From My Notebook – A New Paper

A new series which our thoughtful woman of letters Rose Ghorayeb begins today. Perhaps in her words there is a summons to truth and a forbidding of falsehood...

One of them said to me, with the gleam of rapture and enthusiasm in her young eyes: My utmost wish is to read my name in the corner of a magazine or a newspaper. And how eagerly I await the appearance of this paper—perhaps it will make room for my name in one of its corners.

I said, with a pain in my soul that I did not try to conceal: If this paper is to become a gallery of names and pictures and a machine for making oneself known and seen, then better that it not exist at all. Our patience is exhausted with papers of publicity and magazines of advertisement.

And another beside her said: We have come to breathe publicity as we breathe the air. In the club and in the institute of learning, at the cinema and on the radio, at the dressmaker's and at the barber's. It has reached the point that whenever I hear a talk or a speech I ask myself: does its author mean what he says, or does he want publicity? And whenever I read an advertisement or a piece intended as publicity, I think ill of its author. How I should like to say to those enamored of publicity and advertisement that the effect of their publicity is very often the opposite of what they intend... Let them have mercy on their pockets and cut it down.

I said: Then this paper has found a meaning for its existence. Let it wage relentless war on press publicity. Let it mount an honest campaign against the literature of flattery and gain-seeking and everything of that kind. And let every woman whose soul prompts her to ink an article or to string words together know that if she does not carry to her readers a message of truth or an idea worthy of being broadcast, silence is better for her.

In such an aim this paper finds the justification of its existence. Otherwise, let it respect the duties of the profession and grant us its silence.