The Vision brings together Gibran's Arabic writings concerned with the spiritual life. In 24 meditations, essays, and prose poems, Gibran expounds his unique philosophy of life while discussing such perennial themes as Beauty, Nature, Hidden Realities, Human Unity, Tragedy, Pride, Death, and the Immortality of the Soul.
 |
| Amazon Link |
For Kahlil Gibran, love was a way--perhaps the supreme way--of achieving self-realization and completeness as a human being. "The Beloved" is about transforming one's own life through love's all-consuming power. These exquisite writings on love, marriage, and the spiritual union of souls adds a fresh dimension to our understanding of the philosophy of love and its role in contemporary society.
 |
| Amazon Link |
In Broken Wings, Kahlil Gibran uncovers the glory and pain of young love. This loosely autobiographical story is in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet, but with Gibran's characteristic lush Oriental settings and images. A young Kahlil is introduced to Faris Karama, a wealthy and good-hearted merchant of Beirut, and his daughter, Salma. Kahlil and Salma are deeply attracted to on another and continue to meet regularly, with the blessings of Faris Karama. But a powerful priest, Father Ghalib, in order to gain access to the Karama fortune, demands that his son be allowed to marry Salma.
 |
| Amazon Link |
The Storm brings together fourteen short stories and prose poems from Gibran's Arabic writings, which exhibit several characteristic Gibran themes: the injustice perpetrated by society against the poor, the weak, and the sincere; nature and its destruction by man; and the purity and innocence of young love and its perversion and destruction by society. John Walbridge's clear, sensitive, and fluent translation provides us with an inspired and faithful approach to one of the twentieth century's most beloved authors.
 |
| Amazon Link |
Juan Cole's stunning and lyric translation of Spirit Brides revives Gibran's passionate stories of spiritual transcendence through love and suffering.
The more I get to know Kahlil the more he seems to parallel the historical Jesus in his simple tastes for life, his exhortations to stay true to one's humanity, to love and be loved, and to lift up the ideals of humanism we were born with bound by flesh but dwelt within by the Spirit of God.
As a Lebanese man, Kahlil had a deep empathy for the Syrian peasant displaced and unloved before a world gone mad around them. Kahlil's language, art, and writings all share a divine simplicity of thought and reasoning spoken plainly in the language of the immigrant become refugee living upon the desperate places of this earth.
There have been many men and women throughout the millennia, and from every corner of the world, who have spoken the divine words of love and comfort to the hearing ears and seeing eyes of the invisible other. And I welcome yet another "old world soul" to the generations of humans who have heard God's voice speaking from the deep wells of our human heritage to rise up out of the mortality surrounding us to live again. If only it be to ourselves and those loved ones around us who might join this singular federation of the simple, the earthy, the commonplace.
R.E. SlaterSeptember 5, 2021
by John Walbridge
[typos et al edited by R.E. Slater]
Kahlil Gibran’s reputation has not fared well among Western
intellectuals, who have, on the whole, failed to understand his appeal or his
aesthetic. His publishers, even when his books were hugely successful, treated
him with condescension. His heirs have feuded over the royalties. Gibran
and his patrons meticulously preserved his output, only to have it buried or
mutilated. The carefully organized diaries and papers of his patroness
Mary Haskell are held at the University of North Carolina, but draconian use
restrictions imposed by suspicious heirs make it virtually impossible to use
them even for scholarship, much less to compile new works. The major
collections of his paintings are inaccessible. The works that he left to
the Gibran Museum in his hometown in Lebanon are isolated by war, poorly cared
for, and in some cases vandalized by ignorant but proud trustees having written
their names on paintings. The two major collections in the United States,
belonging to his heirs and to the Tellfair Academy in Georgia, are in storage,
and in the last case, some pieces have apparently been stolen. A few of
Gibran’s paintings are in museums, but they are little seen since they do not
fit in with current ideas about what modern art ought to be. No critical
edition, or even critical bibliography, has been made of his writings, in
English or in Arabic. The translations of his Arabic works are mostly not
very good. It is a dismal situation for an author and artists worthy of
attention on several grounds: as a major
pioneer of modern Arabic literature, as the best-selling American poet of the
twentieth century, and as a Middle Eastern modernist whose intellectual life is
documented in meticulous detail.
