We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells
with windows and some without.
—Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam1
No, sir, we don’t know him. He is not here. We do not know him. He is not here, sir.” The man in the Great Taste Chinese Bakery & Restaurant at 61 Beach Street in South Boston was clearly uncomfortable with my questions. I had asked him if he knew that this was the location where Kahlil Gibran’s family had once had a shop. Immediately a sense of tension and unease rippled throughout the restaurant. I was visiting Boston and all the places associated with Kahlil’s early life in America. However, my prodding questions about someone they had never heard of greatly alarmed the Chinese in the restaurant, perhaps suspecting I was an immigration official. Not wanting to cause more discomfort, I thanked them kindly and stepped back into Boston’s modern-day Chinatown.
The life of an immigrant can be deeply unsettling. Far from the familiar sights and sounds of their home country, they are plunged into an alien setting: a language they don’t speak fluently and a culture that seems so strange, loaded with social nuances they cannot understand. Upon reaching the shores of America, Kahlil and his family found themselves facing a tremendously vulnerable transition. Ironically, well over a century later, the situation in Boston’s South End does not seem to have changed that much.
In 1895, at the age of twelve, Kahlil, along with his mother and three siblings, set off on an arduous journey through the Mediterranean Sea, across the Atlantic Ocean to Ellis Island in New York, where they were processed through Immigration. They eventually settled near relatives in Boston’s South End, then the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese American community in the United States after New York. This area of Boston, then populated with half a million people, remains an immigrant area, home to the city’s East Asian community. Kahlil’s mother began selling lace and linens door to door to Boston’s middle and upper class, peddling, as was common among the Arab immigrant community then. Eventually she was able to work in the more settled role of a seamstress. Her income enabled Kahlil’s older brother Peter to set up a goods shop to help support the family.
The long journey from Bsharri to Boston was much more than geographical. It must have been profoundly disorienting for the young Kahlil, having been uprooted from the rural beauty of the Lebanese mountains and thrust into the heart of late-nineteenth-century poverty-stricken industrialization in a strange and distant land whose language he did not know. At the same time, being an Arab immigrant in this new world served to shape his distinct identity, an identity that would later enable him to artistically and spiritually bridge the worlds of East and West.
The most renowned contemporary Arab writer today is the Lebanese-French novelist Amin Maalouf, who has achieved literary global renown, winning the Prix Goncourt, an appointment to the prestigious Académie française, and nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature. As an Arab who writes from France, Maalouf’s work very much embodies the spirit of Kahlil, his fellow countryman. Having immigrated to France during the Lebanese civil war, Maalouf has a foot in both worlds, enabling him a two-faced Janus view of identity. In Maalouf’s excellent book In the Name of Identity, he is expressively descriptive of the unique identity Kahlil would soon embody. Maalouf concludes there is no permanent, monolithic identity, but a series of what he calls “allegiances”: history, customs, religion, gender, class, and the worldviews they involve. Maalouf argues that the individual is the sum of all their surroundings, and that it is from this complexity that we build ourselves and are built.
Maalouf writes, “What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. . . . Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances.”2 Maalouf’s definition pointedly echoes the person Kahlil became. Years later, Mary Haskell, who became his patron, described in her diary the personal dichotomy that Kahlil felt all his life: “He lives in two worlds—Syria and America—and is at home in neither.”3
Kahlil started learning English in a special class at a school for immigrants, where his name was simplified in English for pronunciation purposes from his given name in Lebanon, Gibran Khalil Gibran, to Kahlil Gibran. At school he showed particular promise in his classes of drawing and painting, and as a result was able to enroll in an art class for immigrant children at a settlement center known as Denison House.
Through his teachers, Kahlil was introduced to the Bostonian artist Fred Holland Day, an avant-garde photographer and publisher, who encouraged his creativity and introduced him to the vast world of literature, even using some of Kahlil’s drawings as book covers. Day was profoundly influential, intellectually and artistically, and opened up Kahlil’s cultural world. Kahlil’s association with Day introduced him to the world of art and literature, as well as to artists and art patrons in Boston’s establishment, such as Sarah Choate Sears, the close friend of both artist Mary Cassatt and art collector Gertrude Stein.
