Letters from Jihan

I was hurrying across Nejmeh Square when I heard her call to me, holding out a brown hand and saying, "Hello, Samira — where is your promise to visit me in Zahle? Summer is half over" — we were in early August — "and I have not seen you at my house..." I apologized and promised to visit her; then I shook her hand and she went off in haste...

A full month later... or less than a month, I was leafing through the daily paper when there was her name, published draped in black. Poor Jihan — she had died... Had I known that my meeting with her would be the last, I would have detained her longer... I would have come to know her better, would have taken from her more than I have... But I did not. I did not know that the fates would compel me to set down tearful lines for Jihan.

My acquaintance with Jihan does not go far back, nor do I claim it was a full one. The times it was given us to meet did not exceed the fingers of one hand, but each one of them deepened my conviction that I stood before a human being whose self and spirit held much to give...

I knew of her that she loved "Mayy" to the point of worship, and that her great hope was to devote herself to a study that would do this woman of letters justice and place her where she deserved to be...

Jihan wrote me five or six letters, most of them turning on Mayy...

The best thing I can do at this hour is to bring Jihan back to life in one of her letters, that we may hear her speak. In one of them, green of line, bearing the date of the sixth of June 1955, she says —

"My study (of Mayy) goes back five years, in which I gathered her fourteen books together with several bound volumes of the magazines al-Hilal, al-Muqtataf, al-Risala, and al-Mar'a al-Jadida, and what was said about her and of her during her visit to Lebanon in 1922, and what was said about her and of her during her calamity, the day she was placed under interdiction, and what was said about her and of her, too, after her early death. As for her letters to Gibran, which were in his museum in Bsharri, only one man of letters preceded me to them, one whose identity I do not know even now — Mr. Halim Kanaan; that writer had no sooner published his study of the bond between Gibran and Mayy in a booklet threadbare in dress and abundant in benefit than the two hands of (...) (*) snatched it up and reworked it without any reference to the true source. As for the rest of the letters of Mayy and Gibran, they are preserved with me, together with a beautiful picture of Mayy in her childhood, as well as a few cards Mayy sent Gibran on certain holidays, in which her great soul, her philosophy of life, and her opinion of Gibran's art shine forth.

As for that wretched aberration, or that wearing repression, I found no trace of it in all that Mayy wrote. And as for what the Lebanese men of letters have said about Mayy, much of it bears no relation to her truth. One group alleged her abnormality and accused her of never having loved anyone — not even Gibran.

Another group said she was mannish, that she had mastered everything except opening her heart to love. Another said the direct cause of her madness was that one of her relatives stole Gibran's letters from her. And it was said, and said — would that these sayings had come from people who lend an ear only to gossip; then the matter would be a light one. But these sayings and their like came from men of letters who carry weight in the Arab world.

Yes, my dear Samira, there are those who accused her of dryness and frigidity of feeling and of a twisted sexual nature, and there are those who claimed she was so soft and superstitious that she went mad when Gibran's letters were stolen from her — all this, and not one of them took the trouble to study her through her literature. Our literary world, my dear, represents our social and political world most fully and most truly; the picture of our life is reflected in strange fashion in the mirror of our literature. We are lost and wandering; we know not how we go or how we come. We are in the midst of a sweeping current carrying us toward perdition, and yet for all that we ask nothing of our thinking, nor do we bind it to deliberation and balance.

This — together with the accusation of madness against Mayy, and that interdiction imposed by cousins of hers to seize Mayy's precious library, and Mayy's deep philosophy and her rising above the spinster's melancholy, and the testimony of a cultivated friend of mine who was a nurse at Dr. Rebeiz's hospital when they brought Mayy there — confirms my belief that there was nothing of madness in her at all. Rather, her insistence on refusing food and on facing no one whatever, even

(*) ... and she also mentioned ——

her intimates, went back to a crying sense — as with any idealistic character — that her dignity had been degraded in this painful fashion and her precious reputation exposed to gossip — she whose opinion of mankind had been all goodness.

All this, together with my intense love for her and my admiration for her genius above any contemporary writer, helped me take a vow upon myself that I would be the one to defend Mayy with a true defense.

And I did in fact begin writing about her life as a fevered man writes when he is near his last breath, that I might feel rest and reassurance; and from so much studying her and rereading her books and letters I would see her in my dreams. But at that very time I was pregnant and on the verge of giving birth, and no sooner did the delivery come than I closed my beloved manuscript, as though I closed with it the file of a death sentence upon an innocent person. Yes, I closed my book with no early return, and plunged up to my ears in the affairs of motherhood and in other affairs of branching paths and twisted aims, over which I shall forever lie sleeping, because they allow me no opportunity to write, not even for the space of half an hour in any day... etc."

This is Jihan in one of her letters: a passion carried to the point of headlong ardor; the dream of her life was to restore the shaken picture to its proper frame. And she feared the days would not grant her time to come before the world of letters with her work on Mayy.

She used to say that she was ill... and when she visited me I preferred to avoid speaking with her of illness, for I never imagined that a human being in whom all these feelings still stirred

could die in a span shorter than a beautiful dream.

But she herself reflected this foreboding often. Once she wrote to me: "Two important matters worked to delay my reply to you: the first is private, and the second I refer to the philosophy of fate, in its ebb and flow in our lives.

I did not mean by this preamble to apologize to you, for my quiver holds many true excuses: I am a mother, a schoolteacher, and a housewife of the obsessive type, with a wasted, highly sensitive body of intractable temper, requiring constant rest and rest of mind and continuous feeding by means of vitamins and calcium and proteins and... and... a body of which the doctors say that it burns everything with amazing speed, until they fear it will soon burn itself up."

Poor thing — as if she were counting out her own days... I remember too that she wrote to me after an accident that occurred at a girls' school in Tripoli — I believe it was the collapse of a balcony, which resulted in injuries and deaths. Jihan wrote to me, saying —

"Samira, my friend, in such a case I cannot keep myself from total absorption and total attraction in the question of fate and destiny. He lied who said that we choose and are not driven. I cannot believe that when a man makes his preparations and readies his equipment, matters proceed according to his will and success accompanies his every step.

Tell me, what was the sin of those innocent girls, and what could they have done to ward off from themselves this decree?

And did it — did it ever occur to one of them that her end would come in this dreadful form?

Then what is man's worth in relation to life, and what is the worth of this soul whose owner does all in his power to guarantee its safety and happiness? Is it not like an insect crushed by the feet of the fates without those fates knowing what they do — as though it, the soul, had never been possessed of mind and thought and hopes and aims?

Is not a single germ among the germs of disease enough to destroy it with a final destruction from which there is no return, ever?"

× × × ×

I do not know, Jihan, nor do I remember what conclusions I produced then to answer your philosophical questionings. But I — but we, your friends — answer you at this hour with a reply tinged with the philosophy of one who concedes the existence of the stronger Hand, the Hand that cannot be turned back, and we say: Yes, they are final decrees, but they erased only Jihan the body. As for Jihan the spirit... Jihan the legacy — she is still alive, breathing in our consciences and in manuscripts that wait to come out into life, that literature in our country may know that here was a woman who gave without boasting and burned without boasting, and who was, in her life and in her death, one of the stories of the great soul's struggle, which neither sickness nor pain keeps from lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness.

God rest you, my friend: you gave more than you took, in a life which, if measured in depth, earned the honor of being called a life.