The Nature of Gibran’s Art
Kahlil Gibran was
born in about 1883 in Bisharri, a beautiful but impoverished Maronite Christian
village in northern Lebanon.[1] His father was an agent of a local warlord; his mother from
a family of priests. When he was twelve, his mother left his
father and immigrated with her children to America. The family settled in the slums of Boston. The social workers of the local settlement house spotted
Gibran's remarkable talent for drawing and introduced
him to a circle of young avant garde intellectuals, who made a pet of him,
encouraged his talent for drawing, and gave him serious books to read. In 1896 he was sent home to attend high school. He spent six years in Lebanon and returned with the
rudiments of an Arabic literary education superimposed on his precocious
readings in 1890s avant garde literature. Once back in
Boston he seriously pursued his art and also began publishing poems and stories
in the Arabic newspapers of New York and Boston. In 1908 Mary
Haskell, the headmistress of a girls school, and the most
important of his several patronesses, sent him to a Paris art school for two
years. Shortly after returning to America, he
moved to New York to be nearer the centers of art and Arab-American literary
culture. He spent the rest of his life in New York,
never completely successful in supporting himself by his art. His ethereal paintings, though unquestionably beautiful and
moving, were completely outside the mainstream of art in his time. He died in 1931. His body was taken
back to Lebanon for burial in his home village.
Though in Gibran's own mind he was primarily a painter, it was his writing that made his reputation. His simple and vivid short stories and "prose poems" were immensely influential in Arabic literature. They were soon published in collections and have been in print in Arabic ever since. By about 1916 he was experimenting with writing in English. The resulting pieces were carefully edited by Mary Haskall. The first work, The Wanderer, appeared in 1919. His most famous work, The Prophet, appeared in 1923 and became immensely popular. It was followed by several other English works.
English-speaking critics have not seen Gibran as particularly good or important. This critical disdain is not shared in the Arabic-speaking world, where Gibran is universally reckoned as one of the key figures of modern Arabic literature. Why, we might reasonably ask, has Gibran failed to win critical respectability in the English-speaking world, despite massive and continuing (though somewhat cyclical) popular acceptance? To be sure, there are some serious limitations in Gibran's works. There is never a trace of humor or irony in his writing (or in his paintings, for that matter). Everything he says is said in deadly seriousness. Of course, he is not alone among poets and writers in his lack of humor, but it is a significant limitation on his range of expression.
Gibran is also not very good at narrative. He did not write many stories, and his narrative harp has only a few strings. His longer stories are overlapping retellings of incidents from the Lebanon of his childhood. The stories of Rose al-Hani, Broken Wings, and The Bridal Bed are similar in event and theme.[2] His characters belong to allegory and folk tale, not to naturalistic storytelling, and there are not really very many of them: the girl married to an insensitive older man, the wicked priest, the pure and sincere youth, and so on. His longest work, Jesus, the Son of Man, is a collection of sketches from which a portrait of Jesus emerges. Clearly, Gibran's genius, whatever we may find it to be, does not extend to subtle characterization or complex plots.
There are also limitations on the Arabic side of his work. He had not mastered the hideously complex traditions and techniques of classical Arabic literature, for which he was sometimes condemned by traditionalist critics. He wrote almost nothing in the traditional poetic forms. His language is simple, colloquial, and sometimes influenced by English. This is not just a matter of style; clearly, he did not know how to write in the classical forms. He came to America when he was twelve and later returned to Lebanon to get the equivalent of an associate's degree. He never had the long and grueling literary training that would have allowed him to write classical qasidas.
Other criticisms might be advanced against Gibran: that his English prose was pretentious, that his ideas were excessively mystical or just trite. What weight ought we to give to such criticisms and limitations? More to the point, what context ought we to read Gibran in? It seems to me that three factors should be considered in evaluating Gibran's literary merit:
- He was primarily a painter and wrote like he painted.
- He belonged to a tradition of modernism that lost out in the English-speaking world in the twentieth century.
- His aesthetic is Arabic, not American or English.
