My Admiration for Salma and Her Essay “Motherhood”

My admiration for Salma began with my love for her essay “Motherhood,” which was a literary event in its time (just after the Great War). I loved this essay because it expresses my own feeling as a mother.

And perhaps this piece is one of the unique pieces in all Arabic literature — I do not say our contemporary literature, nor do I say women's literature; I insist: “all Arabic literature” — that give sincere utterance to a true feeling...

The first distinction of Salma's writing is that she writes from her “heart,” not from her “mind” nor from her learning (and how great Salma's learning was!).

But I do not suppose that my admiration for the piece “Motherhood” proves it has an absolute, abstract literary value: I am a mother, and that is my feeling. Yet what will you say to this — that this piece stirred the admiration of Gibran Khalil Gibran, who was a very stern critic, and whose admiration was not easily stirred; and who, for all his breadth, found pedantry wearisome and did not forgive it, above all when it came from a woman's pen. And what need has woman of literary pedantry? Gibran used to say to me: “Tell Salma to write, every day, a single line out of her own feeling; by the year's end she will have gathered 365 immortal lines.”