You quote Neruda in an essay entitled “Yeats and Decolonization” saying “through me freedom and the sea will call in answer to the shrouded heart.”
The idea is that human beings are not closed receptacles, but instruments through which other things flow. The idea is of the human being as a traveler, who can have imprinted upon him or her the sights and sounds and bodies and ideas of others so that he or she could become an other and can take in as much as the sea and therefore release the shrouds and the barriers and the doors and the walls that are so much apart of human existence. That’s what it’s all about.
I’ve always thought the interesting thing about Palestine is that Palestine in a certain sense, and here’salittlechauvinism,hasakindofuniversality to it. In fact, because of its fantastic referential power, Jerusalem as the center of the world.
Jerusalem, the city from which I come, has a unique status in the world. It’s not an ordinary city, at least in its existential and imaginative status. But to think that Jerusalem is just the city of one person and that it’s just the place where Christianity started
or only the place where the patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church says is the seat of its authority is a debasement of that. It has this extraordinary exfoliating power which has been betrayed by almost every political program.
From:
The Pen and the Sword
Edward Said.