The Painterly Aesthetic
Gibran spent his time painting pictures. When the twelve-year-old Gibran wandered into Denison House in the South End of Boston in 1895, it was his talent for drawing that its intelligent social workers noticed and that was to be his entree into avant garde circles in Boston and Cambridge. It was painting that was to occupy the bulk of his time throughout his life. His ethereal drawings and paintings are integral parts of his books. It is his painterly images that are at the heart of his poetry, and in most cases his pieces can be summarized in a single arresting image. In the prose poem In the City of the Dead a man looks back from the hills towards a smoky modern city. In the foreground is a cemetery where two funerals are taking place, one of a rich man and the other of a poor man. In Before the Throne of Beauty a goddess appears in a forest clearing. In A Vision a cage containing a sparrow dead of hunger and thirst is seen in a field beside a brook.[3]
The same is true even in longer pieces. In The Prophet, the people gather around the departing seer to ask questions as he waits to board his ship in the harbor of Orphalese. In The Bridal Bed, the central image is the dying bride holding her dead lover as she rebukes the wedding guests. A few other vivid images carry the plot to-and-from this point: the drunken wedding feast, the bride in the garden of her new husband's house pleading with her lover to take her away, the maid defying the priest and burying the two lovers.
Gibran turns to prose to express himself only when the narrative and didactic content of his images is too complex to explicate in his style of painting. Like the prophet Mani, Gibran painted first then used language to explicate his images. The visual quality of the images is primary; once the implications of the image are unfolded, the prose poem or story ends. For an art of this kind, we cannot expect narrative complexity, subtle characterization, ironic detachment, or even rational analysis. The image -whether in a painting or a prose poem or an illustrated story - touches the heart at a pre-rational level.
 |
| Exhibit Link |
A Path Not Taken
In 1913 Gibran attended the famous Armory Show of modern art, the show that introduced European modernist painters to America. Gibran wrote to his patron, Mary Haskell, who had seen the show in Boston,
"I am so glad you liked the International Exhibition of Modern Art. It is a revolt, a protest, a declaration of independence. The pictures, individually, are not great: in fact very few are beautiful. But the Spirit of the Exhibition as a whole is both beautiful and great. Cubism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Futurism will pass away. The world will forget them because the world is always forgetting minor details. But the spirit of the movement will never pass away, for it is real-as-real-as-the human hunger for freedom.[4]
A Foreign Aesthetic
It should also not
be forgotten that Gibran was an Arab who wrote for the most part in Arabic. The writing he did in his twenties was all short pieces
written in Arabic for the Arabic emigre newspapers of Boston and New York. It was not until his thirties that he ventured to write for
publication in English, and even then he seems often to have written first in
Arabic and then translated his story or poem into English. The style and content of his English works do not differ
noticeably from his earlier Arabic works, apart from being more didactic and
less fresh. Books like The Prophet are
Arabic literature written in English. The literary
standards of twentieth century English literature are extreme in their demand
for cool authorial detachment. Extended metaphor, elaborate rhetorical
devices, earnest intensity - if they are used at all in modern English
literature - tend either to be ironic or political. It is not an aesthetic ideal that Gibran shared. He was not writing bad English books; he was writing good,
extremely original Arabic books. It is a
distinction that readers have understood far better than critics.
Gibran's Critique of Society
So far I have
discussed aesthetic issues: what we need to consider to evaluate Gibran fairly
as a writer. I think that most readers of Gibran would
consider the more important question to be what Gibran wishes to tell us and
what the relevance of that message might be. I will deal mainly
with the Arabic works. These were earlier than the English works,
most having been written in the fifteen years prior to the publication of his
first English book in 1919.
First, let us consider their audience. Though by the teens Gibran had reached a literary audience, his initial readers were the Syrian immigrants who read the newspapers in which his pieces appeared. Their experiences of life were not much different than his had been. Displaced by poverty from the beautiful but destitute villages of Mount Lebanon, they had ended up in the smoky industrial cities of America in Gibran's time mostly in Boston and New York. The fact that they continued to read Arabic newspapers tells us that they had not fully adapted to American life, as their children were to do. Few were well educated.
Gibran's stories and prose poems seem to have touched his readers in a way that the classical Arabic literature could not. He used simple, colloquial language and avoided the complex language and metres of traditional Arabic poetry. His themes of exile, oppression, and separation from beauty and love touched his peasant readers, even though many aspects of his style derive from the European avant garde literature of the 1880s and 90s. The simplicity of his style gave it a timelessness and universality that have allowed his works to survive and exercise their appeal even in translation.[5] But how does his method work and what do we get from it?
