Derrida & Arafat

These two deaths this fall (Derrida on 8 October of pancreatic cancer and Arafat on 11 November in a military hospital in Paris) change the world, change my sense of the world. No. That's not what I want to say. I want to pay hommage. Both figures have been powerful figures threading through my spheres of academia, writing, self- & world-reflection. Arafat because he is the icon of Palestine, or as Hanan Ashrawi put it, Arafat "is the one who personified the Palestinian people.... He will stay a part of our memory but also be an incentive for the future." Arafat passes on, ceding his iconic spot to a younger generation, who will not be drawn in his shadow's outline. Derrida because his writings rewritten by Spivak, the literary theory teacher I encountered in my first year of graduate school, shapes much of my ways of seeing and understanding. Until I first heard Spivak in that initial class, where she situated New Criticism in its cold war webbing, and I heard postcolonialism, feminism, race, gender, & class all discussed in one breath...I did not know there were such clear words and terms for the things I'd been tumbling in my mind. Two powerhouses of the African Arab world leave us this past fall.