Kahlil Gibran
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Khalil Gibran |
Khalil Gibran, April 1913 |
| Born |
Jubran Khalil Jubran
January 6, 1883
Bsharri, Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Syria (modern day Lebanon) |
| Died |
April 10, 1931 (aged 48)
New York City, United States |
| Occupation |
Poet, painter, sculptor, writer, philosopher, theologian, visual artist |
| Nationality |
Lebanese |
| Genres |
Poetry, parable, short story |
| Literary movement |
Mahjar, New York Pen League |
| Notable work(s) |
The Prophet |
Khalil Gibran (full Arabic name
Gibran Khalil Gibran, sometimes spelled
Kahlil;
[a] Arabic:
جبران خليل جبران /
ALA-LC:
Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān or
Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān;) (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) was a
Lebanese-
American artist,
poet, and
writer.
Born in the town of
Bsharri in the north of modern-day
Lebanon (then part of
Ottoman Mount Lebanon),
as a young man he immigrated with his family to the United States,
where he studied art and began his literary career, writing in both
English and
Arabic.
In the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a literary and political
rebel. His romantic style was at the heart of a renaissance in modern
Arabic literature, especially
prose poetry, breaking away from the classical school. In Lebanon, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.
[6]
He is chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book
The Prophet, an early example of
inspirational fiction including a series of philosophical essays written in poetic
English prose. The book sold well despite a cool critical reception, gaining popularity in the 1930s and again especially in the
1960s counterculture.
[6][7] Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind
Shakespeare and
Lao-Tzu.
[7]
Life
Early years
Gibran Khalil Gibran was born into a
Maronite Catholic family from the historical town of
Bsharri in northern
Mount Lebanon, then a semi-autonomous part of the
Ottoman Empire.
[8] His mother Kamila, daughter of a priest, was thirty when he was born; his father Khalil was her third husband.
[9] As a result of his family's poverty, Gibran received no formal schooling during his youth in
Lebanon. However, priests visited him regularly and taught him about the
Bible, as well as the
Arabic and
Syriac languages.
Gibran's father initially worked in an
apothecary, but with gambling debts he was unable to pay, he went to work for a local
Ottoman-appointed administrator.
[10][11] Around 1891, extensive complaints by angry subjects led to the administrator being removed and his staff being investigated.
[12] Gibran's father was imprisoned for embezzlement,
[7]
and his family's property was confiscated by the authorities. Kamila
Gibran decided to follow her brother to the United States. Although
Gibran's father was released in 1894, Kamila remained resolved and left
for
New York on June 25, 1895, taking Khalil, his younger sisters Mariana and Sultana, and his elder half-brother Peter (in Arabic,
Butrus).
[10]
The Gibrans settled in
Boston's
South End, at the time of the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese-American community
[13] in the United States. Due to a mistake at school, he was registered as "
Khalil Gibran".
[1] His mother began working as a seamstress
[12] peddler, selling
lace and
linens
that she carried from door to door. Gibran started school on September
30, 1895. School officials placed him in a special class for immigrants
to learn
English. Gibran also enrolled in an art school at a nearby
settlement house. Through his teachers there, he was introduced to the
avant-garde Boston artist, photographer, and publisher
Fred Holland Day,
[7]
who encouraged and supported Gibran in his creative endeavors. A
publisher used some of Gibran's drawings for book covers in 1898.
Gibran's mother, along with his elder brother Peter, wanted him to
absorb more of his own heritage rather than just the Western aesthetic
culture he was attracted to.
[12] Thus, at the age of fifteen, Gibran returned to his homeland to study at a
Maronite-run preparatory school and higher-education institute in
Beirut, called "
al-Hikma"
(The Wisdom). He started a student literary magazine with a classmate
and was elected "college poet". He stayed there for several years before
returning to Boston in 1902, coming through
Ellis Island (a second time) on May 10.