We do not get
philosophy in the usual sense. Gibran did know some philosophy - he had read a lot of Nietzsche, for example, but his literary method does not allow for discursive analysis. We get a vivid but essentially static image with enough description and narrative
explanation to allow us to grasp it. An emotional
strobe light momentarily illuminates an aspect of our experience, leaving us
with a picture burned onto our emotional retinas. Thereafter, we see
that aspect of our experience with different eyes. Like a painting, a Gibran prose poem uses a vivid image to tell us how we should feel about some aspect of our
experience. It does not tell us how we ought to
understand this link of emotion and experience.
We should not then expect reasoned ethics from Gibran, nor rational theology, nor prescriptions for reordering society. His literary tools are too simple and too far from the rational level of consciousness to serve such purposes. What we do get is the extraordinary force of Gibran's moral seriousness turned on various aspects of life. When Almustafa answers the astronomer:
"You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons,...
Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness..."[6]
It may not be obvious to us how such a dictum is to be translated
into action but we do have a sense that some significant aspect of our attitude
towards time has been challenged. Gibran does not
tell us what we ought to do but rather questions the assumptions on which we
have based the habitual actions of our life. His paintings can
only move us in an inchoate way, since there the narrative element is still
obscure. His writings can challenge us directly
because their [painted] images are complex, the narrative meaning is made explicit for
us, and the whole is driven home by Gibran's relentless and utterly
earnest sincerity and sense of the importance of what he has to say.
Gibran tends to express his moral and spiritual views in terms of dichotomies. I will discuss three such dichotomies:
- City vs. Country
- Society and L aw vs. Nature and Love
- The Pagan Gods vs. Monotheism
City vs. Country
Gibran
romanticizes the country and demonizes cities. This is curious,
for he spent virtually his entire life after leaving Lebanon at age twelve in the large cities of Boston, Beirut, Paris, and New York, and was very much a city person. He loved what
modern cities had to offer: theater, museums, exhibitions, and the like. He could perfectly well have settled in some small town or
in one of the artists' colonies that were beginning to appear in various scenic
corners of the United States where, most likely, he would have found a
congenial reception. Instead he lived a rather isolated life in
New York, cut off from the mainstream of the New York art scene. His prose poems on the contrast of the country and the city
are the homage that he pays to his lost childhood in the Lebanese mountains.
Gibran's cities are of the dark, Satanic-mills variety. In the prose poem, A Dialogue of Spirits, two lovers commune with each other across a sea. The woman is in a village in the mountains of Lebanon; the man in some unnamed city. Late at night, when the sounds of footsteps on the sidewalk outside his room have died away, the man calls in spirit to his beloved across the sea. She wakes to his call and walks out into the fields, where the dew wets the hem of her robe. Moonlight lights her valley, but smoke blackens the sky of his city. While ghosts of kings and prophets walk in the mountains of Lebanon, the air of the city contains only crime, vice, and the tormented sighs of the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. When morning at last comes, it is not the bleating of flocks that is heard in the city:
Grey faces and worried eyes are plain to sight. The wretched trudge to the factories, death dwelling within their bodies beside life, their pinched features showing the shadow of despair and fear, the shadow that would darken the face of one sent against his will to a fearful and deadly battle. The streets are choked with people in greedy haste. The air is filled with the shock of steel, the grinding of gears, the shriek of steam. The town has become a battlefield where strong fights weak and tyrannous rich monopolize the fruits of the toil of the poor and destitute.[7]
Another prose poem, A Lamentation in the Field, tells how the narrator went walking in the countryside only to find nature in grief. The wind sighs in the tree branches, and when he asks why, it replies, Because I go towards the City, driven by the warmth of the Sun, to the City where the contagions of diseases will ride upon my pristine skirts and the poisonous breaths of men will cling to me. This is why you see me sad. The flowers, tears of dew falling from them, the brook, and the birds make similar complaints. Why, the narrator asks himself, does Man destroy that which nature builds?[8]
On the whole, his
portrait of the city is more convincing than his portrait of the country, for
in his mind the harshness of life in the countryside which, after all, drove his family into exile has been reduced to a few well-polished stories. His portraits of the city reflect life as he regularly
experienced it.
