish in Palestine.
There were many memorable moments in Said's visit - meetings with Kader Asmal and Brian Friel (whose Translations he revered); late-night initiations into the minutiae of Irish politics and his endless curiosity about everything from how colcannon was made to how the men trailing lines in the Garavogue river preferred to cook the fish they caught.
By week's end he seemed to know half the people of Sligo.
He had always been interested in Ireland and some of his early essays on Swift are among the best yet penned. He would come back later in the 1980s as guest of Séamus Deane to address a packed theatre L in UCD on Palestine.
In 1993 he spoke to the delegates at a conference on Irish literature in Cairo, at the invitation of Ambassador Éamon Ó Tuathail.
Instead of the expected literary topic, on that occasion his talk was on the sufferings of his people in the occupied territories (a subject Éamon Ó Tuathail knew well). Next morning that talk appeared almost word for word on Al-Ahram.
Through the years of a long illness, Said never lost touch, writing articles for the Sunday Business Post and The Irish Times. An honorary doctorate from NUI Galway was a source of huge pride.
He remained also a generous host to Irish visitors in New York, who were fed like long-lost cousins at the family table but subjected to sharp questioning as well.
A ferocious critic of the Oslo Accord, which condemned Palestinians to police their own untransformed ghettoes, Said initially found it hard to believe that the Belfast Agreement might not be a similar sell-out of Irish nationalists.
On a visit in 2001, I tried to convince him of the many benefits which flowed from the Irish agreement.
"Maybe you're right, I hope you're right," he said doubtfully, "but these people never give anything up easily - and besides, your brother doesn't agree with you."
Then he brought me in a taxi to (his little joke) the Empire Hotel near Columbus Circle. The taxi-driver, who was Turkish, wouldn't take any fare. "He is my hero," he said pointing at the professor. "It is an honour to have him in my car."
Ireland was often honoured by the presence and attention of Edward Said. May the people of Palestine ("victims of victims", as he so memorably called them) study his own writings well, because they provide the real "road-map" to a better future.
Declan Kiberd is author of Inventing Ireland and Irish Classics