Get to Know Our Ladies... Mrs. Almas al-Duwayk

...Do not say that the domineering red of the anemones is alone in adorning the fields of our society... Have you forgotten the violet?

Ever since I began to see, to weigh, and to make a practice of diving into the depths — all the depths — I have gone searching for the violet... and I have come to love the violet, and to find her sweet and great...

The violet was never weak, not for a single day! But by her silent skill she knew how to make beautiful the meaning of humility, until it became a throne for pride, and a refuge for greatness, however many its forms and colors and degrees...

I have known Mrs. Almas al-Duwayk for a long time... and the tie of kinship between us had the first hand in making her known to me... Often I would meet her here and there, and I would greet her and she would greet me; then I would ask after her condition or her health, and she would answer me briefly, with a passing smile that served as the musk-seal of the talk between us — and what talk!

I had never listened to her converse, nor visited her a single time, but I would feel in her glances a fineness of sensibility and a graciousness in listening... and that was enough for me to say of her, between me and myself, that she is no ordinary human being...

The days went by, and there I was, finding myself with an appointment with chance — I, for whom chance has kept the truest and best of appointments...

...I had to accompany my mother on one of her "rounds" — so-and-so has been ill these two days... and so-and-so (poor so-and-so!) is reproachful and cross, and has sworn she will not set foot across our threshold unless we drink a cup of coffee with her at one of her "morning gatherings" — I had to accompany my mother here and there... Am I not a young girl — and praise be to God! And on the way home we turned in at Mrs. Almas's, and she was alone in the house, tidying it and adorning it and setting it in order...

I do not know how the talk began between us this time, but it soon took its natural course, from the future to the present to the past... that long yesterday — or say rather, that strange world standing by itself.

Our lady lived the life of the past for many years — that is, in the days when a girl reposed, surrendered, in the arms of those traditions... Like all women she wore the veil over her face; it was an inseparable part of a woman's personality in those days. The first affront the bride Almas suffered from her husband was that he asked her, with every tact and courtesy, to remove the veil so that she might be at ease; she refused with pride and disdain, and clung to the curtain over her face until the days themselves stripped it away, a short time later.

Her fluency of speech falls in no way short of her eloquence of pen; I have known in her a sincere frankness and a lofty spirit of rebellion.

From behind the veil Mrs. Almas studied and pursued learning until she gained the certificate... and a heroine indeed was she who held a certificate in her grasp in those days!

May — God rest her soul — was a consolation to the history of woman, especially in that period. It is glory enough for her that she won the respect of men and the love of women.

Mrs. Almas keeps, with every care, letters from May, Julia Dimashqiyah, and Marie Yanni.

And now... has the pen been "paralyzed," and the brush run dry, in our lady's hands? She smiled at my question and set about enumerating for me the dictates of circumstance and the bonds of household and wifely duties... The recounting and the enumerating, in the mold of logic, wearied her — for when did art ever submit and humble itself before circumstances and dictates? Who will believe with me that a gift may grow faint, but does not die...

Mrs. Almas did not convince me — and rarely has a woman succeeded in convincing a woman...

Yes, her pen has not stopped; and she confessed to me that writing is her first consolation in life. She went on writing for herself alone, until she had a collection of articles in most of which I felt a transparent spirit, a refined taste, and a restless soul, which the bitterness of life had taught how to love life and to respect it.

Strange, how the notion of disgrace changes from age to age, and from year to year.

From behind the veil she painted canvases in oils, and with most of them she has adorned the walls of her sweet house.

And from behind the veil, too, Mrs. Almas wrote prose and composed verse, and rarely did she show any of it to anyone... and I did not ask her why...

Were they deceived, I wonder, in those days, thinking that a woman's fingertips did not know how to command the pen and the brush?

She used to visit Mrs. Julia Tu'mah Dimashqiyah, who had the greatest influence upon her, and she published some articles in her magazine al-Mar'a al-Jadida; she also published some of her writings in the magazine al-Khidr, which Afifa Saab brought out, in the magazine Minerva of Marie Yanni Ata Allah, and in the magazine al-Fajr of its proprietor Najla Abillama. She knew Mrs. Marie Yanni as well, who was her friend and guide. As for May, she met her in Beirut, when the Women's League invited her to give a lecture at its club. May, as she remembers her, was elegant and captivating.

She has voluminous memoirs, and she mentioned to me that she will publish most of them in the near future — however long the time has grown in which she no longer unveils what her soul has to say.

I leafed through her memoirs, and every page of them has a color and a tale. On the first page she addresses her Lord, saying:

"Would, my Lord, that a crust of Your bread might keep body and soul together in us and nourish our souls that hunger for faith and knowledge, for religion and virtue.

Would, my Lord, that limpid water from Your spring might refresh the spirits that thirst for every tenderness and mercy..."

And on March 11, 1953, she says:

"Today I am in a deathly torpor, and in my inmost self there is a towering, awesome desolation... perhaps it is the ring of nothingness opening its jaws to close around me..."

And she addresses her pen, saying:

"You are to me, my pen, an instrument of good and blessing... you are an arrow I have loosed from between my fingertips, that with it I may strike a mark from which springs a gleam of light and a breath of spirit, so that my soul finds ease and rejoices. Am I not a human being, and then a woman, who holds of the right of life, for her and upon her, what fits her for the true life, and for the building of the nation and the homeland..."

And now... will you grant me that the domineering red of the anemones is not alone in adorning the fields of our society?...

A letter dated January 12, 1923, from Mrs. Julia Tu'mah Dimashqiyah.

To the esteemed Miss Almas Salman,

My dear,

Since my hours do not allow me to visit you whenever I feel my longing for you grow, I beg you to accept al-Mar'a al-Jadida as a gift from me for the year 1923, that the bond between us may endure, and that it may take my place in conversing with you and diverting you in your hours of leisure.

And be assured that I write no word in it without your image rising before me, so that I say a word here and there especially for you. Remain well and happy, from her who loves you.

Julia Tu'mah Dimashqiyah

A letter dated September 18, 1921, from "May."

To the excellent Miss,

How charming are those words that came so spontaneously from you to me, and how refreshing those greetings, whose gentleness recalls the breezes of Lebanon and the sighs of its rivers. I cherish your lines, for they draw for me the picture of a girl who, though she go "veiled," remains my sister in sex and homeland as she is my sister in soul and inclinations.

You say that you remember me — you and your sisters, the members of the Women's League. My thanks to you and to them, for the past and for the future. I say "the future" because I want you to remember me often.

Remember me! Remember me as much as you can, that you may compel my ethereal body to appear among you, to attend your gatherings, and to look upon your useful works in the country for which I yearn with an aching yearning. My spirit goes off to Syria flying on the two wings of love and longing. But if the hearts of friends and dear ones draw it thither, its presence will be the more complete in clearness, and its being the more manifest in truth.

(May)