I wanted to be the next Edward Said!” declares Farouq, a character in Teju Cole’s 2011 novel, Open City. Farouq is a former graduate student from Morocco who works at an internet café in Brussels, where Cole’s narrator, Julius, meets him. Julius admires Farouq’s fluency in literary theory, which rustles into life when Farouq speaks. He is a little attracted, and a little repulsed, by Farouq’s political passion.
In the late 20th century, Said was one of the most globally recognised intellectuals of the left. For the Farouqs of the world, he was their man on the inside of the Western academy. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the Said phenomenon was just lifting off, one imagines the combined forces of the American-Israeli right must have savoured the fact that their most prominent foe was an effete Anglican Arab and Joseph Conrad specialist, ailing from leukaemia, who would rather be playing piano.
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