Two Cries of Patriotism — by May and Salma Sayegh

We welcome the pen of our friend Mrs. Aida Labaki, wife of Salah Labaki and only daughter of Salma Sayegh... We welcome her pen as it comes down into the field, and it is no wonder that Aida should excel, for she has gathered literary glory from both its ends... She wrote us this piece on the occasion of the third anniversary of her mother's death, God rest her soul:

Events interact, and the days and years pass, to give us an appointment with life, or an appointment with death, or appointments of memory. This past September twenty-seventh fell the third anniversary of the death of my mother — comrade in work with a great number of this magazine's readers, comrade in struggle in the literary, social, and national field. Salma Sayegh, my mother and my dearest companion, bearer of that gentle name, owner of that sweet face, and of that womanhood bursting with motherhood and feeling — her memory will not leave us so long as there are mothers on the face of the earth, and death will not take her from us so long as there remains among mankind a single soul that strives for the good and is faithful to a creed and a faith, and thus faithful to all humanity, with all its destitute, its homeless, and its deprived.

If I speak to you of her today, on this anniversary, I shall not have stepped outside the scope of speaking of woman in society; rather I feel, in doing so, that I am strengthening the structure with a solid course of masonry, if not with the cornerstone. And I am certain that in the hour my mother left me and closed her eyes for the last time and faced the great Judge to render her account, she earned the honor of sitting among the righteous who are near to Him.

It is a mistake to think that the Lebanese woman has not worked on the social plane. Our women were occupied with Lebanon's future and its independence in the days when the colonizer was strangling liberties, hunting down those who demanded sovereignty and freedom, and resisting every movement that rose to build this homeland and waken people's eyes to national consciousness. And chance willed that the feeling of two women of letters should answer one another — the first a Lebanese in the Nile Valley, the second in Lebanon — each bending over Lebanon, over its future, its condition, and its misery. May Ziadeh despairs in her exile and questions, then writes her historic article: "Where Is My Homeland?" And Salma Sayegh answers her, reassuring and encouraging. Said May, princess of modern Arabic letters: "When the names of the homelands were proclaimed, I wrote the name of my homeland and set my lips upon it to kiss it. Then I pondered the problems that admit no solution, and my brow was worn, and I fell to thinking; I felt a crushing that abased me — why should I, and no other, be the one who has no homeland? In the morning I am wakened by the bugle of departing armies and by chants urging them on to sacrifice and valor, and I loathe the victors, and for a moment I wish I could be one with them, to forget in their wealth my poverty and in their might my abasement... But the peoples whisper a whisper that strikes my ear: these say, You are not of us, for you are of another sect; and those say, You are not of us, for you are of another race. Why then should I, and no other, be the one who has no homeland? I was born in one country, and my father is from one country, and my mother from another, yet I live in still another, and the phantoms of my soul pass from country to country — to which of these countries do I belong, and which of these countries shall I defend? The dead pass on, leaving to their descendants material and moral inheritances and a national honor to uphold; but as for me, nothing remains of the traces of my dead but the weights hung upon my hands and my neck."

"Every nation speaks of its own merit and nobility — so which of the nations shall I admire? And every nation — it and no other — guards the sanctuary of liberty and defends justice, equality, and brotherhood — so on which of the nations shall I rely? And every religion — it and no other — holds the monopoly, for its followers, of honor and virtue in

life, in heaven, and in divinity after death — so which of the religions shall I embrace? I never heard a country described but my longing hastened toward it, nor listened to the voice of a people but I thought it the voice of my hope and my despair; nor did I imagine the distances of the earth, the reaches of the firmament, the deserts and the seas, the worlds and the stars, but a yearning for them swept over me, as though they were homelands awaiting me... Why then do the forces of my melancholy gather, deep and keen, because I alone in this world am the one who has no homeland..."

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And May came down to Lebanon in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-two, and the women's associations delegated Salma Sayegh to answer May's cry. She said to her, in an appealing and stirring call: "Your homeland, May, is this little mountain, which was a homeland before the word patriotism took shape in the minds of men. Here is your homeland: Lebanon the aggrieved, against whom the nights rage, thrusting him into every one of the problems of the East, then cutting away his plains, then putting him to death by starvation and by hanging. And for a gleam of light to dawn upon him, for a sip of the waters of life, for a last breath to be restored to him, the earth quakes its quaking! Yet he is still the noble old man, laughing at the stinginess of men and the smallness of men, and distributing to the Arab world the blood of his heart and the pieces of his liver, as an eternal proof of his right to life. We have no flags, May, of stripes and stars and crescents and crosses; but we have, O raiser of the flag, flags that march fluttering over India and the Hijaz and Iraq and the Nile Valley and the Seine and the Amazon. We have ancient flags, stained with our blood and our tears, folded away in the belly of history: they are our victims, ancient and recent; we carry them upon our hands and show them to the people, and they remember faithfulness. Here is your homeland — go, then, and bring the glad tidings of your return to it. For nothing upholds homelands but the shoulders of men and the hearts of women. You yourself are a homeland, May, with your teeming, overflowing life, which, were it divided out, would make of it a thousand lives. So say no more — may my soul be your ransom — 'Where is my homeland?'"

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I have conveyed these two historic cries to my readers only out of my certainty that they deserve admiration and pride, and out of my belief that they inscribe two pages of glory in the Lebanese woman's struggle for her liberation and for the independence of her homeland.

May Ziadeh and Salma Sayegh — where are their two souls now? Where is that genius, to beckon to the living and point them to the remedy — these ills of which she forewarned us thirty-six years ago? It was granted to my mother that the prophecy come true before her eyes! As for May, she saw it from her far-off assembly on high.