There is another
city for Gibran, the home of moral debasement and hypocrisy. In his imaginary geography, this city is the Beirut of his
youth. It is a place of some beauty, a seaport
dominated by the homes of wealthy men. In the story Rose al-Hani, the narrator, looks out across the city from the
window of the little house shared by Rose and her lover and listens as she
tells him of the city and its people:
Look at these beautiful houses and tall and stately palaces. There live the rich and powerful among men. Their walls are decorated with silken tapestries, yet enclose coarse treachery concealed by hypocrisy. Beneath their gilded roofs, falsehood stands close by affectation. Look! and think on those edifices with care. To you they symbolize wealth, power, and happiness, but they are no more than caves in which lurk degradation, misery, and wretchedness. They are whitewashed sepulchres in which the seduction of helpless women is concealed behind eyes darkened with kohl and reddened lips. Within them the flash of silver and gold hides the egotism and bestiality of men. They are palaces whose walls rise in haughtiness and pride towards the sky, but if they could perceive the stench of the loathesome things and deceit flowing from them, they would crumble and fall to the ground in ruin. The poor villager looks at them with tears in his eyes, yet within the hearts of their inhabitants, no trace can be found of that sweet love filling the heart of that villager's wife. If he knew, he would smile with mockery and pity and return to his field.[9]
Rose goes on to tell the narrator of the corruption concealed
within the fine houses: adulterous men and women, the unloved wives of
indifferent husbands, the spiritual husbands of shrewish wives, the greedy, the
ambitious, and the vicious.
The Beirut of his
imagination is a shallow place. In the prose poem Between Night and Morn the poet paints the
ship of his thought in gaudy colors and is given a hero's welcome when he
enters the harbor of his city - yet none bother to board the ship and so
discover that it is empty. Conscience-stricken, the poet enters his
ship and sails throughout the seas to fill it with treasures. When at last he returns to the harbor of the city, his ship
deep-laden with the choice goods of many lands and islands, he is ignored, for
the bright colors with which he had painted his ship had faded on the long
journey. Dejected at meeting with only mockery, he
goes up to the cemetery above the city, the city of the dead, a city more honest about its nature than the city of the living
dead below and more beautiful in its combination of stillness and natural
beauty.[10]
In the story, The Cry of the Graves, the narrator watches the splendid spectacle of the Emir passing judgment on various criminals: a young man who murdered an official, a young woman caught in adultery, and an older man caught stealing the altar chalises from a monastery church. Each arouses some sympathetic murmers from spectators: the youth for his strength and pride, the girl for her delicate beauty, and the older man for his evident poverty and suffering, but each has been caught in the act by witnesses, so the Emir, zealous for justice, must condemn each to a suitable exemplary death. The narrator, though disturbed, accepts the justice of the sentences.
The next day the narrator goes walking outside the city and, guided by the circling carrion birds, comes upon the place where the three unfortunates have been killed: beheaded, stoned, and hanged respectively, and their bodies left to be eaten by animals. The narrator contemplates the mournful scene and wonders whether justice has truly been done:
Three who according to the customs of men had
offended against justice, so blind Law had stretched forth its hand to crush
them without pity.
A man slays another man, so men say, "This is a wicked murderer." When the Emir slays him, men say, "This is a just Emir."
Do we requite a sin with a greater sin and say, "This is the Holy Law?" Do we fight corruption with wider corruption and call out, "This is the Law?" Do we oppose crime
with a more serious crime and cry, "This is Justice?"
Has not the Emir destroyed an enemy in his past life? Has he not stolen money or land from some one of his
helpless subjects? Has he not seduced a beautiful woman? Is he so free from these sins that he can execute the
murderer, hang the thief, and stone the adultress?
And who stoned this adultress? Are they pure ascetics come from their cells, or are they only men of the flesh who commits sins and practice vileness under the concealing curtain of night?[11]
As he thinks these unhappy thoughts, the survivors of the executed criminals come to mourn and bury their dead, contrary to the orders of the Emir. Surprised in the act, each explains him[self] or herself to the narrator. First is the girl who has come to bury the youth. She explains that the Emir's official had set an absurdly high tax on her father's land as a pretext for abducting her. The youth was her betrothed, who intervened to protect her. [Next,] a young man comes to bury the adultress, explaining that they had loved each other from childhood but that her father had married her to a man she did not like while the young man was away. He had come only to see her, but they had been found and falsely accused of adultery. According to custom, all the disgrace had fallen on her for the supposed crime. Last, a poor woman appears to bury the older man who had stolen from the church. She explains that he had been a servant of the monastery, but when he had lost the strength of his youth, the monks had dismissed him with nothing, leaving him and his family near starvation.
