Pictures of Salma as I Knew Her...

It was at the beginning of June 1920.

Lieutenant Dewey introduced Salma Sayegh, "my colleague" at the French Embassy, with these words:

"Here is a sea brimming with knowledge, taste, and good company — draw from it what you will and what you can."

Salma's pen was then cutting its flourishing path through the gardens of literature.

And I was at the beginning of my career in translation.

Salma would correct my language and refine my phrasing.

She held in my heart the place of reverence and respect. And how should abundant courtesy, refined breeding, lofty character, self-denial, and solicitude for others be met, if not with reverence, love, and respect?

It was Salma Sayegh who introduced me to Gibran and "baptized" me in Gibran's literature.

I still remember her bereavement at his loss and her grief for him. It was not granted her to witness his funeral, held in Lebanon on August 21, 1931; she was at that time convalescing in Paris. From there she sent me, for that occasion, a word on the departed one of the East, which she concluded as follows:

Salma said to Gibran: "We were denied the sight of you living; we shall not be denied the sight of you dead. We, your followers, fear neither skulls nor bones, nor do we dread hollow eye-sockets; for in the fresh face of the child and in the pallid skull of the old man there is beauty, art, and poetry. And we are as you wished us to be: we see the spark in the worms as we see it in the stars."

Salma held art sacred; she loved artists and respected them.

At a ceremony held for the painter Habib Srour on the occasion of his being awarded the Order of Merit, Salma improvised a speech on Habib Srour in which she revealed his genius and the splendor of his art, and into which she wove the following incident:

Salma was summering with her firstborn infant child at al-Kfour. One day she entered her house and surprised Habib Srour bent close upon himself before the bed of her sleeping child, his immortal brush quivering left and right, rippling across the face of the canvas and roving over its margins, that the child's face might be drawn upon it in the fullest and most beautiful likeness. The mother stood aghast at this sight, then cried out to the artist: "For pity's sake, do not! To paint a child while he sleeps is an evil omen."

Habib Srour yielded at once to this feeling and destroyed the canvas.

And fate willed that the child should fall ill a few days later, and that death should snatch him from his mother's bosom, leaving anguish and tears behind.

The mother longed to glimpse the face of that child whom death had hidden away — hidden his face forever. She remembered Habib Srour's canvas, and repented most bitterly, and grieved over it with the bitterest grief, realizing that a thoughtless remark had done away with the picture and with that beloved face.

Habib Srour sensed her remorse and her grief; he set about spurring his faithful memory, and his immortal brush set about recording what had clung to that wondrous memory of the absent child's features.

A few hours had not passed before Salma stood in front of a canvas on whose surface she could almost touch the face of her little idol, his hands and his gown — almost feel his quiet breathing and smell his sweet scent. A canvas pulsing with life, radiant with splendor; her eyes remained fixed upon it until death closed them.

... And Lebanon's loss after Salma was like its loss after Mayy and Gibran.

Edmond Wehbe

***

Memory carried me back to 1950, on an evening in Beirut's sweltering spring — and it was fated that that hour should be my last meeting with her — in her beautiful house, upon the soft settee, near which crouched a bookcase, most of it white volumes ranged with fine precision. I went about reading the titles on their spines, a straw fan in my hand with which I stirred the breezes while I waited for the author of "The Breezes."

I knew that she had summoned me together with Zaheya Ayoub and In'am al-Saghir, with her mind on this magazine's emigrants' issue; and I knew too that, like all teachers, she was plunged deep in the flood of final examinations. Neither June's heat nor her educational and literary occupations had turned her from laboring over a translation — which I concluded was from Portuguese, which she spoke together with its twin, Spanish — and which filled my eyes as it lay on the table in the other corner of the room.

And how great were my ease and my admiration when she received me with a cheerfulness and composure over which her merry spirit and the astonishing quickness of her memory prevailed. Her sensitive fingertips took my clasped hand, and her voice, in the nasal music and charm of French, took my ear; I was won by the deep-rooted femininity and beautiful art that breathed from her person and her surroundings.

And when the two other guests had arrived — I still remember that we sipped with her an iced tea, refreshing and delicious. When we asked her how it was prepared, she answered with the simplicity and eagerness of every woman who cares for the affairs of her house: "Like lemonade — only instead of water you put tea." Then my curiosity reached the point of asking again: "You mean the same quantity of lemon and sugar and water?" And she rejoined with the light wit and ready jest for which she was known: "Your question is like the baccalaureate examinations. One says: 'the quantity of lemon and sugar and water itself,' and not 'the same...!!'"

And then there flashed before me a glimpse of Salma the educator, interweaving and intertwining with Salma the woman: sagacity and charm joined together, in a sheer black dress encircling skin like milk and a fairness like honey. And how should there not be traced in my imagination, as in the minds of those who knew her, those two dark-lustered eyes, above whose arched brows rose a gleaming forehead, from which the hair branched away like threads of the sun in their gilding and their renewal! And I would have lingered over the setting of her sun, with its mournful, desolate yellowing, were it not for a proud nose defying the generations — and the revolt of thought bursting forth from the faint movement on that page which is her mouth:

— What shall we say to the emigrants about Lebanon? A country that spreads "the fragrance of the inula and the broom"? While through its corners spread human masses whom the savagery of humanity has condemned to become "fire and firewood for the burnt offering of Palestine"? Where are its pampered sons, and the vagrant childhood, the deprived motherhood, the outcast old age? It is incumbent upon us to find a solution to the problem of the teacher "and of illiteracy in the highlands and the remote countryside." God rest the Syrian leader who did justice to woman. And what do you think of the rulings handed down by some of our judges?

Then she took from the table a pen and paper, and her graceful fingertips began to quiver — the quivering of a slaughtered creature longing for deliverance. The pen in her hand turned scalpel, the ink blood, the pages hearts — stained by injustice, made foul by avarice, turned to stone by bluster. She had a message for the citizen and for the emigrant — she who had known both sides at close hand.

And Salma the writer stood revealed before me in her fullest meanings. She struck out into the ideal and the real, into beauty and ugliness, into intuition and sense. It was not enough for her to have criticized our frail society "and shown us our faults magnified until we hate ourselves and despair of reforming them"; she pictured it as an impregnable edifice with requirements and designs, which she laid out with precision and exactness after setting down the rock of reason as its foundation; then the clouds of dreams bore it aloft, a fluttering banner, on which the sun of reform shines and which the rains of integrity and dignity wash.

And the time ran out! — as the age runs out of its sons, and learning of its luminaries, and letters of its leading lights.

We three made to take our leave; she bade us stay a moment and walked with us to the door. And when a table crossed our path, on which issues of The Woman's Voice were ranged in a circle with the special "Mayy" issue at its center... her thin, pale fingertips took it up, and she looked and said, with the magazine facing us: "It is an exquisite drawing, and an eloquent issue."