[14] Two weeks before he returned to Boston, his sister Sultana died of
tuberculosis at the age of 14. The year after, Peter died of the same disease and his mother died of
cancer. His sister Marianna supported Gibran and herself by working at a dressmaker’s shop.
[7]
Debuts, growing fame, and personal life
Gibran was an accomplished artist, especially in drawing and
watercolor, having attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910,
pursuing a symbolist and romantic style over the then up-and-coming
realism.
[citation needed] Gibran held his first art exhibition of his drawings in 1904 in
Boston, at Day's studio.
[7]
During this exhibition, Gibran met Mary Elizabeth Haskell, a respected
headmistress ten years his senior. The two formed an important
friendship that lasted the rest of Gibran’s life. Though publicly
discreet, their correspondence reveals that the two were lovers.
[15] In fact, Gibran twice proposed to her but marriage was not possible in the face of her family's conservatism.
[6]
Haskell influenced not only Gibran’s personal life, but also his career.
[16]
She became his editor, and introduced him to Charlotte Teller, a
journalist, and Emilie Michel (Micheline), a French teacher, who
accepted to pose for him as a model and became close friends.
[17] In 1908, Gibran went to study art in
Paris for two years. While there he met his art study partner and lifelong friend
Youssef Howayek.
[18]
While most of Gibran's early writings were in Arabic, most of his work
published after 1918 was in English. His first book for the publishing
company
Alfred A. Knopf, in 1918, was
The Madman,
a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical cadence
somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran also took part in the
New York Pen League, also known as the "immigrant poets" (al-mahjar), alongside important Lebanese-American authors such as
Ameen Rihani,
Elia Abu Madi and
Mikhail Naimy,
a close friend and distinguished master of Arabic literature, whose
descendants Gibran declared to be his own children, and whose nephew,
Samir, is a godson of Gibran's.
Death
Gibran died in
New York City on April 10, 1931, at the age of 48. The causes were
cirrhosis of the liver and
tuberculosis.
The young emigrant from Lebanon who came through Ellis Island in 1895
never became an American citizen; he loved his birthplace too much.
Before his death, Gibran expressed the wish that he be buried in
Lebanon. This wish was fulfilled in 1932, when Mary Haskell and her
sister Mariana purchased the
Mar Sarkis Monastery in
Lebanon, which has since become the
Gibran Museum.
Written next to Gibran's grave are the words "a word I want to see
written on my grave: I am alive like you, and I am standing beside you.
Close your eyes and look around, you will see me in front of you."
[citation needed]
Gibran willed the contents of his studio to Mary Haskell. There she
discovered her letters to him spanning twenty-three years. She initially
agreed to burn them because of their intimacy, but recognizing their
historical value she saved them. She gave them, along with his letters
to her which she had also saved, to the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library before she died in 1964. Excerpts of the over six hundred letters were published in "Beloved Prophet" in 1972.
The Gibran Museum and Gibran's final resting place, in Bsharri.
Mary Haskell Minis (she wed Jacob Florance Minis in 1923) donated her
personal collection of nearly one hundred original works of art by
Gibran to the
Telfair Museum of Art in
Savannah,
Georgia
in 1950. Haskell had been thinking of placing her collection at the
Telfair as early as 1914. In a letter to Gibran, she wrote "I am
thinking of other museums ... the unique little Telfair Gallery in
Savannah, Ga., that
Gari Melchers
chooses pictures for. There when I was a visiting child, form burst
upon my astonished little soul." Haskell's gift to the Telfair is the
largest public collection of Gibran’s visual art in the country,
consisting of five oils and numerous works on paper rendered in the
artist’s lyrical style, which reflects the influence of symbolism. The
future American royalties to his books were willed to his hometown of
Bsharri, to be "used for good causes".
Writings
Style and recurring themes
Gibran was a great admirer of poet and writer
Francis Marrash,
[19][20] whose works he had studied at
al-Hikma school in Beirut.
