Woman's Eternal Poem

I thought long when I began to write about May — I thought I would not call her a genius or a prodigy — and then I found myself running into it wherever I turned my gaze, and however far I went in touching her blazing intelligence and her inventive mind. She is the genius of this her age, and genius streams from her abundant writings — from the depth of her studies and her soaring with them beyond all limit — to a fineness of depiction — and a spiritual suggestiveness joined to the latent spirit of motherhood. At one moment I see in her fervor and her impetus the spirit of the lioness defending her cubs; at another I touch the spirit of the mother who pats with her soft hand, chanting to her children in her plaintive voice the highest anthem of humanity, to rouse the flagging wills and revive the tormented hopes with tokens of resolve and tenderness — saying to them: "The goal of humanity — the ideal that gives life a delicious meaning and lends it a new luster — and kindles in the soul a fire that burns up its corrupt inclinations and makes it fit to be a temple of lofty thoughts and noble purposes."

Upon what wide horizons of wisdom, poise, and knowledge she made us look out! And how often — how very often — she charmed us with her engaging style, of that easy manner none can imitate. To my eye she is like a circle: one is at a loss from which side to approach her. From her striking, magnetic personality? From her high culture? From the masterpieces of her enchanting writings? Or from her character, her feeling, and her tenderness?

Did she not write with the ink of her heart these writings and those chapters, until by them she became immortal? And is there anything like the heart — a limpid spring which, whenever Providence feeds it from its overflow, gives life abundance upon abundance and draught after draught?

Therefore her overflow was unbroken and its spring abundant and unrelenting, and she endowed mankind with shining treasures that are the inheritance of the generations and the ages, and the pride of the women of the twentieth century.

How happy I was the day May took her last stand on the platform of West Hall at the American University of Beirut, scattering her precious pearls, which set my heart dancing with delight. I began looking right and left to see her effect upon the company, and behold, they were drunk with her wine as I was, anxious even about their own breath, lest it trouble the serenity of that sweetness and cut the electric current that flowed from her to us. And how sweet was the lofty spirit she breathed into our spirits, sealing her magical words with the saying: "The culture of one individual cultivates many individuals; one small light illumines a wide space; the strength of one individual creates a thousand heroes."

And perhaps she, being that one individual, will quicken this spirit of hers in us, and so create a thousand heroes and thousands of individuals, who will be joined to her rich spirit, and it will furnish them with light and strength and heroism and life.

How many times have we women taken refuge with May and sheltered in her shadow, our heads held high! Is she not part of the womanly being that feels the wrong done it and condemns the usurpation of rights? She tried to show man his faults with mildness and his failings with gentleness, without any self-conceit appearing in her — though she had the right to it, having outdone many of the wielders of pens in her soaring through far regions and her handling of the subtlest subjects; so she earned the testimony of the greatest of our men in worth — the testimony of the late scholar Yaacoub Sarruf, who said in presenting her book "Bahithat al-Badiya": "I do not recall that I have seen, to this hour, any among the writers of Arabic who is her match, nor any among the Europeans who surpasses her."

Her writings, all of them, are the poem of women and their eternal anthem; their music is sweet, their thoughts are lofty, they lay balm upon wounds. How sweet she is when she says to men: "Go on working for the emancipation of woman — the longed-for emancipation — until you hear from your own souls that splendid testimony: O man, you have done well — done well because you have made amends, done well because you have done justice."

Who ever conversed with May and was not bewitched by the grace and sweetness of her talk? And who has read May without crying out in admiration at the beauty of her fresh expressions and her blazing eloquence? She lifts her reader to far-off regions, and he feels the loftiness of her horizon and its splendor — a woman of letters and of society, and a great reformer, eloquent and pure in language — an orator beyond rivalry — she plumbs the unknown with her living feeling and her luminous mind, and sets it before the eye in a supple, captivating style. Does not her reader feel that he stands before a skilled painter? —

For when she speaks of the sky, you would think its clouds grown blue, its sun radiant, its twilight luminous; and if she mentions the dry land, it grows green and dewy between her fingertips. She lets you hear the purl of the brook, the surging of the great sea, and the stillness of the desert, and shows you the beauty of its oases, its brightness, and its glittering mirage.

In her portraits of the personalities she set down you see — for she brought the unknown of their lights out into the open — her fine, comprehensive analysis, her coloring of their portraits with art and taste, her clothing them in garments in harmony with their souls — so that we loved them as she herself loved them. Is not her description of Bahithat al-Badiya as a writer original in its expressions? She says: "The alphabet belongs to all mankind, and people ordinarily understand one another only through speech. What then is that power, given to some, to draw with letters faces and the manner of their roundness; lips and the edges of their folds; horizons and their endless breadth; night and its depth and its stars; the soul and the wonders of its hidden places? And how does there pulse, in bare and lifeless words, a swift and kindled life — with the storm of feeling, the raging of anger, the moaning of complaint, the ringing of success and triumph? And why do words tremble at one moment like strings, and wail at another like the waves of the roaring sea, and whisper a wondrous whisper, as though it came forth from the abyss of the generations and the dimness of the farthest hopes?"

Then, after all she has written and created, she says: "Why have you brought me into being, O universe, and what do you want of me?" And of whom should it want anything, pray, if not of her — she whose cup brims over with rare intelligence and a piercing, leaping thought, and two eyes that penetrate the living and the lifeless, joining themselves to it with a radiant, creative power that makes of its spirit and its clay speaking tongues for the children of her generation and for the generations to come.

And her existence will have a meaning that spurs on women's thought — saying, as she herself once said of Madame de Sévigné: Forward, women, forward!

And her name will be given to one of our streets, so that every class will pronounce her name and long to know her struggle and her nobility.

And her books will be taught in the schools and the universities, so that her lofty spirit may work its way into the rising generation — this spirit which stamps her writings with its mark before they are signed with her name; for her spirit is in the lines and between them, fluttering, soaring to the upper regions, to what is unseen, bringing every distant thing near to the understanding by its beauty and its heavenly breathings.