After more than a decade of struggling with leukemia, Edward Said succumbed to the disease on 24 September 2003 at the age of 67. Many members of the African Literature Assoeiation were aware that he was losing the battle against cancer. Illness had prevented him from addressing the ALA Conference in Alexandria, Egypt, last spring. Literary critic and advocate for Palestinian independence, Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, during the British mandate. Raised there and in Cairo, he went to the United States for secondary school and university studies, sent by his father, a well-to-do Palestinian businessman who had obtained American citizenship for himself and his children by serving in the United States Army during World War I. Said held a BA from Princeton and a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard, and spent his academic career teaching comparative literature at Columbia Univer? sity. His publications were numerous and diverse; he wrote on literary theory, music, Middle Eastern politics. Many students and scholars knew him first as the author of Joseph Conrad and the Fiction oj Autobiography (1966), the initial step toward his theories concerning culture and imperialism. This text, which grew out of his doctoral dissertation, revealed the critic's affinity for the outsider in literature, illustrated by Joseph Conrad in his life and fiction. A decade later, Orientalism (1978) established his reputation as a major critic and became a key text in the realm of postcolonial studies. In this work, the critic defined Orientalism as a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the latter's special place in Western experience. In his view, the Orient is the source of the West's deepest and most recurring images of the Other. Hence, it helps define Europe in terms of contrast; one culture is what the other is not. Within this conceptual framework, Said emphasizes the imbalance of power between Occident and Orient caused by Western imperial dominance. In this vein, the critic provides readers with the concept of "imaginative geography," a term that expresses the dichotomy between "our land" and "their land." The space that Westerners occupy is safe and secure; the rest is unknown and dangerous. At home in both Arabic and English, Said was both an American university professor devoted to literature and a committed advocate of the Palestinian cause. His criticism of American and Israeli policies toward the Palestinian struggle for a homeland often made him a controversial figure in the United States. He became a member of the Palestine National Council in 1977, helped draft a new Palestinian constitution in 1988, but resigned from the council in 1991, having lost confidence in Yasser Arafat's leadership. He subsequently opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 because he felt that the agreement did not adequately support the Palestinian refugees in their claim to the right to return home.