Are There Writers in Lebanon?

Are there women writers in Lebanon? So they ask — as though they took it for settled that there are writers in Lebanon; why then, oh the scandal, should there not be women writers!

We do not intend here to answer this question, nor to answer what the question dragged along in its train in our colleague "Kull Shay'": a treatment of The Woman's Voice with flattery on one side, and with an "arithmetical" distortion of the facts on the other. Rather, we intend here to comment on this question with a question of its own kind: Are there writers in Lebanon?

Indeed! Are there, at present, writers in Lebanon? We mean real writers, practiced in the craft of letters, given over to it wholly, schooled in its lofty arts, deep in the study of its immortal monuments, who have set themselves to produce, from the overflow of their talents, a production that contributes, even from afar, to the glories of mind and spirit...

Real writers, we mean: not stylists around whose pallid meanings the shining phrase revolves; not journalists at whose doors speech stands in a beggar's humiliation; not ranters who fling crumbs in our faces while promising us lavish banquets in some "someday" of days; not acrobats who walk the tightrope before us, make the monkeys dance, and pull mice from the sleeves of their black jackets; not partisans who play the man of letters in politics and the politician in letters.

Real writers, we mean: who treat the problems of the human soul as it is reflected in their own persons, in their nation, and in the whole world; who break free, in eloquent speech, from the bounds of the meager, well-trodden subjects into what runs deep and plunges into the flood of human existence — that spacious existence with all its anxiety and infatuation, pain and despair, joy and hope, love and hate, and all it holds within it of eruption, creation, and rebellion.

Real writers, we mean: where, then, are they in Lebanon today? Can this man who claims there are no women writers in Lebanon point me to more than two or three writers in Lebanon whom we may rightly — and that with indulgence — count as such?

We had a writer in Amin Nakhle, but before long he slipped into the chasm of politics and the affairs that politics drags along; we had a writer in Salah Labaki, and he too slipped into the chasm; and we had writers in the making in Tawfiq Awwad, Khalil Takieddine, Said Akl, and others among the authors of attempts at the story, the play, and the other constructive literary arts — and lo, we see them overcome and undone in the melee of politicking, office-holding, and the pursuit of what their talents were never stamped for...

No, there are no writers in Lebanon. If it has al-Bustani, Naimy, and Marun Abboud, that is little. And Lebanon, as we know, has stood since the dawn of the renaissance as guardian of the literary movement in the Arab East. If it wishes to remain so, it must become aware of the state it is in, and set about raising it up and lifting its level.

And now: if some ask whether there are women writers in Lebanon, it would better become them to ask whether there are writers in it at all — and then, no doubt, they will lower the wing of humility and shame.