Has History Done “May” Justice?!

Have they not carried to you the talk of May,
like the flowers of the thickets in its fragrance?
And have they watched her precious gems,
like the constellations of the stars in her sky?
And have they circled her study and gone on pilgrimage
there, in Egypt, to her salon?
They would have alighted upon a peerless lady of learning
who melts her life away to give life to others,
melting as the reed pen melts for her,
upon whose lips her heart and her tongue run.

With these verses — in which surges the tale of a free-flowing, generous soul; in which one breathes the fragrance of the flowers of the meadows and glimpses on their horizons fleeting flashes of vast learning and a kindled genius — they show you beauty and nobility in their most resplendent fresh attire, in a new shade of women's literature that rests upon the heart and the tongue: the heart in its throbbings, melting with tenderness and release, and the tongue in its fluency and its skill.

Yes, with these verses the poet Shibli Mallat opened his poem on May at one of the celebrations held for her in Lebanon when she came there on a visit in 1922.

And whenever I call these few verses back to mind, my imagination calls back for May a splendid artistic portrait that represents her in person more than any other picture — for all the many happy canvases the artists painted of her, which remained to them afterward an immortal legacy, and for which their fascination with her at the time was pretext and inspiration.

As for May's talk, nothing of it has been carried down save the verse that was composed about her, and the rare scraps that clung to the memories of the living men of letters of her age — Taha Husayn, al-Aqqad, Mansur Fahmi, al-Tanahi, and a few others.

As for her living gems, she herself gathered them into fourteen books up to the year 1924. The first of them was Sawanih Fatat (“A Girl's Musings”) — and it will be noted that it was compiled in response to the correspondence and admiration of the poet Wali al-Din Yakan — and the last was Kitab al-Sahaif (“The Book of Pages”), a valuable collection of her studies of certain personalities she admired, such as Dr. Shumayyil, Michelangelo, Madame de Sévigné, Ismail Sabri, and Gibran Khalil Gibran in his Processions.

As for the articles her pen adorned in al-Muqtataf, al-Risala, al-Hilal, al-Muqattam, and other fine magazines, from 1924 until her death, they still sleep in the bellies of those papers and magazines, with no rising or resurrection in prospect — because not one of the men of letters capable of lending an expert hand to literature is willing, or has even thought, to take upon himself the trouble of digging and searching to rouse those articles from their slumber.

As for May's private letters to the distinguished elite of her eminent friends — Rihani, Shumayyil, Sarruf, Antun al-Jumayyil, and others still living — they remain in the keeping of the unseen; no one but their possessors knows their fate or what has become of them. They are, I believe, a precious treasure that would open wide horizons for tracing the age of the intellectual renaissance in the Arab world by the light of the plain facts, in the days of that renaissance's flowering, growth, and cross-fertilization.

There are also works of May's not yet published, and they deserve attention and publication. Among them I mention “The Nights of the Asfuriyya,” the second part of “Words and Signals,” and Voix des Femmes d'Orient; together with the rest of the manuscripts she left behind, they all remain under heavy sequestration — as though an eternal vengeance were intended against the pride and nobility of that rare genius: a vengeance that inflicted grievous wrong on their author while she lived, and after her death gave license to some of those who wished to write her life in a volume or a booklet to flounder in an endless sea of absurdity — above all on the sentimental side — placing her in a station unworthy of her: she who, by the loftiness of character and nobility of soul with which she was molded, so long inspired the nation of letters with immortal poetry, beautiful prose, and splendid writing, in a stretch of time when she was a radiance before which every radiance on the brow of Arabic literature grew dim.

From this side we see that history has not done May justice; nor has it done her justice from another side either — as a woman of letters with an independent personality of her own, which long set her apart from the rest of her Eastern sisters. It placed her in a passive position which she had no hand in amending, and no means of repelling or defending herself against, out of care for her literary standing and to guard a dignity that remained, all her life, honored and revered.

It becomes clear to whoever examines closely the stages of May's life, by the light of modern psychological science, that the darkening factors which affected her, and which had a far-reaching echo in the shaping of her life, were four principal ones, together with incidental others that ought to have passed her by lightly — as they pass by every other human being, scarcely heeded and without effect — had they not come in rapid, crowding succession.

As for the principal ones, the first was the outbreak of the Great War, with the calamities and woes it dragged upon the world, the systems and theories it overturned, and the thoughts and opinions it struck at — a stab to the very heart of humanity's soundness and goodness. And May, the great humanitarian, was still in the dawn of her youth, with no experience of fate's misfortunes or man's savagery, greeting life in celebration, laughing to it — when her soul began slowly to shrink and to sense evil in life and in people. This showed itself after a lecture Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid delivered at the Higher Schools Club on Abu al-Ala: she was soon thinking of Abu al-Ala with all her thought, then speaking of him with a passion — and what a passion! — then debating his pessimism and his seclusion, then commenting on what was being written about him; and in all of this she was his partisan, an admirer of his philosophy. This was the second of the darkening factors that passed through May's life — or through which she passed — without any intent or design of her own.

As for the third factor, it was her love for Gibran — that enchanting, spiritual love which lived with her for the rest of her days after she had watered it with her blood and with all the warmth in her blood. She paid no heed to the scattering of its blossoms, nor did her hands ever permit themselves to pluck it, for it held the station of sanctity in her consecrated soul, a soul of its own particular stamp.

Then comes the fourth factor, late, but the most violently working of all the factors in her being. How quickly that sensitive soul turned from pessimism to foreboding, then to black melancholy, then to a wound to her confidence in herself — a deep wound that never healed. For there appeared in the world of letters the book Gibran Khalil Gibran by Mikhail Naimy: a book which the public read with one eye and May read with another.

That Gibran — who held in her imagination the sanctity of worship, and in her mind the station of the ideal artist, the man of the spotless soul and the noble, candid virtues — what had come over him, that his self should be pictured to her as other than what it had been molded upon?

A book in which its author told the tale of man weak before his unbridled instincts, leaving no glimpse or fragment of Gibran's inner secrets without expounding it fully, gracefully, captivatingly — save indeed for one matter he did not touch upon in his book, as he declared more than once, out of regard for her feelings and for the moral traditions that rule our Arab East, as he says, which make talk of such things a kind of scandal.

Was Naimy right, one wonders, in the view he took? Would it truly have pained May to be mentioned in connection with so exalted a form of love — so that she would be ashamed of it and hide from the scandal? No, I believe not. Had Naimy mentioned this noble love in his book, he would have given Gibran a single moral virtue interceding for all his faults in May's eyes; and he would have respected in it the sanctity of a heart, and spared the dignity of a woman.

And what a woman she was among women! Was she an ordinary woman? She was a woman of pride and disdain, of a standing no woman before her in history had attained, of a personality rising above all personalities to take the first place in the ideal.

Would it not have grieved her not to be — she in her own person — that ray which lit Gibran's barren road until it brought him to the highroad of peace?

Thus it was among Naimy's crimes against Arabic literature that he deprived it of May's voice early. She fell silent, swallowing her griefs one after another without a word either way; and so the field of doubt was opened before her — doubt of people, kin and friends alike — until these and those said of her that she had been stricken in her mind; and the doctors said of her, “she is afflicted with paranoia”; and history pronounced upon her its decisive word:
— Early genius ends by driving its possessor to madness, for human capacity is limited — alas.

Has history, then, done May justice? Was its word about her true? And does science go along with it in this mistaken opinion?

History has not done May justice — but it will, when the time comes and someone appears to vindicate the proud writer's passive course toward her persecutors and those who laid snares for her.