Will History Do Salma Justice?

Here is the gathering, met to honor Salma Sayegh the departed!

Here is the assembly, convened to send its grief over Salma Sayegh the dead!

Here are the company of friends and the people of thought, hastening to snatch the shade of Salma Sayegh from the black world of oblivion — that other death, the more utterly annihilating — restoring to memory Salma's virtues, Salma's gifts, Salma's qualities, and Salma's services to her country and her generation!

Here are the admirers of a mind whose like time rarely grants, and those who prize her gifts, flocking to express that esteem and that admiration in a ceremony reviving her memory!

Here are the tokens of honor, the feeling of grief, the sense of gratitude, lavishly sent forth today on the occasion of her death!!

Yes — all this for Salma the departed!! But Salma the living — Salma wounded in her pride, desolate and estranged in hours when the overpowering waves of life played with her, searching for a kind hand to pass across her burning brow, that she might confess a secret which wrestled with her and she with it; that she might confess she was more wretched than we suppose — that Salma, who saw in such a confession the whim of a wounded soul, for which forgiveness must be begged, “for complaint to any but God is abasement” — upon that Salma we begrudged even a little of our attention!

I say this, honored assembly, and I ask your pardon for saying it. I say it because I lived close to Salma in hours when her soul broke free of the bonds of a suppression she had imposed upon herself, and she would pour out, confession after confession, her wounds, and “what had nested in the folds and recesses of her being” — she would confess her feeling of loneliness, and her doubts about the values the thinkers profess!

For Salma Sayegh — the gifted woman of letters, the writer of genius, the truly and genuinely rare thinker — and I say it in fairness, not by way of compliment — Salma Sayegh deserved in her lifetime an esteem that was begrudged her!

I ask this honored assembly's pardon a second time, for a feeling that boils up within me and that I have not had the strength to suppress!

But am I wrong if I wish to draw out of Salma's life and death a lesson at which we ought to pause, to take from it a teaching — however harsh — about our esteem for literature and for writers? Or say rather, about this drought in the sending of esteem toward them in their lifetime, which turns to plentiful rain at their death!

Is their existence, then, a sin we cannot forgive them except in their death?

And now I should like, in any case, to point briefly to Salma's intellectual mission... For Salma had an intellectual mission, and she performed it as far as she was permitted to work within the frame in which her life turned.

Salma believed, intellectually — with a genuine faith, rooted in the depths of her sound humanity — that the reform of mankind, and the creation of a spirit of faith in goodness, truth, and love, come about only by spreading the lights of knowledge through men's minds... So she took those minds in charge while they were young, and set about pouring into them, without falseness or affectation, what flows from the channels of sound human feeling. She built no dams to block the bursting forth of awareness in those minds, nor did she cut canals to direct that outburst into fixed courses; rather she watched over their unfolding, and took care that this unfolding should be free of all constraint.

Salma was of that generation — the generation of free thinkers spread today through the world, who understand thought and mind only as an instrument of expression free of every fetter!

She was of the generation spread today through the world — this generation which performs a mission that will enable thought to wrest the initiative from the dominion of iron and fire wielded by the force of tyranny and terror; of the generation that works to spread the spirit of contempt for those who boast of the reach of those brute powers, so that there may arise in the world a power more effective than tyranny and iron and fire: the power of upright wills, working by the inspiration of upright thought, free and unfettered!!

Need I say that one whose way this was, in the performance of her intellectual mission, has earned from mankind esteem and love?

Wrong was done to Salma Sayegh in her lifetime. But history — the master of the word that cannot be gainsaid in acknowledging merit and assigning places — will do Salma Sayegh justice; and see, already she takes her seat in it, in a place worthy of her gifts and of the noble mission she performed.