[21] According to orientalist
Shmuel Moreh, Gibran's own works echo Marrash's style, many of his ideas, and at times even the structure of some of his works;
[22]
Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins have mentioned Marrash's concept of
universal love, in particular, in having left a "profound impression" on
Gibran.
[21]
The poetry of Gibran often uses formal language and spiritual terms; as
one of his poems reveals: "But let there be spaces in your togetherness
and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another
but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the
shores of your souls."
[23]
Many of Gibran's writings deal with Christianity, especially on the
topic of spiritual love. But his mysticism is a convergence of several
different influences: Christianity, Islam, Sufism, Hinduism and
theosophy. He wrote: "You are my brother and I love you. I love you when
you prostrate yourself in your mosque, and kneel in your church and
pray in your synagogue. You and I are sons of one faith—the Spirit."
[24]
Reception and influence
Gibran's best-known work is
The Prophet, a book composed of twenty-six poetic essays. Its popularity grew markedly during the 1960s with the American
counterculture and then with the flowering of the
New Age movements. It has remained popular with these and with the wider population to this day. Since it was first published in 1923,
The Prophet has never been out of print. Having been translated into more than forty languages,
[25] it was one of the bestselling books of the twentieth century in the United States.
One of his most notable lines of poetry is from "Sand and Foam"
(1926), which reads: "Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so
that the other half may reach you". This line was used by
John Lennon and placed, though in a slightly altered form, into the song "
Julia" from
The Beatles' 1968 album
The Beatles (aka "The White Album").
[26] Johnny Cash
recorded Kibran's "The Eye of the Prophet" as an audio cassette book,
and Cash can be heard talking about Kibran's work on a track called
"Book Review" on
Unearthed (Johnny Cash album).
Visual art
His more than seven hundred images include portraits of his friends
WB Yeats,
Carl Jung and
August Rodin.
[6] A possible Gibran painting was the subject of a June 2012 episode of the
PBS TV series
History Detectives.
Religious views
Gibran was born into a
Maronite Christian family and raised in Maronite schools. He was influenced not only by his own religion but also by
Islam, and especially by the mysticism of the
Sufis.
His knowledge of Lebanon's bloody history, with its destructive
factional struggles, strengthened his belief in the fundamental unity of
religions, which his parents exemplified by welcoming people of various
religions in their home.
[21]
Gibran had a number of strong connections to the
Bahá'í Faith. One of Gibran's acquaintances later in life,
Juliet Thompson, reported several anecdotes relating to Gibran. She recalled Gibran had met
`Abdu'l-Bahá, the leader of the religion at the time of his visit to the United States, circa 1911
[10]–1912.
[27] Gibran was unable to sleep the night before meeting him in person to draw his portrait.
[21][28] Thompson reported Gibran later saying that all the way through writing
Jesus, the Son of Man,
he thought of `Abdu'l-Bahá. Years later, after the death of
`Abdu'l-Bahá, at a viewing of a movie of `Abdu'l-Bahá, Gibran rose to
talk and proclaimed in tears an exalted station of `Abdu'l-Bahá and left
the event weeping.
[27] A noted scholar on Gibran is Suheil Bushrui from Gibran's native Lebanon, also a Bahá'í,
[29] published more than one volume about him
[30][21] and serves as the Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace at the
University of Maryland[6][31] and winner of the Juliet Hollister Awards from the
Temple of Understanding.
[32]
Political thought
Gibran was by no means a politician. He used to say : "I am not a
politician, nor do I wish to become one" and "Spare me the political
events and power struggles, as the whole earth is my homeland and all
men are my fellow countrymen".
[33]
Nevertheless, Gibran called for the adoption of Arabic as a national
language of Syria, considered from a geographic point of view, not as a
political entity.
[34]
When Gibran met `Abdu'l-Bahá in 1911–12, who traveled to the United
States partly to promote peace, Gibran admired the teachings on peace
but argued that "young nations like his own" be freed from Ottoman
control.
