A Flame of Letters Goes Out

Literary circles in Lebanon were shaken on Sunday, September 27, by the news of the death of our great woman of letters, Mrs. Salma Sayegh — that lady who inscribed in Lebanon's literary history, over the last quarter of a century, a bright and shining page which guarantees her glory so long as there remains in Lebanon a pen that scatters words as

pearls and wine...

Who could have believed that illness would dare assault that elegant lady of enchanting personality with such savage cruelty, and leave her, after nine months of pain, a broken heap at which hearts are torn... and that she would remain, through it all, constant in her graciousness and her fine breeding, conversing and commenting with her unique feminine art and in full consciousness until the last breath, while a deceiving hope beguiled her with a near recovery that would restore her health and her strength!... Blessed be Thy might, O God!..

The deceased was borne from her home in Beirut to the church of Mar Elias Btina in a full and solemn cortege that gathered the choicest of the people of learning and letters, in which the governmental bodies and the women's organizations took part. Radio Lebanon mourned her as a woman of letters who raised Lebanon's name at home and in the Mahjar and earned her homeland's thanks in the form of a gilded medal; she was mourned also by the Ahl al-Qalam society, the General Arab Women's Union, the Lebanese Cénacle, the League of Women's Organizations, and the Nahda association. Eulogies were delivered by Emily Fares Ibrahim, Zaheya Ayoub, George Baz, and Salah al-Asir.

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The life of our dear departed was one long, unbroken chain of struggle in the service of the Arabic language, refining it and bringing it forth in a pure and elegant literature in which scarcely any contemporary woman's pen could keep pace with her. She served the language, too, by bringing it near to the understanding of the rising generation and making them love it. In losing her, Arab women's letters has lost a pearl upon its brow, and a cause for its pride and its glorying.. She has left us a number of precious works, printed and in manuscript, chief among them "The Breezes" and "Pictures and Memories."

For two years past our departed Salma Sayegh was a pillar and a support to the magazine The Woman's Voice, and the flow of her literary bounty would never have run thin, but for the hand of the fatal disease, wringing without mercy that gentle last spark of life and robbing it of its water and its vitality.

And for the woman's cause Salma Sayegh was a soldier of the vanguard: she defended it from the first shot until the truce was declared but yesterday, and woman won her first assured victory.

No doubt the affliction of her only daughter, Mrs. Abida Labaki, together with her husband the poet Salah Labaki, is great indeed... and great is the affliction of literature at her loss, and great the affliction of the Lebanese woman, in her institutions and in her magazine... To us all, the finest consolation in losing her; and to our beloved departed, the luminous, spacious gardens of Paradise, wherein she may soar with her lofty spirit, self-forgetting in pursuit of goodness and beauty...