A countercultural progressive, Day not only was known to push the artistic norm in the new art form of photography but also published forward-leaning literature like Oscar Wilde’s Salome, the distinguished British literary periodical The Yellow Book, and Stephen Crane’s poetry collection, Black Riders. Day introduced his eager pupil to much of the literature of Romantic poets and their Symbolist successors.
Echoes of transcendentalism still reverberated in New England through poets like Louise Guiney, Lilla Cabot Perry, and Josephine Peabody, focusing on the mystical dimension of our existence and the wonder of nature. Kahlil’s naturally mystical bent found this world highly appealing. And it was through Day that Kahlil discovered The Treasure of the Humble by Belgian Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck. It was to be a book of spiritual awakening for Kahlil during his formative teenage years, a book of reflective mystical essays, speaking of the oneness of the individual with the Absolute.
As Kahlil’s mother and older brother watched him absorb these Western influences, they became concerned that he was losing too much of his Arab culture and values. Their solution was to send him back to Lebanon at age fifteen to complete his high school studies at a Maronite Catholic boarding school in Beirut.
It was a gorgeous day in Beirut. The sky was wondrously clear, something that was very rare in Cairo, where I had been living. The fresh smell of the sea filled the air as I drove to visit the Gibran Khalil Gibran Garden, on the way to East Beirut, where Kahlil had spent his high school years.
The Gibran Garden is not easily reached and is hidden down below the Central Beirut Ring Road, Fouad Chehab Avenue, an overpass thoroughfare that goes through the heart of the city. Two blocks away sits the shelled-out Beirut City Center cinema, known at “The Egg,” an icon of the Lebanese civil war. In spite of its chaotic location, there was a special tranquility to the garden. It encompasses more than an acre of green grass directly in front of the United Nations House, the headquarters of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). The exquisite garden features two circular lawns, six obelisks, a fountain, a modern art sculpture, and a large bust of Kahlil at one end.
Due to its central location in front of the UN building, the Gibran Garden is often used as a venue for peaceful and democratic demonstrations and sit-ins. The day I visited was no exception. I parked next to rusted barbed wire, edging the side of the garden that had undoubtedly been used for recent protests. Positioned front and center were two elderly women sitting outside tents. As I approached I noticed dozens of photographs of young men and women attached to the fence dividing the garden from the UN building. My curiosity aroused, I asked the women about the photos and learned that they were pictures of those who had disappeared during the civil war and were still suspected of being held in Syria. The women explained that they were part of a protest movement called SOLDE (Support of Lebanese in Detention and Exile). Then they went on to tell their personal stories, stories of heartache and separation. One elderly mother cried as she told of the disappearance of her twenty-three-year-old daughter more than twenty years ago. The other held up a photograph of her son, who had disappeared a few years before that; five years ago she learned he was still being held in a Syrian prison. Due to all the political complications between Lebanon and Syria, their children had all but been forgotten. They were determined to keep protesting until someone listened to their plight.
As a teenager just learning his way in a “new world,” Kahlil suddenly found himself back in Beirut, many thousands of miles away from his mother, the only person to date who seemed to really understand him. The sense of longing for his family—as a child being sent off to boarding school for the first time to the other side of the world—must have been profound. They had arranged for him to attend a prominent Maronite Catholic School in the Achrafieh district of East Beirut, the Collège de la Sagesse (College of Wisdom), with the hope that their revered Middle Eastern values would be instilled into him anew during this formative stage in his life.
My lunch in Achrafieh, East Beirut, was at the chic Frida restaurant, named for Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. I was meeting with Nadine Labaki, the renowned Lebanese actor and movie director, whose recent film Where Do We Go Now? garnered global attention, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival and winning the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film humorously and poignantly addresses the religious tensions between Christians and Muslims and how critical it is that they live together peacefully. This was a message Kahlil intensely absorbed while studying in Beirut as a young man and that is reflected in his writings throughout his life. Also dining with us was the film producer of Kahlil’s The Prophet, so our conversation naturally gravitated to discussing Kahlil’s continuing legacy in Lebanon. “To this day, there is no one who more poetically illustrates for Lebanese the importance of coexistence, and seeing the beauty in each other’s traditions, than Kahlil Gibran,” remarked Nadine, as we reflected on how he went to high school just around the corner.