The last of these miserable people depart, leaving the
narrator to contemplate the three graves and the markers left on them by the
grieving survivors: a sword, a bunch of flowers, and a simple wooden cross:
After that the sun disappeared in twilight as though it were
weary of the cares of men and loathed their oppression: "I raised my eyes to the zenith of heaven and spread my arms
towards the graves and the symbols upon them. In my loudest
voice I cried, 'This is your sword, O courage. It is sheathed in the dust. These are your
flowers, O love. Fires have seared them. This is your cross, O Jesus of Nazareth. The darkness of night has covered it.'"[12]
---
Gibran's moral universe is marked by a radical distrust of society and its institutions. The Emir has done justice rightly, according to the lights of men and even according to the revealed Law of [the] God [they have imaged to follow]. These three people did commit the crimes of which they were accused (except for the girl taken in adultery, whose position was nonetheless sufficiently compromising in Lebanese terms to justify a conviction). At the trials, the narrator is saddened by the convictions, but he has no doubt of their justice. It is only when his knowledge transcends that of the Emir that he understands the real truth of the three cases.Indeed, Gibran implies that all social institutions, laws, and actions are flawed in this way, serving only to crush the natural and the spontaneous. In a piece called Slavery, Gibran portrays history as a bloody history of slavery in endless varieties:
Seven thousand years have passed since first I
was born, yet I have seen only submissive slaves and shackled prisoners.
I have traveled the east and the west of the world and
wandered in the shadows of life and in its bright days. I have beheld the caravans of nations and peoples journeying
from its caves to its castles, but until now I have seen only serfs bent
beneath their burdens, arms bound by chains, knees bent before idols.
I have followed man's path from Babylon to Paris, from
Nineveh to New York. Everywhere beside his footprints in the
sand I saw the marks of his dragging chains. Everywhere the
valleys and hills echoed with the grief of generations and centuries.
I entered the palaces, the squares, the temples. I stood before thrones, altars, and pulpits. There I saw the laborer a slave to the merchant, the
merchant a slave to the soldier, the soldier a slave to the general, the
general a slave to the king, the king a slave to the priest, the priest a slave
to the idol, the idol shaped from dust by devils and raised above a hill of
dead men's skulls.[13]
What must wise men and women do in the face of the oppressiveness
of social norms? Gibran gives two answers. In The Storm, Yousuf El-Fakhri lives
in a little hut alone in the mountains of Lebanon, leading to various rumors
about his origins and the reason for his living the life of a hermit. When the narrator of the story takes shelter in Yousuf's hut
during a thunderstorm, the hermit explains himself. He is not a religious ascetic, and indeed his hut is well
supplied with such luxuries as coffee and tobacco. Rather,
I sought [solitude] as I fled from men, from
their laws and teachings and customs and thoughts, from their clamor and cries.
I sought solitude so that I would not see the faces of men who sell their souls
that the price might buy that which is less than their souls in worth and
honor. I sought solitude that I might not meet the women who go about with
necks outstretched, eyes winking, upon their mouths a thousand smiles, and in
the depths of their hearts a single purpose. I sought solitude so that I would
not have to sit with those who, having only partial knowledge, see the image of
a science in a dream and imagine themselves in wisdom's inner circle. While
alert and awakeful they see one apparition of reality and imagine that they
possess its perfect essence. I sought loneliness because I had wearied of
boorish courtesy that imagined refinement to be weakness, that imagined
forbearance to be cowardice, arrogance to be a form of glory.[14]
The narrator, impressed with the insight of Yousuf El-Fakhri, protests
that he has an obligation to participate in society so as to guide people to a
wiser life. Yousuf patiently explains that such a
course is futile:
From the beginning the physicians have attempted to save the sick from their sickness. . . All these physicians have died without hope or expectation... The truth... is that this 'evil patient' murders the physician then closes his eyes and says to himself, 'In truth, he was a great physician....' No, my brother, there is no one among men who can help men. However skilled a doctor the plowman may be, he cannot make his field to blossom in the midst of winter.'[15]
True spiritual happiness, Gibran tells us, can only be found in
solitude from society.
