Salma Sayegh, Our Mother...

Thank you — government, organizations, associations, and all here present.

Thank you, because you have gathered to honor the memory of our mother.

Thank you, because you have gathered to honor the memory of the Mother:

our mother and yours.

Salma lived and died a mother.

In every letter her pen traced, in every phrase her lips uttered, in every gesture that came from her, there is a boundless overflow of the feeling of motherhood.

And how many an orphan is there, now that Salma is gone, besides the daughter who is of her flesh and blood!

Salma was the mother of harmony, of balance, of proportion — the mother of storms and of shades crowding into a single line to create a beautiful form.

She was the soldier's mother, and his tongue: "Send me back to my country, to my village, to my mother's breast and her pure breath."

She was the emigrant's mother: "Send me back to Lebanon, to its soil and its sky, to its snows and its waters... send me back to Lebanon."

She was the mother of the wretched — mother of the young girl they sell into marriage, she who never "smiled upon love, nor upon manly vigor, nor upon youth"; and mother of that husband who is a stranger in his own house. She consoled and comforted, and stormed in the face of all that had hardened into stone among society's traditions.

She was the mother of the deceived and the forsaken, mother of the exiled and the hungry and the persecuted, and the crucified,

mother of the sick and the imprisoned,

mother of the deprived, men and women alike.

She was the mother of the call to human brotherhood:

"Let us be what we will, O people; let us trace our descent to Hammurabi, or to Pharaoh, or to the Tatars — but let us be human beings.

And O you good, tender mothers of this homeland: there are many children sleeping this winter under tents. These little ones accept with gratitude the least, least bit of love and tenderness."

And Salma was the mother of the true nationalism — active, responsible, self-sacrificing.

Then let us sacrifice.

Let the official sacrifice, and the young men, and the girl, and the woman.

Let the mother sacrifice an hour: "and teach her child the language of his forefathers herself; for it is a disgrace that we should cast these stones at the foreign institutes every time we look upon our own abasement."

Let the whole nation sacrifice a passion that is the root of the affliction; let it sacrifice the sectarian passion that brands our several patriotisms.

Salma was the mother of her country:
"Because I have a soul mighty as life and obedient as death.

I want my country proud and unassailable; I want her steeped in all the civilizations that have crumbled within her, and scattering to the world the lessons of learning and wisdom. And as wounded motherhood suffered in Rachel's heart, so that she cried out in bitterness to Jacob, 'Give me a child, or I die' — so my hungering soul stood upon the ruins of Baalbek and cried out a cry divine as the gods and deep as the abyss:

'O children of my country, near and far — O children of my country, give me a homeland, or I die.'

Who is the child of Muhammad Mustafa of Basta, and the child of Yusuf Tuma of Chnaneir? They are my two children, by right of the motherhood that transformed the fibers of my heart and made them sensitive, resonant strings. They are my two children, and the children of every woman whom motherhood has ennobled."

And Salma was the mother of independence — her voice, for all its softness and faintness, still rings loud and resounding:
"The best school for independence is independence."

And Salma was the mother of woman's rights. But she did not raise her voice demanding in the name of equality alone, but in the name of equality joined to desert; and she made of her life and her struggle a model, an example, and a pattern.

She made her demands holding that every woman is capable of what she herself was capable, and for that deserves more than many another deserves.
She strove, in her frailty and her weakness, and she endured, spurred on by love and by will. And she went out of this world owing no debt to any man.

But how many a debt owed to her remains unpaid!
As for the woman of letters, neither pain nor death struck her down.

In the last days before the end she would tell me of tales she was living, complete and half-complete: "I shall dictate to you, if the disease grants me respite, and you shall write." And I expected — had death but turned aside from her — that she would come out to us with works the like of her masterpieces in power of feeling, soundness of thought, and beauty of expression, and a simplicity beyond even the simplicity of the Acropolis in its grandeur.

Salma said to each one of us what she said to her daughter:

"How much of my soul I have poured into your soul! I gave to you until I kept nothing for myself."

And I fancy her today, as you gather to revive her memory, saying to each one of you — from behind this tomb that holds the body, and from the spaces of this firmament too narrow for her spirit — what she said there to her daughter:

"And I came back to you, and behold, you were a spring that knows no drought, giving to me and giving to me and giving to me without measure."
So thank you!