The Collège de la Sagesse, located on a hill, is in one of the oldest districts of East Beirut.
Today, Achrafieh is both a residential and a commercial district, with narrow winding streets and luxurious apartment and office buildings. However, during Kahlil’s high school years, Achrafieh was mostly farmland owned by a few Greek Orthodox Christian families that had ruled the country and the region for centuries and were considered Beirut’s “haute société.” During Lebanon’s civil war, which started in 1975, bombs and rockets wiped out a significant part of Achrafieh’s architectural heritage. The area became a major strategic base for the Christian militias led by Bachir Gemayel, and as such formed part of Christian East Beirut. Walking around the neighborhood today, it is evident that the destruction of old buildings continues in order to construct tall modern structures that overshadow the few remaining historic neighborhoods.
Kahlil thrived in his studies at the Collège de la Sagesse, being allowed to follow a special curriculum focused on Arabic and French and their literature, as well as art, religion, and ethics. One of the priests in charge of the school was purportedly struck by Kahlil’s self-understanding, which led to his being allowed to pursue a more personalized approach to his studies. During his first meeting with the senior teacher, Father Yusef Haddad, Kahlil told him he wanted to focus on Arabic language and its literature, and not be “relegated” to an elementary class. When the priest explained that learning was like climbing a ladder, one rung at a time, Kahlil’s subsequent response took the priest by surprise, impressing him: “Does not the teacher know that the bird does not ascend a ladder in its flight?”4
While in Beirut, Kahlil started a literary magazine with a classmate and won the school’s poetry award. His summers were spent with his father back in the village of his birth, Bsharri, but sadly his father could not understand his creative side, causing much rejection and suffering for Kahlil. During those two and a half years, he fell under the spell of love twice, but each ended in great pain. One relationship was shut down by an older brother (Hala); the other was lost to death (Sultana).
I arrived at 78 Tyler Street in Boston’s South End and looked up at the redbrick building before me. After I rang the doorbell several times, a Chinese priest slowly opened the heavy, arched wooden door. With a faint hesitancy he bowed slightly, unclear as to the reason for my visit. Learning that I was aware that this was the site of the former Maronite Catholic Church, he enthusiastically showed me their little chapel. During Kahlil’s time it was the local parish church for the immigrant Lebanese Maronite Catholic community, known as Our Lady of the Cedars. It was just a few blocks from his tenement apartment and a few doors down from the old Quincy School he attended as a young boy, which still functions as an educational center today. Interestingly, while the Maronite Church of Kahlil’s day burned down in 1959, the rebuilt building is still a Catholic church today, albeit now the Chinese Catholic Pastoral Center.
As I sat quietly by myself in the chapel imagining the child Kahlil sitting in church with his mother, brother, and sisters for weekly masses, I found myself wondering whether he ever entered this church for assistance after the tremendous losses he experienced upon his return to Boston after his schooling in Lebanon. When tragedy struck, did Kahlil seek the aid of Father Yazbek, the young and energetic Lebanese priest of his local parish?
In 1902 Kahlil made his way back to Boston via Paris, and while there he learned that his fourteen-year-old sister Sultana had just died of tuberculosis. The following year his brother died of tuberculosis as well, and then his mother died of cancer. With these devastating circumstances to deal with emotionally, after working to settle the debts of the family’s store, Kahlil poured himself into his painting. His sister Marianna worked at a dressmaker’s shop in order to help support them both. In 1904 Day’s Harcourt Studios hosted Kahlil’s first art exhibition, during which he met Mary Haskell, the headmistress of Boston’s Marlborough Street School for Girls, who became his lifelong benefactor, advisor, and guiding spirit. Unbeknownst to him at the time, several years later Mary would sponsor him to study art in Paris for two years, an experience that would deeply influence his life’s work.
As if Kahlil had not experienced enough loss, one day his entire collection of artwork was burned in a fire at Day’s studio. For Kahlil, this was a devastating series of losses, and in the next few years, perhaps searching for consolation, he began to throw himself deeply into the world of Arab émigré writers. He began contributing articles and essays to Arab-American newspapers, publishing books for an Arabic-language imprint, and helping to organize the Golden Links, a group of Arab-Americans in Boston who met regularly for discussions and lectures.
