Reply to a Cousin Settled in New York

"AND WHEN YOU HAD EVERYTHING, WOULD YOU, THE KING,
TAKE ME, A POOR GIRL, FROM HIM WHO HAS ONLY ME."
VICTOR HUGO, HERNANI

Cousin,

Your letter moves me — not that I am in the least tempted to expatriate myself, above all to the United States, but because you have reminded me of the torments of my own irresolution when, living in Paris and happy there, I had to choose between settling there and returning to Lebanon. As you see, I too have lived abroad: all through the first Great War, and then twelve years at a stretch without one return to the country. To that I owe my understanding of the homesickness your children combat.

Cousin, the acclimatization of the children of emigrants has no doubt altered their temperament. As for me, I love — to the point of being unable to renounce them — the harmony of the silence on the summits of our mountains, the resounding within me of all their echoes, and the sensation of my roots clinging fast to my soil.

Even if reasons of principle did not hold me to the country, I would suffer in your cramped apartments, like cages too near the sky. I love the smell of the earth too much. And the throbbing of overcrowded, feverish countries tries me like high blood pressure.

As for the ideal of equity you praise to me, there is more of it in Europe, and in the old countries, such as France, which I love for the emancipation of her thought, her sovereign taste, and a thousand affinities.

Why I tore myself away from her, I am going to tell you. The question of material interests, which keeps so many emigrants far from their soil, did not come into it. I did not have to weigh it; I believe all the same that had I been a man, I would have solved that problem. No one will persuade me that a great number of emigrants, resolved to reorganize their country with their means and their experience, would fail at it.

What detached me from life abroad was an inner unease, coming perhaps from my conscience. It made agreement with myself impossible. The more I admired France, the more sadly I called to mind my Lebanon, its natural beauties, its stagnant resources. The wealth of France is the work of generations of beings who, humble or eminent, endowed her with science, poetry, an epic of arcades and vaults, palaces and cathedrals, museums and libraries, theaters, forests, music.

Cousin! Human dignity does not accommodate itself to living as a parasite. To live in order to kill time is to consume poison and antidote.

So one day I came back to Lebanon. It was in the days of Mr. Ponsot, High Commissioner of France, with Charles Debbas as Lebanese Head of State. Charles Debbas was my cousin and a friend of my childhood. He accompanied me on my tour of rediscovery through the country for which our childhood had sketched so many dreams. He had realized one of them: to border the mountain roads with maples and acacias. Their young verdure already shaded the somber slopes carpeted with pines and brightened the arid hillsides above the valleys. Talking as we went, we followed the climbing hairpin turns, which opened upon sites of arresting beauty. Debbas had undertaken a number of reforms, and he was planning them in every domain. Politics, and its snares laid by men more powerful than he, hobbled him. "The problem is not a want of competence," he confided to me, "and we do not lack men" — but it was imposed upon him to balance out favors.

"Ah! if only the emigrants came back to us," he would sigh.

I urged him to more daring. He smiled without answering. It was plain that he was not free.

This letter, Cousin, does not aim at history, still less at sterile criticism. It is to lay bare my roots to you.

Time has passed. Lebanon today is free, and its liberty is seven years old. That is young for a people which, like Lazarus, did not leave its infirmities behind in the tomb. What is more, my Lazarus was straightway betrayed. His most powerful godfathers — the very ones who tenderly named him "the Benjamin of our constitutions" — have set wolves at his frontier.

Do I today regret my return to the fold?

The ideal that animated the Lebanese emigrants — contaminated by the materialism of the scientific countries — has deserted them. We are overcrowded with Palestinian refugees. In winter they shiver under the snow in the precarious shelter of wretched tents. The horde of all the unhappy Jews flung upon narrow Palestine refuses their repatriation. All-powerful allies second the rape, which threatens our security as well. Shall I now cut my Lebanese roots, my cousin!

For it is not only to breathe your Lebanese mornings, nor merely to hear the silence of your summits, that my roots will hold. Saints thirty years dead are waking, and by prodigies they command me to persevere. Through them a grace has fallen to me. I have seen and heard the little children of Lebanon.

Their games consist in adorning the mountain with "squares" as in Great Britain, with church fronts like Amiens, and with forts whose defense they contend for among themselves. How could I give up?

Foot by foot, and with their own hands, their old grandparents turned, cleared, spaded, and combed the Lebanese earth, which by their care became a garden. Their grandchildren will carry it on.

A million men with hearts as finely tempered will study, sculpt, build, and sing Lebanon so well that it will become, in the Middle East, "THE GARDEN OF PEACE." As in other countries, where it is customary for each to bequeath to his homeland at least a mite, each of us will enrich the beloved patrimony as he can.

Cousin, happiness consists in creating and sowing. The powerful states have no need of us. Come! More than ever our lands are becoming once again the refuge of spirits and the country of miracles. Because we possess neither gold mines nor enriching subterranean beds, the gods have loved us and the saints carry on. You have surely heard of the one who today restores hearing to the deaf and sight to the blind. Like those miraculously healed, Lebanon has its reason for being, its mission of peace and love to fulfill. And it will fulfill it by the grace of God!.. Ah, come!