Life Has Taught Me

At the opening of this year the writer Salma Sayegh looked out upon a new decade of the decades of life, and the director of the women's section at the Near East Station proposed that she broadcast to the women listeners of the Arab world something of what life had taught her. She said:

Here I am, turning to look back — looking back on a lifetime of which far more has gone than remains. Here I am, gathering up my sincerity, my fidelity to truth, and my desire for the good; gathering a longing to turn away from evil, and an unbroken devotion to the highest ideals; here I am, gathering all this into a bouquet of roses whose petals I scatter, to fly to every house in Lebanon and to every chamber in the world that holds a woman who speaks this Arabic tongue of mine.

Life has taught me that work is the blessing of blessings, and that the misery of the present world was brought upon it by those classes that feast on a loaf drawn from the earth by the sweat of the destitute!

Life has taught me that motherhood gives and does not take — if we reckon that it gives oceans and takes drops. I have witnessed this bounty in everyone around me and in every country I visited as searcher and student, and the reckoning has never once gone wrong! My grandmother gave my mother oceans, and she carried what she had been given to her children — I the fourteenth among them — and in my turn I gave all that I was given to my daughter, and here she is, building from her own life the life of her son. Each of us four women was gifted and giving, and what was taken from the mother was — always — a debt paid to the taking child, not to the giving mother. From this, from this denial of self, mankind has wreathed the word "mother" in a halo of sanctity. I have passed in my life by dozens of happy mothers and hundreds of forsaken mothers, and I never heard a wretched, wronged mother but she was murmuring something like a prayer:

"Lord, gently! Turn this torment of mine into grace and fair patience, for bitterness in a mother's heart comes down as a curse upon the heads of the children!!"

*

The days have taught me that woman is body and soul, and that the life of the body has an imperious law; that repression turns to despair, and if the elements of exile and loneliness gather round it, the pain becomes merciless and unresting; and that the best thing a woman can do whom life has denied a natural right in which the beasts and the insects and the plants find happiness — I say the best thing such a woman can do is to take up some humane work by which she may turn from her hunger for love and for motherhood, provided she keep for herself intervals of diversion, whether in an art, or in travels, or in innocent amusements.

*

Life has taught me that the ideal morals — those with which life grows sweet, the life of a man and a woman who live in one house and die in one house — are not confined to women apart from men, nor to men apart from women. I have known in my life women fit to stand as beacons of guidance, and I have known men beyond reproach — yet I have come away with this conclusion: that the number of virtuous women is greater than that of virtuous men. Out of ten women — for example — I count eight virtuous; out of ten men I count five. And among those who fail in this sifting, the moral balance tilts toward the women's side. For all women are sacrificers upon the altar of motherhood, and therein lies their distinction.

And the men??

I say it without laying my hand upon my heart, for I am bold in speaking the truth. The men — after I set aside those who make up the chosen elite — he among them who is not weak is a hunter, a wrecker of decent sheltered homes; and he who is chaste may be a gambler; and he who is safe from gambling may not escape the disease of drink; and he who is no drunkard may be a miser; and he who is no miser is one of those spendthrifts whose conduits pour only outside their own door!! And he who is delivered from the evil of squandering may carry in his blood a germ of that... that which brings forth that poor, sickly offspring... the hell of women and of mothers!

A man may escape all these plagues; but one plague he will never escape, and that is selfishness.

Travels have taught me that homelands are deadly, and that every emigrant is a stranger. A stranger, living on the margin of people's lives in the homelands of other people. A stranger, bound to his first homeland by a thousand and one roots. A stranger, distracting himself now with work, now with gathering money, now with raising children; and no sooner do they grow up — children of the soil of the new homeland — than his estrangement deepens, and he feels more than at any other time that he is a stranger.

Life has taught me that all the philosophies — those that search for a Creator who floods existence with an outpouring of blessings, and for man's relation to this Creator and then to this existence, and for the roads that lead up to the summit of human perfection — life has taught me that the cream of all the philosophies is contained in noble sayings such as these:

"O man, love God with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

"All creatures are God's dependents, and the dearest of them to Him is the most useful to His dependents."

And life has taught me that religion is the best restrainer and the best deterrent. In my life I have fled only from those from whose hearts the fear of God has fled.

*

The nights have taught me that the hurt which people's tongues inflict upon people is killed only by silence! I do not mean the stillness of the tongue between the jaws; what I mean by it is the stillness of the mind from remembering the hurt. The greatest of men and women are those who erase from their memories every trace of the aggression of backbiters, of haters, and of the suspicious-minded; for there is no pleasure to be measured against the pleasures of forgiveness — the true, the complete. In it is rest from the boilings of anger, then of rancor, then of the desire to return the injury; and in it is deliverance from an ugliness that traces itself upon the most radiant of faces and the most perfect in form, the hour the mind sets about magnifying wrongs, and the hour the door opens to the spirit of evil and it drives the lights of love from the heart. Then the muscles of the face contract, the nose grows old, the brow wrinkles, the light dies in the eye, the smile of contentment flees from the mouth, and the waves of life dry up in the hair. If the existentialists, those who run after pleasure in life, were discerning, they would know that there is no pleasure and no life without beauty, and no beauty without love, and no love without forgiveness — if these toilers after happiness were discerning, they would summon mankind to the creed of "Forgivenism."

Those who have influenced me in my life are those who sowed before me, among the thorns, the seeds of love. They are the ones who told me that reproach is not always a soap for hearts, and that the sage of his generation was the author of this verse:

If in every matter you keep reproaching
your friend, you will never meet the one you need not reproach!

*

Every one of life's days has taught me that woman — in every family quarrel — is the wronged one: as mother, and sister, and wife, and daughter; and that she is like a vase of crystal — whether it falls upon the stone or the stone falls upon it, the result is one in either case; and that the halls of justice lift no injustice from a woman; and that complaint to people and airing one's pain in the salons carry off self-respect and dignity and defile the heart, the holy of holies! And I am certain that the two following verses were composed for women above all other people:

Complain not, to blamer or excuser,
of either of your states, in ease or in adversity;
for the pity of the condolers is a bitterness in
the heart, like the gloating of enemies.

*

O my reader, wherever you may be — a quarter of a century ago I read a testament left to the generations by the master of prose writers, Abdullah ibn al-Muqaffa', in which he set down the qualities of a perfect man, saying at its end: "Hold fast to these morals if you can — and you will not be able wholly — but taking a little is better than leaving the whole."

Since that day I have tried to resemble, in some measure, that perfect one who "does not complain, and does not crave, and does not chafe and does not fret, and does not keep for himself, apart from his brothers, anything of his resource and his effort and his strength."

I confess, truthfully, that I have tried and still try, and striven and still strive, to overtake that hero victorious over his own self — and I have not yet succeeded altogether!