During this time his emerging prophetic voice was maturing with conviction and confidence. As an immigrant, he discovered he had the liberty to write in a way that he would not have been able to while living in the Arab world. The avoidance of shame in Middle Eastern culture is paramount. In a shame-based culture, appearance is everything. All is done to preserve honor, whether it be for an individual, a family, or a community. Writers and artists often practice self-censorship to avoid governmental or religious oppression, which brings humiliation upon the family. Having lived and worked in the region for many years, I know of numerous examples of artist-activists speaking out against authoritarian regimes, only then to hear that dreaded knock on the door at night and disappear, their whereabouts remaining unknown. Perhaps due to having lived in Lebanon again during his later teenage years, Kahlil realized upon his return to America that he could write with greater boldness without repercussions. Hence his stories and articles began to daringly address highly sensitive issues.
Kahlil’s writing began to call on his Lebanese people to question ideologies as he himself began to grapple with religion and spirituality. Throughout his life, Kahlil had a tenuous relationship with the Church, and early on he was deeply disturbed by his observations of oppressive leadership in Lebanon. He was also distressed by sectarian differences that tore the very fabric of society, tensions that he saw as often fueled by religious authorities. While passionately believing in the importance of cultivating peace, he felt strongly that “young nations like his own” should be freed from Ottoman control.
While some interpret his early writings as being against religion, they are not, per se, but rather against the hypocrisy, injustice, and self-aggrandizement done in the name of God. As Kahlil began to write with a righteous indignation, his reasons for not identifying with any church became clear. Kahlil instead chose to focus on “awakening” people to their greater selves and to the true heart of God.
As a result of his writing, Kahlil began to be seen by some as a “heretic and rebel,” both religiously and politically. This is most clearly seen a few years later, when he moved to Paris for art studies, in the reaction to the Arabic publication of his book Spirits Rebellious. This collection of four stories, which includes a story titled “Khalil, the Heretic,” resulted in significant controversy in the Arab world. Spirits Rebellious pulsates with righteous indignation and was immediately criticized by the Church for its antiestablishment tone and stance.
Although clerical disapproval of Spirits Rebellious was exaggerated after Kahlil’s death to include accounts of his excommunication and book burnings, he did relate an unpleasant exchange between himself and a Maronite bishop to Mary Haskell, which she recorded in her journals.
Spirits Rebellious, published while K. was in Paris, was suppressed by the Syrian government—only 200 copies got into Syria, secretly. Long since, of course, it has entered—and the edition has been exhausted. But the church considered excommunicating K. Practically he was excommunicated but the sentence was never actually pronounced. . . . When the representatives of the Patriarch, however, came to Paris they invited K. with other Syrians—and when he came to take leave asked him to stay and dine alone with them. One bishop had a sense of humor—the other none.
Non-humorous took him aside: “You have made a grave mistake—are making a grave mistake. Your gifts you are using against your people, against your country, against your church. The holy Patriarch realizes this. But he does not condemn you. He sends you a special message and loving offer of friendship. . . . And now—seek out every copy of the book—destroy them all—and let me take word from you back to Syria and the Church and to the holy Patriarch.”5
This exchange only spurred Kahlil on further. The stories in Spirits Rebellious are bolder and his use of symbolism and imagery richer. All four short stories are set in rural Lebanon. Two deal with women forced into marriages by custom and tradition rather than out of love or spiritual affinity. Of these two, one ends with the woman leaving the wealth and security of her older husband to live in poverty with the man she loves; the other ends tragically, a la Romeo and Juliet. Another, “City of the Graves,” dramatically confronts the condemning of innocents, corruption, and the oppression of the weak by the strong.
The pinnacle story, and one of my favorites, is “Khalil, the Heretic.” It is a powerful, sweeping story with beautiful imagery, full of deep spiritual insight, delivering a triumphal tale in which greed, hypocrisy, and corruption are laid waste by the goodness and tender compassion of an oppressed people. All the elements of an epic drama are present, love story included, and the masterful expressions of a poet’s heart pour forth in its descriptions of nature.