---
 |
| The Coming of the Ship |
Gibran's second prescription for dealing with the oppressiveness of society is the love of man and woman, which forms a bubble of solitude within which the two can live a life of spiritual happiness. In A Ship in the Mist, the unnamed sage [may be] perhaps Yousuf El-Fakhri? His hut is in the same valley as Yousuf's reveals that in his youth he had loved a girl who was visible only to him, a mental shadow as a companion for me to love and befriend. They lived a life alone together amidst society as nearly constant companions. Yet when he leaves Lebanon on a trip to Venice, she vanishes. Only when he reaches the house of his host in Venice does he realize the truth, that his companion was the lonely daughter of this Venetian dignitary and that she now lies dead within the mourning house.Rose al-Hani and her young lover share a similar solitude. As a girl of eighteen, she had married Rasheed Bey Nu'man, a prosperous man of nearly forty. He treated her generously, giving her rich clothes, servants, a fine carriage, and a magnificent home. Only too late does she realize that she is only one more of Rasheed Bey's fine possessions, but she is trapped by the law of marriage that binds her to this man, who is, as the narrator knows perfectly well, not a bad man but only an insensitive one. After two years of marriage, she falls in love with a bookish young man and runs away with him. The solitude they share is a little cottage in the hills outside Beirut and their rejection of and by the respectable members of society.Romantic love is important to Gibran because it is the way in which individuals can make a refuge of the natural within society. Marriage, however, is suspect because it is the way in which society controls and warps the pure and natural realm of sexual romantic love.
The banished gods of beauty
and imagination
Gibran was opposed to the church, as the authorities of the Maronite church pointed out when the unappetizing matter of giving him a religious funeral came up. The Christian churches, and by extension other organized religions, appear in Gibran's literary works as part of the system of oppression of the natural.
I followed the generations from the banks of the Congo to the shores of the Euphrates, to the mouth of the Nile and to Mount Sinai, to the courts of Athens and to the churches of Rome, to the alleys of Constantinople and to the great buildings of London. Everywhere I saw slavery being carried in processions towards the altars and being called God. They poured libations of wine and perfumes at its feet and called it Angel. They burned incense before its images and called it Prophet. Then they fell down prostrate before it and called it the Holy Law.[17]
In The Bridal Bed, it is the priest who
forbids the burial of the two lovers. In various other
stories and sketches the organized church is portrayed as an instrument of
oppression. The church and monastery oppress their
sharecropping peasants, for example.[18]
To the dark oppressiveness of monotheism, Gibran contrasts the old gods and goddesses of nature. In Before the Throne of Beauty the narrator goes wandering into the fields and woods. There he meets a lovely girl dressed in vines and flowers. When he asks who she is, she replies, "I am the daughter of the forests, so do not fear." He questions her further, Does someone like you inhabit this land of desolation and wild beasts? "Tell me who you are and from whence you come." She sat on the grass and said, "I am the symbol of nature. I am the virgin whom your fathers worshipped, building altars to her in Baalbek, Aphek, and Byblos."[19] In The Queen of Imagination a goddess appears among the ruins of Palmyra and pleads for the rights of the imagination.[20] "These old gods and goddesses have been driven out of the land," Gibran implies, "and man is left out of contact with the natural." In the sketch Among the Ruins, the ghosts of two ancient lovers meet among the ruins of the temples of Heliopolis Baalbek in Lebanon to renew their pledge of love.[21]
Thus it is that the one city that Gibran does not condemn is the ancient city, whose type for Gibran is Orphalese the city at whose center is a temple served by both priests and priestesses.
Reading Gibran within his own
aesthetic and moral world
What then ought we to make of Gibran as a writer? Though he is in important ways an American writer, it is wrong to read Gibran from the point of view of contemporary American literary tastes. He is not a contemporary American modernist writer. Rather, he is several other things and deserves to be read accordingly.
First, he was an Arabic writer who eventually came to write in English. He used the flamboyant rhetoric acceptable to Arabic canons of taste, not the cool, detached style of modern American poetry.
Second, he was a symbolist, a member of a school that was already dying as he began to write. In both his writing and his painting he followed a path that other modernists abandoned, the last representative of a school that might have been.
Third, he was a
painter who wrote. His writing was of a piece with his
painting: haunting, ethereal images that hint at an
accompanying narrative. It is no accident that he never mastered
either extended narrative or abstract analysis. His stories and
prose poems are usually no more than an explication of a single arresting
image, usually one slightly too complicated for him to express visually in a
single picture.
