From Julia Tu'mah Dimashqiyah

“Summon up a girl brown as coffee and as tamarind and as musk, and set upon her a nebulous stamp of longing and yearning and bewilderment and spiritual hunger, and a readiness for delight and joy and a great readiness for sorrow and pain — and give this ensemble the name of ‘May.'”

The memory of “May,” and of the first days that brought me together with her at the Sofar casino nearly twenty years ago, and the friendship whose bonds were tightened thereafter, and the letters that passed between us — these are among the events which the black nights have had no power to erase from my memory.

I remember her at our first meeting: here I see her entering the sitting-room after the evening meal, between her two parents.. and here am I, directing all the attracting power I possess — of feeling and gaze and will — toward “May” and her parents; and I kept up my staring until I won my wish, when the three came to sit in the corner I occupied with my husband.

No sooner had “May” taken her seat beside me than she laid her hand upon mine, saying:

“So it is you here, O New Woman!” — pointing to the name of the magazine I was publishing at that time — “I am truly delighted to meet you.” I felt then a special happiness, and resolved within myself not to part from her from that time on — we were both at the same hotel — until I had sounded the depths of that unique creature who, every time I read something new of hers, left me more perplexed about her, and further removed from every human image and semblance to which I might liken her.

And when I expressed my thanks and my astonishment that she remembered me — we had met until then only once, amid a great crowd of people — she said: “Or have you forgotten that I recognized you then before anyone pointed you out to me? As for you — so I see — you are still in doubt about the reality of the being that has taken up its dwelling in the word ‘May'” — pointing to a phrase in my first letter to her, in which I introduced myself... She spoke with her eyes gazing at the farthest point they could see. And before waiting for any answer from me she said: “I see you hesitating over your answer; perhaps you prefer to postpone it until you have mastered the unriddling of the obscurities of my soul and the hidden places of my inner self. You are determined to go on dissecting me piece by piece, to make of me a subject for your monthly talk with the daughter of your country — isn't that so?”

And she continued: “Come, we two must reach an understanding on certain women's questions. Tell me your frank opinion on the subject of the new modern fashions, and dancing, and adornment — these three things which are among the most prominent features of this circle we see before us now, and which you have so often treated in what you write in the pages of your magazine.”

And when I answered her with the harm I saw in such things, and especially in what concerns the painting of faces and adornment — bearing in mind that “May,” God rest her soul, was most attentive to the arts of toilette and adornment — she replied to me at once with what excuses her sister woman, if desire or her particular circumstances lead her to improve her face with paint.. nay, she laid the blame upon everyone who stands in woman's way and denies her this weapon, which is one of her legitimate rights.

“Do we not boast — and all the nations of the earth boast with us — of the ornamentation of our churches and our museums and the furnishings of our houses, and of everything connected with us? Why, then, do we fault woman for her adornment — she who is asked to create beauty and to distribute it through all the walks of life?”

And so May set off, producing proof after proof, and argument after argument, for the soundness of her view.

I remember, too, that during that month we spent together I was more constant in attendance upon May than her own shadow, hoping to reach the depths of her soul and to profit from her learning and the breadth of her reading. Nor was she any less desirous than I of being with me and talking with me alone. But — alas — those private hours and solitary conversations that punctuated our stay, and which made me happy to a far degree, could not bring me to that far point I desired — the understanding of “May” as she is — to that magic spring in which the torrents of genius and brilliance had gathered, and from which “May” drew without measure.

There is no doubt that May bore a special human stamp in which no other human being resembles her; and I know of no description that does her fuller justice than the one she sent me in the first letter she wrote me, introducing herself, which is this:

“Is it true that you have not yet arrived at my picture? Here it is, then: summon up a girl brown as coffee, or as tamarind as the poets say, or as musk as the lover of al-Amiriyya says; and set upon her a nebulous stamp — let the rhetoricians permit me this contradictory expression — of longing and yearning and bewilderment, and a hunger of mind that is never satisfied and a thirst of spirit that is never quenched; and accompanying all these, a great readiness for delight and joy, and a greater readiness for sorrow and pain — and this last always prevails — and give this ensemble the name of ‘May.' Then see who, at this hour, can match her pen.”