First we meet a “grand prince,” Sheikh Abbas, squeezing life out of his vassal servants:
The submission of these unfortunates to the Sheik Abbas and their fear of his harshness did not come only from his strength and their weakness, but it came from their poverty and reliance upon him. The fields they tilled and the hovels in which they dwelt belonged to him; they were a heritage from his father and grandfather as the people’s heritage from their forefathers was poverty and wretchedness.6
As the scene is set at the outset of the story, the supporting character of the natural world plays its special role once again:
Winter came with its snows and storms, and the fields and valleys were empty save for the croaking ravens and the naked trees. . . . December drew to a close. The old year sighed and breathed its last minutes into the grey skies; then came night, wherein the new year was a child crowned by destiny and placed on the throne of existence.7
Next, our peasant hero Khalil, an orphan, is introduced:
On that terrible night beneath wild skies a youth of twenty and two years made his way along the road that rose gradually from the monastery of Kizhaya [here he’s going for the jugular—Kizhaya was the richest and most famous monastery in Lebanon] to the village of the Sheik Abbas. The cold had dried up his very bones, and hunger and fear had sucked away his strength. Snow covered his black cloak as though wishing to make for him a shroud. . . .The rugged path seized hold of his feet and he fell. He called out for help, then was silenced by the cold.8
But all is not lost.
On that wild night already described, Rahel and her daughter were sitting by a fire whose heat was lost in the cold and whose embers were grey. Above their heads hung a lamp, which sent forth its feeble yellow rays into the gloom like a prayer that sends forth consolation into the hearts of the bereaved.9
Rescue is at hand, and a moving tale unfolds as the widow and her daughter save Khalil’s life and he in turn awakens the village to their “greater selves,” a theme woven into much of Kahlil’s future art and writings. Shocked to discover that the monks of the monastery had thrown the orphan Khalil out into a snowy night, the women’s apprehension soon fades as they discover the reasons for his banishment, essentially the living of too Christlike a life.
I left the monastery because I was not a blind and dumb being, but a man hearing and seeing. . . . The monks taught me to have no belief except in their way of life. They poisoned my soul with submission and despair until I reckoned the world an ocean of sorrow and misfortune and the monastery a port of salvation.10
True light is that which radiates from within a man. It reveals the secrets of the soul to the soul and lets it rejoice in life, singing in the name of the Spirit. Truth is like the stars, which cannot be seen except beyond the darkness of night. Truth is like all beautiful things in existence: it does not reveal its beauties save to those who have felt the weight of falsehood. Truth is a hidden feeling which teaches us to rejoice in our days and wish to all mankind that rejoicing.11
We come not to this world as outcasts, but as ignorant children, that we may learn from life’s beauties and secrets the worship of the everlasting and universal spirit and the search after the hidden things of the soul. This is the truth as I knew it when I read the teachings of Jesus the Nazarene, and this is the light that emanated from within me and showed me the monastery and all in it as a black pit from whose depths rose frightening phantoms and images to destroy me.12
After an initial month’s punishment of solitary confinement in the monastery’s dungeon, Khalil soon realizes that the monks have not softened.
But vain was my thinking, for the thick veil that the long ages had woven across their eyes was not to be torn apart by a few days. And the clay with which ignorance had stopped their ears could not be moved by the soft touch of fingers.13
It is not surprising that such writing threatened the church hierarchy of Lebanon. Combined with the other stories in Spirits Rebellious, which also attacked traditional cultural mores, it is no wonder Kahlil was labeled a heretic.