As for the content
of Gibran's writing, we can scarcely read him literally as
a guide to life. We cannot abandon our cities to live alone
at the edge of the Vale of Qadisha or to live as hermit couples in idyllic
cottages overlooking Beirut. What then does he teach us? What can he teach the young people who are always his most fervent
admirers? Gibran brings to his writing a total and
relentless earnestness, a complete faith in the supreme importance of the
spiritual side of life. We cannot extract dry and practical
ethical maxims from his works, but we may be kindled by the fire of his
intensity. He reminds us in an emotional way that the
dignity of the individual is to be found in nature, not in social institutions,
that the love of man and woman is not a trivial part of life, that souls sicken
without beauty and imagination. Above all, he tells us that we must face
life romantically, living so that our reason and our passions are in balance, the rudder and the sails of our seafaring souls. But Gibran cannot tell us the course we must set as
individuals. His method of instructing us is well
summarized by Almustafa, when asked about Teaching.
No man can reveal to you aught but that which
already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. . .
And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.[22]
January 1998
Lahore
JohnWalbridge
jwalbrid@indiana.edu
Near Eastern
Languages
Goodbody 102
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
Notes
[1]This account of his life is based on Jean and
Kahlil Gibran, Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World (Boston: New
York Graphic Society, 1974).- Properly speaking, his name should be
rendered Jibran Khalil Jibran; the truncated form and the spelling are due to
Boston school officials.
[2]Gibran's
Arabic works, most originally published in Arabic newspapers in America, are
collected in al-Majmua al-Kamila
li-Mu'allifat Jibran Khalil Jibran (Beirut, 1961, and many times reprinted), which compiles several
earlier collections. There have been a variety of collections
in English. The translations cited here are from John
Walbridge, trans., The Storm: Stories and Prose Poems (Santa
Cruz: White Cloud Press, 1993; new ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin Arkana, 1997)
and John Walbridge, trans., The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the
Heart (Ashland, Ore.: White Cloud Press, 1994; new ed., Harmondsworth:
Penguin Arkana, 1997). Rose al-Hani is Warda
al-Hani, in Majmua, pp. 81-95, trans. Beloved, pp.
16-40. Broken
Wings is al-Ajniha al-Mutakassara, in Majmua, pp. 146-239; trans. Juan R. I. Cole, Broken Wings (Ashland,
Ore.: White Cloud Press, forthcoming). The Bridal
Bed is Madja al-Arus, in Majmua, pp. 106-15; trans. Beloved, pp. 82-97.
[3] Ru'ya, in Majmua, pp. 250-51; trans. Storm, pp. 35-37.
[4]Quoted
in Gibran and Gibran, p. 252.
[5]They
were, I am told by my friend Ramjee Singh, widely read in Hindi by young Indian
nationalists in the 1940s.
[6]The
Prophet (New York: ***, ***), p.
***.
[7]Munajat
Arwah, in Majmua, pp. 316-19; trans. Beloved, pp. 77-81.
[8]Manaha
fi'l-Haql, in Majmua, pp. 273-74; trans. Storm, pp. 83-86.
[9]Majmua, p. ***; trans. Beloved, p.
30.
[10]Bayna
Layl wa-Subh, in Majmua, pp. 389-93; trans. Storm, pp. 73-82.
[11]Surakh
al-Qubur, in Majmua, pp. ***; trans. Storm, pp.
60-61.
[12]Majmua, pp. ***; trans. Storm, pp.
70-71.
[13]al-Ubudiya, in Majmua, p. 362; trans. Storm, pp.
39-40.
[14]al-Asifa, in Majmua, p. 433-34; trans. Storm, pp. 16-17.
[15]Majmua, p. 436; trans. Storm, pp.
18-19.
[16]Safina
fi Dubab, in Majmua, pp. 493-502; in Storm, pp. 93-110.
[17]al-Ubudiya, in Majmua, pp. 363; trans. Storm, pp.
40-41.
[18]Surakh
al-Qubur, in Majmua, pp. ***; trans. Storm, pp.
66-68.
[19]Amama
Arsh al-Jamal, in Majmua, pp. 265-66; trans. Storm, pp. 115-17.
[20]Malikat
al-Khayal, in Majmua, pp. 281-82; trans. Beloved, pp. 57-60.
[21]Bayn
al-Khara'ib, in Majmua, pp. 253-54; trans. Beloved, pp 67-69.
[22]The
Prophet.
This paper copyright; not for quotation or citation without the author's permission.
For new translations of Gibran by Professor Walbridge see: Book Orders
