Pictures of Salma as I Knew Her...

I was in my eager, ambitious school days — the days of looking forward and thirsting for knowledge — when I received a precious gift sent to me by a cousin of mine who cared for culture and letters.. an issue of the magazine al-Mar'a al-Jadida, to be followed by the issues of a full year. I rejoiced at it exceedingly, and seized the kind gift as a hungry, thirsty man seizes a cup of cold laban. And in one of its numbers I read for the first time the name of Mrs. Salma Sayegh, inscribed beneath her beautiful picture as she bent over her little daughter “Aida.”

This picture has remained drawn in my mind, and remains so to this day, for it carried many meanings to which the soul is drawn: “the tenderness of motherhood,” and “innocence,” and “the beauty of love and tenderness looking out from the mother's eyes,” and “the fresh youth of letters manifest in her features,” and “the intelligence radiating from her eyes.” These shades within the picture acquainted me with Mrs. Salma and endeared her to me. And what drew me on to read her book al-Nasamat was the masterly way in which Mrs. Julia Tu'mah Dimashqiyah, proprietress of al-Mar'a al-Jadida, announced it. Mrs. Julia possesses a mastery in the art of journalism, and a gentle tact in the courtesies of introduction between writer and reader.

I am not concerned here to speak of al-Nasamat and the subjects and sections within it which the late Mrs. Salma was the first of the women of the first renaissance to broach; al-Nasamat still comes and goes between the bookshelf and the reader, for it is the breezes of the spirit for the spirit, and the gift of one generation to the next generation and to the generations that follow it.

And her book only deepened the acquaintance the “picture” had begun; for it was a lucid book, which opened before me in those days wide horizons of reflection and understanding, and furnished me with ideas, aims, and feelings that were planted like a seed in the soil of my mind, then ready for fertilization — and it would almost have grown into a palm with clusters hanging low, had the scorching winds of despair not overtaken it, drying its blossom before budding and bearing fruit.

Every writer and poet has in our minds a picture and a frame; and this picture may be a poem from a collection, or a verse from a poem, or a chapter from a book, or a spiritual meaning embracing the whole book between its two covers. What minds and talents produce are souls wandering among the parts and the chapters, and the sentences and the words meet our souls in a cycle of reading and understanding, and mingle with them in a flood of love and affection, until they become an inseparable part of them; they live in us and grow within our thoughts, and out of them our spiritual, moral, and literary being takes shape. As for Salma's picture, it was, in the eyes of my mind in those days, a spiritual meaning embracing a whole book whose meaning could be read though its words were veiled; and I absorbed it, and comprehended it.