Two years after the assassination of former Prime Minister Hariri, Lebanon still lives to the rhythm of uncertainties about its future. Caught between tradition and modernity, between forces that want to anchor the country in the Arab world and those inviting it to join Western Europe, it holds its breath, threatened with disintegration at every moment of everyday life. Like the political situation, the life of Lebanon’s most famous poet and writer, Khalil Gibran, also appears as a succession of breaks, transgressions, but also of ultimate attempts at surpassing and reconciliation. His biography and the writings that mark its main stages are admirably reconstructed in his Complete Works, recently published in the traditional “Bouquins” collection by Editions Robert Laffont.
At the age of puberty, a period characterized by numerous divides, the poet experiences a first crossing by leaving his native land for the United States. This opens for the author a period of swaying between two cultural models, traces of which can certainly be found in his style and texts. Three years in Boston, return to Lebanon before heading back to America, then settling for a while in France. The dispersion of his work among novels, short stories, and collections, the indecision between using Arabic and resorting to English are only apparent. Reading The Prophet, which sealed his fame, captivates the reader with the swaying rhythm of sentences, a melody punctuated by hesitations to live at the confluence of two worlds. It reveals the dual attraction between the East and the West that places the writer, from the Iranian Sadegh Hedayat to the Russian Mayakovsky, in the direct lineage of poets suffering between their land of origin and their land of adoption. The former, trapped between Tehran and Paris, found his only solution in suicide. The latter repeatedly stated, “I would have liked to live and die in Paris if Moscow did not exist.” Gibran confirms in turn: “If Lebanon were not my country, I would have chosen it as my country.”
Like Hedayat and Mayakovsky, Gibran unconsciously suffers his inner drama: “Every evening,” he writes from Boston to a friend, “my mind returns to Paris, and wanders in its houses.” “And every morning, I wake up thinking about those days spent among the temples of art and the world of dreams.” Despite frequenting the artistic and upscale environments of New England, he feels like an “exile at the end of the earth, locked in a world of ice, with a taste of ash and eternal silence.”
This force, this “inner impulse” as Khalil Gibran himself termed it in a letter to his friend Youssef Hoayek, drove him to write after reading a beautiful story. To write and to draw. For the interested visitor who shows their friendship for the land of the Cedars by going to the Gibran Museum in Bsharre, will discover the richness of the multiple achievements of which the present work offers some – too few – illustrations. He thus confesses his admiration for Garibaldi, whose portrait he painted in 1913 but commented to his confidante Mary Haskell in these terms: “He is a man who travels from one part of the world to another.” His oil on canvas “Anxiety” from 1914 reveals a deep pain that he expresses through strokes worthy of Munch’s “The Scream.” In 1911, about the “spectator,” he comments: “I hope I will always be able to paint canvases that allow people to see other canvases… I want each canvas to open onto other invisible canvases…” Mary Haskell responded in kind about the woman and child (1915): “Rodin expresses the soul. You the soul of the soul…” It is in this kind of infinite regression that Khalil Gibran thought to find the truth of love as much as that of freedom.
By its specific location in the Lebanese mountains, the town of Bsharre, which saw the writer’s birth, receives, it is said, the first glimmers of dawn for the entire country. The holy Qadisha valley, which also houses not far from his birthplace his resting place, leads towards peaks still snow-covered in late spring. A landscape fitting the author: made up of precipices where monasteries cling to their austere faith alone, maternal troglodyte pockets where sometimes, watchful of a glorious death, some emaciated hermits await, knotty laces of roads clogged by herds of chewing goats which gaze with wise ignorance at the passing stranger. An eternal Lebanon.
Khalil Gibran, Complete Works, Coll. “Bouquins”, Editions Robert Laffont, 2006, 992 p., 30 euros.
