The Literature of Salma Sayegh

I used to sit with her, the two of us remembering, in those days, our dear Lebanon — far from our eyes and near to both our hearts — the tear of longing glistening on our mournful eyelids in exile!

How often Salma's soft, velvet voice would call to me: “Come, lad, give us poetry” — and I would recite in her hearing my poem “Lebanon,” which she loved and knew mostly by heart — until I reached the last verse, murmuring:

Lebanon in my eye is dearer
to me than the eye of the beloved!

This verse, it seems, found its welcome echo with her, and it almost came “to dwell in” her heart, in her own novel phrase.

And rarely was a literary or social or humanitarian gathering held without “our Salma” as its bride! Societies of every tendency raced to invite her to give lectures on the national and cultural movement in our country.

And she — may God wrap her in His mercy — would, as was her way, scatter witticisms and maxims, giving of herself the best that imagination can bring forth and the finest that thought can produce. She stirred woman's ambitions around her, and awakened among her companions the spirit of vigilance and of struggle for the attainment of her rights.

Her book “Pictures and Memories” is part of the provision of the emigration, one of the fruits of her deep reflection, and a witness to what she saw and heard; were space not so short, I would speak of it at length.

Salma Sayegh was elected unanimously a member of “al-Usba al-Andalusiyya,” and contributed effectively, with her valuable articles, to the editing of the League's magazine, during her stay and after her return to the homeland!

God rest that beautiful, noble face among the faces of my country, and that proud Lebanese Arab soul — awakener of woman's renaissance, and bearer of the torch of literary renewal in thought and in the written word — so that in her al-Mutanabbi's verse holds true:

Were women all such as the one we have lost,
then women would be set above men!

Zahle, from the Green Hut, 15/11/1953
Riyad Maalouf
of the International PEN Club
and al-Usba al-Andalusiyya