In Society: Salma Sayegh in Emily Fares Ibrahim's Lecture at the Cénacle

The women's literary renaissance in Lebanon and the other Arab lands is never mentioned without two great names inevitably being mentioned with it: May Ziadeh and Salma Sayegh.

Many articles have been written about the author of "al-Nasamat," dealing with her writing and her thought; yet a prominent question mark was always drawn around the source of this production. Who is Salma Sayegh, the woman who gave this work of the soul?

Then came the well-known woman of letters Emily Fares Ibrahim, secretary of the Ahl al-Qalam Society, to study this side of her from the platform of the Lebanese Cénacle — and behold, she drew for us a living picture, speaking with eloquence, of Salma in her life and her literature. And behold, we see before us her eyes, in which there is something of the sky's clearness over our galaxy, looking out like two oases from two pupils above which rises a sky where stray phantoms wander up from the depths of a soul that has plunged to the deepest deeps of this complex being itself, absorbed in its aims.

And they roam through the boundlessness of the world's expanses, contemplating, questioning, perplexed at what throbs and what seethes in the greater world enfolded within the small body, and at what they see of reality and convention — soaring, and I mean tender.

And behold, we touch her soft, rich, waving hair, and we commune with her, her very self — do we commune with that sweet countenance whose gentleness flows over all that gracious being, until it becomes an overflowing womanliness?

No wonder, then, that Emily Fares Ibrahim succeeded in her lecture, "An Overflowing Womanliness in a Rich Humanity," and stirred the admiration of the select elite who listened to her. The elements of success were all at her command: abundant matter — and what matter is more abundant than that of our ideal departed one, who sharpened her pen upon the folds of the heart? — an adroit writer of fine taste, who lives what she sets down; and a free platform that raises up everyone who stands upon it.

I can still hear the sweet tone of the lecturer, as though it had mingled with the sweet tone of the departed, saying: she was a beloved to every heart, a kinswoman to every father; she is a gushing love that never runs dry, shedding over its atmosphere the bliss of the meanings of an appealing, reticent call... And perhaps she did not know that the two windows of her soul, her eyes, opened to the beholder vistas upon the elegance of the spirit, its coquetry and its charm, in the free, innocent openness of its playgrounds. She was all beauty — and how often has beauty wronged the beautiful!

And she was all love — and how often has love been misunderstood in a human being...

Yes, Salma was all love. And what a blessed all it was.