The Lost Motherhood in May's Heart

I did not know May personally, but I knew her through her literary outpourings. I remember hearing her at the West Hall forum at the American University of Beirut in the days when I was a student there. I heard her deliver a lecture on a social subject, in which she treated the faults of human society.

May possessed an ample share of culture and learning: she had mastered Arabic and French and was well acquainted with English. She left us a precious store of literary works. Among her works: Bahithat al-Badiya; The Aim of Life; Words and Signals; Equality; A Girl's Musings; Darkness and Rays; The Pages; Between Ebb and Flow; The Return of the Wave; Love in Torment; Smiles and Tears; and then the book Flowers of Dream, which she composed in French, and which fortune has not favored me with reading. Yet when you read these works, or some of them, you find that they reflect, among other things, a perplexed, troubled, restless soul, pulled to and fro by life's flow and ebb. Reading May in her books, you feel that she is the prisoner of desolation and solitude; and if it was granted her to break free for an hour, she is lost and astray, having missed the road, with darkness engulfing her. She is a seeker in the desert of life who does not know the aim of life. Perhaps the cause of it goes back to her torment in love and to her remaining far from the bliss of motherhood, which the Village Poet preferred to the bliss of God.

Her many sayings show you her sense of this desolate emptiness. Among them, what she says in the piece “The Child and I”: “I asked him, will you not sit on my knee? He sat down in silence. And when I felt the weight of his small body I remembered my only brother, dead; and my heart leapt to my lips, and tears welled between my eyelids. So I bent toward the child to sip the sweetness of his cheek, distracting myself with that kiss from the melancholy rising from my heart as the clouds rise from the edges of the seas. How sweet is the kiss of children, and how sweet the taste of their smiles.”

I would hardly be exaggerating at all if I said that the word “child” and its like were among the dearest words of the language to the heart of this virgin mother! In the piece “The Child's Weeping” she also writes: “I heard the child laugh, and my ethereal spirit trembled in my earthly body. The voice of this infant echoes back the voices of the angels, etc....” And here she is, in her article “From a Father to His Son,” all but confessing the desire for motherhood pent up in her soul when she asks: “And to him who says in his secret heart, how, I wonder, does a mother love? how, I wonder, does a father love?—you brought part of the answer in the first letter, where you described your love for your son with a beautiful description, etc.” Perhaps this feeling of desolation that May suffered goes back to her being a poet of delicate sensibility; and the poet lives forever in a harsh desolation amid the most crowded gatherings of men, and among his own people and friends. At a celebration in Bikfaya—in the districts of Lebanon (May's original homeland, or mother-homeland, as they say)—she says at the close of her address: “Lebanon is a single word. It is a small word. But all love and all hope are in it, for it is the name of the dear homeland, in whose breast are the graves of the ancestors and the beloved; it bends over their remains as a mother bends over her nursing child.”

Thus “mother” and “nursing child” are words May repeats, and repeats with a great deal of sweetness. And when she mentions the mother, she remembers this ill-starred Arab nation which has condemned woman to deprivation of many things that are her right in life and the secret of her beauty. So she says: “Painters symbolize slavery by drawing a despairing man dragging his chains; had they been just, none but woman would have been the symbol. That

is because they have grown used to enslaving her not by tyranny, oppression, and torture alone, but by kindness, pampering, and endearment. The poor women swoon with delight at being loved for their beauty; had they thought a little, they would have grasped what contempt that holds for all their powers—even for womanhood itself.”

And this desolation may make her feel that there is no spring in life, and that nature is empty of all that is splendid and beautiful:

“Evening drew near, and spring stirred me, and I wished to go out and wander, to share with nature in its joys. It was as if I imagined the walls of the house cutting the tie between me and it, making me feel deprived of communion with the created things calling out with the fragrance of May among the branches, and with the adornment of the bride-earth.” What, then, can this deprivation be to which she points here?

And there is a subject May chose for herself on the pretext of linguistic reform and social guidance, though in truth I do not fancy she chose it except because it occupied her broodings in the hours of her solitude with her own heart—namely, the subject of “So-and-So and His Madame,” where she says: “Among the set phrases used on New Year's greeting cards we find this very widespread one—So-and-so and his madame offer you their congratulations.” And she comments: “How often my eye has fallen on these words. And though I am used to them, they make me laugh every time, for they remind me of that Lebanese who lost his wife in the streets of New York and went about asking the police after her in a tongue he claimed was English, when he said: Ya mister, where has that misteera gone?” Then she comes to her criticism, asking: “If he mentions her in her absence, I wonder how he calls her? Does he say my lady, that is, ‘my madame,’ as this word means in French?”

Thus we sense in the style of this artist among writers a tender feminine breath exhaling love and mercy and compassion from behind the lines—but they are bitter exhalations, whose source is the deprivation that condemned her to live far from the atmosphere of the motherhood for which she was created: that sweet instinct which accompanies woman from the moment she opens her eyes to the light until her last days—from her time as a little girl hugging her beloved doll to her breast, to the day the grave hugs her to its own. Yes, God created her to be a tender mother, guiding her children by the light of what she had gained in learning and acquired in experience. And this motherhood of hers would not have kept her from carrying out the literary and idealistic mission to which she devoted her life and her pen.

And you will no doubt perceive that I have mentioned such things only to prove to you May's devotion to her literature and, in consequence, to her society. For the true writer is he who dips his pen in the ink of his spirit to render what his heart, believing in life, inspires. And what is life but this pure, devoted love? Nor do I think she would have accepted a man as husband merely for his looks or his money; rather she dreamed of a marriage arising between spirit and spirit, and between heart and heart. And “when souls are great, bodies grow weary in pursuit of their desires,” as al-Mutanabbi says. And what is May, in truth, but a generous, great soul, and a delicate, sensitive heart? She is a woman of letters and a poet, and a virgin mother who embraced her children as symbols and phantoms.