I Am Woman!

... This charming reportage was prepared for "The Woman's Voice" by the great man of letters Ustad Musa Sulayman, the intimate friend of Dar al-Kitab and the dearest friend of "The Woman's Voice"... The university girl students' pageant of the most famous women of history was among the most elegant occasions this country has seen, in conception and in staging.

It was centuries ago, in the year one thousand of the Christian era, and the world was plunged in a pitch darkness of ignorance. There, on a jutting rock among the rocks of the Manara, where the American University of Beirut stands today, sat a youth whose heart was filled with the love of learning and knowledge, and he began to dream and to think...

The time was evening, and the sun with its luminous rays was all but sinking into the depths of the sea, while the waves breaking upon the rocks of the shore made a sound most like a sweet and wonderful melody...

Our youth surrendered to a calm, deep sleep and began to swim in the world of visions and dreams. And in a single instant of imagination — equal to tens of thousands of this world's years — there passed before him magnificent historical scenes, presenting the freshest of the women's faces that have colored history with a thousand and one colors.

Here is Sappho, the Greek poetess who lived in the seventh century before Christ, reciting to the connoisseurs of her verse the truest poetry she ever composed, in a literary and artistic gathering breathing love and imagination...

And here is Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, who made the world's head spin before her own was turned by the love of Antony...

Here we are in Palmyra, in the heart of the fertile desert; the time is the fourth century of our era, and Zenobia, queen of the East, lady of might and main, rages and fumes, threatening and menacing, as she awaits the Roman emperor Aurelian, that she may build him a prison in her palace where he shall die of grief... And nothing softens her sharpness and her fit of anger but a throng of the palace maidens who enter the great hall to perform the rites of the sacred dance to the strains of stirring music!!

Here we draw near to our Arab history, and the youth surrendered to sleep pierces with his mighty imagination the veils of history to reach the fair of Ukaz, where he finds a pavilion set up in which sits al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani, while al-Khansa, poetess of the Arabs and their sorrowing genius, recites to him the sweetest and most delicate of verse.

The voice of al-Khansa fades into the folds of time, that we may hear the voice of a second Arab maiden roaring... That is Khawla bint al-Azwar, who plunged into the thick of war disguised in men's dress to rescue her brother Dirar from captivity by the enemy.

We pass from East to West, from the year 690 to 1597, to the opening of the seventeenth century, to England, to Elizabeth, to see her in the last part of her life, in a scene in which she tries to hold on to what remains to her of her glory and her power — and her nerves betray her.

And let us turn aside to the land of India, land of magic and talismans and living love, where we see "Taj Mahal," the beautiful Indian virgin whom chance and the fates cast in the path of the Shah of India as he was on a hunting expedition; he admired her and loved her, and made her — the poor, lowly girl — queen over the famous Indian palace of the "Taj Mahal."

And Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XV — here she is, having reached the summit of her greatness and the peak of her glory, dancing in a rapture of delight and happiness; but it is the fleeting delight, and the happiness that collapses as dreams collapse!...

And here is Sarah Bernhardt, the famous French actress of 1890, who shook the boards of the French stage with a shaking whose echoes the theaters of the modern world have repeated. Here she is in an alluring scene in her dressing room, surrounded by Oscar Wilde and the newspapermen.

And Madame Curie. Here she is, working night and day at reading and study, to occupy among the men of science a great place for which the men envy her.

Our friend's sleep runs long, and he wakes only to a violent shake from one of the girl students of the American University in the year 1948.

"Hello... hello, dearie..."

"Who are you?..."

"Who am I?? I am Woman... I am she whom you saw in your dream, she who has kept company with the ages and the generations; I am she who built thrones and razed thrones, I who raised you to the height of heaven and brought you down to the depths of the abyss... I am Woman..."