[10] Gibran also wrote the famous "Pity The Nation" poem during these years, posthumously published in
The Garden of the Prophet.
[35]
When the Ottomans were eventually driven out of Syria during
World War I,
Gibran's exhilaration was manifested in a sketch called "Free Syria"
which appeared on the front page of al-Sa'ih's special "victory"
edition.
[citation needed]
Moreover, in a draft of a play, still kept among his papers, Gibran
expressed great hope for national independence and progress.
[citation needed] This play, according to Khalil Hawi, "defines Gibran's belief in
Syrian nationalism with great clarity, distinguishing it from both
Lebanese and
Arab nationalism, and showing us that nationalism lived in his mind, even at this late stage, side by side with internationalism."
[36]
Works
In Arabic:
- Nubthah fi Fan Al-Musiqa (Music, 1905)
- Ara'is al-Muruj (Nymphs of the Valley, also translated as Spirit Brides and Brides of the Prairie, 1906)
- Al-Arwah al-Mutamarrida (Rebellious Spirits, 1908)
- Al-Ajniha al-Mutakassira (Broken Wings, 1912)
- Dam'a wa Ibtisama (A Tear and A Smile, 1914)
- Al-Mawakib (The Processions, 1919)
- Al-‘Awāsif (The Tempests, 1920)
- Al-Bada'i' waal-Tara'if (The New and the Marvellous, 1923)
In English, prior to his death:
- The Madman (1918) (downloadable free version)
- Twenty Drawings (1919)
- The Forerunner (1920)
- The Prophet, (1923)
- Sand and Foam (1926)
- Kingdom of the Imagination (1927)
- Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
- The Earth Gods (1931)
Posthumous, in English:
Collections:
- Prose Poems (1934)
- Secrets of the Heart (1947)
- A Treasury of Kahlil Gibran (1951)
- A Self-Portrait (1959)
- Thoughts and Meditations (1960)
- A Second Treasury of Kahlil Gibran (1962)
- Spiritual Sayings (1962)
- Voice of the Master (1963)
- Mirrors of the Soul (1965)
- Between Night & Morn (1972)
- A Third Treasury of Kahlil Gibran (1975)
- The Storm (1994)
- The Beloved (1994)
- The Vision (1994)
- Eye of the Prophet (1995)
- The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran (1995)
Other:
- Beloved Prophet, The love letters of Khalil Gibran and Mary Haskell, and her private journal (1972, edited by Virginia Hilu)
Memorials and honors
- Lebanese Ministry of Post and Telecommunications published a stamp in his honor in 1971.
- Gibran Museum in Bsharri, Lebanon
- Gibran Khalil Gibran Garden, Beirut, Lebanon
- Gibran Khalil Gibran collection, Museo Soumaya, Mexico.
- Kahlil Gibran Street, Ville Saint-Laurent, Quebec, Canada inaugurated on 27 September 2008 on occasion of the 125th anniversary of his birth.
- Gibran Kahlil Gibran Skiing Piste, The Cedars Ski Resort, Lebanon
- Kahlil Gibran Memorial Garden in Washington, D.C.,[37] dedicated in 1990
- Elmaz Abinader, Children of Al-Mahjar: Arab American Literature Spans a Century[38]
- Pavilion K. Gibran at École Pasteur in Montréal, Quebec, Canada
- Gibran Memorial Plaque in Copley Square, Boston, Massachusetts see Kahlil Gibran (sculptor).
- Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public high school in Brooklyn, NY, opened in September 2007
- Khalil Gibran Park (Parcul Khalil Gibran) in Bucharest, Romania
- Gibran Kalil Gibran sculpture on a marble pedestal indoors at Arab Memorial building at Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil
- Gibran Khalil Gibran Memorial, in front of Plaza de las Naciones, Buenos Aires.
- Gibran Khalil Gibran Cultural Space in northern Caracas, Venezuela.