Later in “Khalil, the Heretic,” Khalil speaks to an audience of villagers while on trial before the unrelenting Sheik Abbas:
My crime, O men, is in my knowledge of your despair and my feeling for the weight of your fetters. And my sin, O women, is in my compassion for you and your children, who suck in life from your breasts with the sting of death. I am your kin, for my forefathers lived in these valleys that exhaust your strength and died under this yoke which bends your necks. I believe in God, who hears the cry of your tormented spirits and sees into your broken hearts. I believe in the Book that makes us all brothers equal before the sun. I believe in the teachings that free you and me from bondage and place us unfettered upon the earth, the stepping-place of the feet of God.14
God has surely sent your souls into this life to be as a lighted torch growing in knowledge and increasing in beauty in their search after the secrets of the days and the nights. . . . God has given to your spirits wings to soar aloft into the realms of love and freedom.15
His developing view of religious authorities, beyond just church leaders, is clearly seen in his longest work, a novella titled Broken Wings. He takes a pause in the story to verbally blast more than just the bishop:
The heads of religion in the East are not satisfied with their own munificence, but they must strive to make all members of their families superiors and oppressors. The glory of a prince goes to his eldest son by inheritance, but the exaltation of a religious head is contagious among his brothers and nephews. Thus the Christian bishop and the Moslem imam and the Brahmin priest become like sea reptiles who clutch their prey with many tentacles and suck their blood with numerous mouths.16
Not only do religious leaders receive a lashing, but the rulers of their lands are attacked as well:
Because of their wickedness and guile family was set against family; community against community; tribe against tribe. For how long shall we be scattered like dust before this cruel storm and quarrel like hungry whelps around this stinking corpse? The better to keep their thrones and ease of mind did they arm the Druse against the Arab and stir up the Shiite against the Sunnite and encourage the Kurd to slaughter the Bedouin and put Moslem to dispute with Christian. Until when will brother continue to slay brother on his mother’s bosom? Until when will neighbor threaten neighbor by the grave of the beloved? Until when will the Cross be separated from the Crescent before the face of God?17
However, unlike his story “Yuhanna the Mad,” this story ends in a hopeful tone.
Half a century has now passed since these happenings, and an awakening has come to the people of Lebanon.18
In 1908, addressing the Arab religious backlash against him, Kahlil wrote to a cousin living in Brazil:
I feel that the fires that feed the affection within me would like to dress themselves with ink and paper, but I am not sure whether the Arabic-speaking world would remain as friendly to me as it has been in the past three years. I say this because the apparition of enmity has already appeared. The people in Syria are calling me heretic, and the intelligentsia in Egypt vilified me, saying, “he is the enemy of just laws, of family ties, and of old traditions.” Those writers are telling the truth, because I do not love man-made laws and I abhor the traditions that our ancestors left us. This hatred is the fruit of my love for the sacred and spiritual kindness which should be the source of every law upon the earth, for kindness is the shadow of God in man. I know that the principles upon which I base my writings are echoes of the spirit of the great majority of the people of the world, because the tendency towards a spiritual independence is to our life as the heart is to the body. . . . Will my teaching ever be received by the Arab world or will it die away and disappear like a shadow?19
A century has passed and Kahlil’s words have not disappeared. Although considered a heretic and a rebel by some at the outset of his writing career, over time Kahlil’s voice began to soften. After exposing the duplicity he observed in religion, he began to journey toward a deeper spirituality. He found harmony within and sought creative ways to share his discoveries with others. While seen early on as a heretic for his critique of the religious establishment, ironically his inclusive spirituality would be embraced by the world.
“Who is that man?” I heard a young girl ask her mother as she rubbed her little hand across the bronze bas-relief of Kahlil Gibran’s youthful face on the public monument on Boston’s historic Copley Square. “I don’t know, but he must be famous,” her mother responded. I interjected and asked her if she had heard of the book The Prophet. “Oh, yes,” she replied. “That is one of my favorite books.” “Well, he is the author,” I pointed out. The woman leaned over and read the plaque, musing slowly over its words. She then took a photograph, carefully positioning her little girl in front of it. “Thank you,” she said to me as she walked away, casually glancing back at the monument several times. Ironically, in the background of her photograph would be a church, the famous Trinity Episcopal Church, whose distinguished rector, Phillips Brooks, wrote the beloved Christmas Carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” He died just a few years before Kahlil immigrated to Boston.
Standing in front of the memorial plaque aptly placed between Trinity Church and Boston’s Public Library, which Kahlil frequented, I found myself contemplating the combination of influences on his life during his years in Boston. On the side of the granite memorial are engraved these words written by Kahlil: “It was in my heart to help a little because I was helped much.” This young immigrant boy had come a long way.
The words engraved in the granite next to the bronze plaque say it all: “A grateful city acknowledges the greater harmony among men and strengthened universality of spirit given by Kahlil Gibran to the people of the world in return.” This “citizen of Boston” would go on to inspire all to be “citizens of God’s world.”