The Wall That Didn't Fall in His Lifetime

Pilgrims Beneath the Fortress Wall

What a documentary about a scholar who died without winning the argument he spent forty years making can teach us about the difference between noise and siege

Tomorrow, at the Toronto International Film Festival, a documentary called Edward Said: Between Worlds has its world premiere. Directed by Maiken Baird, made with the first-ever full cooperation of the Said family and estate, and drawing on home movies, private letters, and lectures pulled from Columbia University's archive of his papers, the film traces a man born in Jerusalem in 1935, raised between Jerusalem, Cairo, and Beirut, and settled for the rest of his life in New York as an American academic who never stopped writing about the place he'd left. He died in 2003. He did not live to see the conflict he spent four decades analyzing resolved, softened, or even meaningfully paused. By any standard that measures a life's work by whether the wall came down while the person was still alive to see it, Edward Said's central project failed.

And yet the reason a film studio spent years and secured unprecedented family access to make a two-hour documentary about him in 2026 — twenty-three years after his death, in the middle of yet another devastating chapter of the same conflict he wrote about — is that almost nobody in the field he worked in would say his project failed. Orientalism, his 1978 book arguing that centuries of Western scholarship, art, and journalism had constructed a flattened, exoticized "Orient" that conveniently served colonial interests, is one of the most cited humanities texts of the last fifty years. It reshaped how literature, history, and area studies departments across the world train their students to read. None of that happened quickly, and almost none of it happened while he could watch it happen.

That gap — between work that produces no visible result on any timeline you could put a name to, and work that turns out, later, to have mattered enormously — is worth sitting inside rather than rushing past, because it cuts directly against the reflex almost everyone alive today has been trained into: if it doesn't trend, it didn't work.

An old story about circling a wall

There is a much older story, from long before film festivals or footnotes, about a fighting force ordered to do something that must have felt, for six straight days, like the least strategically sound instruction ever given: walk once around a fortified city, in silence, and go home. No siege engines. No breach. Nothing visibly different about the wall on day two than on day one, or day one than day six. The text is explicit that nothing happened for six days. Only on the seventh day — after circling seven more times, then finally making noise — did the wall come down.

Read quickly, this is a story about a single dramatic moment: a shout, a collapse. Read slowly, it is a story about six days of nothing, which is most of the story, and which most retellings skip because six days of nothing does not make a good highlight reel. The lesson embedded in the account, and made explicit elsewhere in the same body of ancient wisdom literature — that steady labor "is not in vain," even when it produces no evidence of not being in vain — is not a lesson about the payoff. It is a lesson about what you're supposed to do on day three, when there is no payoff yet and no way to know whether day seven is coming at all.

It would be dishonest, and it would also defeat the point of taking old texts seriously instead of mining them for convenient metaphors, to pretend this story is comfortable. It is a conquest narrative, and the destruction that follows the wall's collapse is total, by the text's own account — the kind of ancient total-war ethic that should make a careful modern reader flinch, not nod along. Any argument that lifts this story's discipline of patient, undramatic persistence while quietly setting aside its violence isn't dodging the text — it's doing the actual interpretive work the text requires: separating the method a passage models (sustained, quiet, disciplined process) from the specific and historically bound content it was applied to (a war of annihilation that no serious modern ethical framework should ever be recruited to justify). That separation matters here for a second reason too, which the Said story makes concrete: the same impulse toward totalizing, all-or-nothing certainty that makes an ancient conquest narrative disturbing is exactly the impulse that makes contemporary arguments about identity, empire, and the Middle East go wrong in both directions — the temptation, on any side of any such argument, to describe an entire people, an entire tradition, or an entire body of scholarship as uniformly and irredeemably one thing.

The uncomfortable footnote the film will have to sit with

This is where an honest account of Said's legacy has to resist turning him into an uncomplicated hero, because his own critics — and there are serious ones, not merely hostile ones — have made a version of exactly this charge against Orientalism itself. Scholars including Bernard Lewis and, later, Robert Irwin argued that Said's sweeping indictment of "Orientalist" scholarship painted with too broad a brush, lumping careful philologists in with imperial propagandists and treating two centuries of enormously varied scholarship as a single monolithic project serving a single monolithic power. Whether or not you find those specific critiques persuasive — and serious people land on both sides — the structural point survives independently of who's right: a body of work built to expose the danger of flattening a complicated world into a simple story is itself vulnerable to the same failure, and pretending a landmark text is beyond that risk is exactly the kind of uncritical certainty the text itself, at its best, was trying to teach readers to resist.

That is the discipline this moment actually calls for, on every side of every argument the film will inevitably reopen: holding two things at once. Said's diagnosis of how representation serves power remains, on the weight of nearly fifty years of scholarship built on it, substantially right and enormously influential. And it was still a human argument, made by a person working under the pressure of his own exile and his own political commitments, and therefore still worth arguing with rather than simply inheriting. Believing both of those sentences at the same time is harder than believing either one alone. It is also the only honest way to inherit forty years of somebody else's patient, unglamorous labor.

Why the six days matter more than the seventh

The instinctive modern response to intractable conflict — and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains, as this film's press notes acknowledge, one of the most intractable on earth, with legitimate grievance, real atrocity, and real fear distributed on more than one side of it — is to look for the seventh day: the single decisive gesture, the viral statement, the open letter, the boycott, the speech that finally makes the wall fall. Said's own career argues against that instinct more forcefully than almost anything else available as an example. He wrote densely argued, unglamorous scholarly prose for four decades. He gave lectures to rooms of thirty people. He corresponded. He revised. None of it went viral, because nothing in 1978 could. And the slow, cumulative weight of that unglamorous labor changed how multiple academic generations were trained to read — which is a form of change so gradual and so structural that almost nobody experiences the moment it happens, in the way almost nobody in that old story experienced the wall's first six days of silent circling as anything but pointless.

None of this is an argument for quietism, or for staying out of public conflict, or for treating patient scholarship as a substitute for urgent public witness when urgency is genuinely called for — plenty of moments require the shout, not just the circling. It is an argument against mistaking the shout for the whole of the work, and against the despair that creeps in when six days pass with no visible movement and the temptation is to conclude that circling silently was always going to be futile. The historical record, in this specific case, says otherwise. It also refuses to promise the same outcome to every reader doing the same kind of patient work today, on any side of any argument — the story never claims day seven definitely comes. It only insists that day three doesn't get to be the day you stop.

Call to action

Before sharing the next headline, the next clip, the next thirty-second summary of an argument this old and this contested, choose one long, patient, unglamorous act of understanding instead: read one full book — not a summary, not a thread — written by someone who lived a side of this conflict you didn't grow up inside, and pair it, deliberately, with one serious critical response to that same book from a scholar who disagreed with it. Sit with both. Do it slowly enough that it costs you actual time you'll notice losing. That is what circling the wall looks like when there is no siege engine, no shortcut, and no guarantee — and it is, on the evidence of one scholar's four unglamorous decades, still how walls of any kind eventually come down.