Abstract
The essay engages with the work and reception of the Arab émigré writer Kahlil Gibran by underscoring the bilingualism of his enterprise and the problem of reception it has generated. Adopting what Edward Said calls a worldly attitude to texts, the essay argues that Gibran’s bilingual work must be first located within the intellectual context of the Nahda or Arab renaissance/awakening in the nineteenth century, so as to qualify Gibran’s contribution to Arabic literature and, in particular, what I consider the post-religious vision of his poetic enterprise. The essay goes on to examine the translational reconfiguration of this poetic vision when it travels across language, culture and location, in light of Gibran’s rather anxious switch from Arabic into English. This travelling entails attention to the initial reception of his work in the United States – a reception that often deemed his texts Oriental and spiritual in a monolithic and unexamined manner – and to the later reception of his English work in the Arab world, where it is “Arabized” and given another hermeneutic life and value. A rounded and more complex picture of “Gibran” therefore emerges, one that derives from the methodological necessity to look at “world literature” beyond English and Euro-America as linguistic and epistemic norms, respectively.
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Notes
- 1.
Naimy, Mikhail. Kahlil Gibran: A Biography (New York: Philosophical Library, 1988), 156.
- 2.
This is full Arabic name of Gibran by which he is known in the Arab world. For an account of the Americanization of his name as Kahlil Gibran, which was imposed on him at school in the United States, see Francesco Medici, “Racing Gibran’s Footsteps: Unpublished and Rare Material” in Gibran in the 21th Century: Lebanon’s Message to the World, edited by H. Zoghaib and M. Rihani, (Beirut: Center for Lebanese Heritage, LAU, 2018), 93–145.
- 3.
Naimy, Kahlil Gibran, 156.
- 4.
Sheehi, Stephen. Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Florida: University of Florida Press, 2003), 4.
- 5.
Massad, Joseph Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3–6.
- 6.
- 7.
Sheehi, Foundations, 98–100.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
“Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.” See Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (London: Routledge: 1978), 217.
- 11.
On the chain of signification that links hospitality to hostility in relation to “ipseity,” that is, to the “I can” rather than merely to “the capacity to say I” which comes before any “identity” of the subject, see Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 14. I draw on this reflection of ipseity as indissociable from power in the context of Gibran’s bilingualism, which I see as conditioned by the hospitality of the host language that is interlocked with the hostility of imperial culture in its construction of the xenos in ethnic, racial and civilizational terms that are “inferior,” what I call the bilingual chasm.
- 12.
Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? (Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4, 5.
- 13.
Said, Edward. The World, The Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991), 82.
- 14.
See Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, 4, 5.
- 15.
See, for instance, translations of his poems “Veiled Land,” “Earth” and “Fame” in Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, 72–74.
- 16.
See for instance, his short realist plays in Arabic, Assilbān (published in al-ʿAwāṣif), Between Night and Morn, The Beginning of a Revolution and Coloured Faces, all of which were published in the Arab Mahjari press and collected in John Daye, ʿAqīdat Jubrān [The Doctrine of Gibran] (London: Dār Surāqia, 1988), as well as his well-known but understudied Sufi-oriented play Iram Dhāt al-ʿImād (Iram, City of Lofty Pillars), published in 1921, an Arabic precursor to The Prophet.
- 17.
See Adonis, al-Thābit wa al-Mutaḥawwil: Baḥth fi al-Ittibāʿ wa al-Ibdāʿ ʿinda al-ʿArab: Ṣadmat al-Ḥadātha [The Fixed and the Changing in Arabic Poetics, vol. 3] (Beirut: Dār al-ʿAwda, 1978), 158–211.
- 18.
Ibid., 164, 165.
- 19.
Ibid., 210.
- 20.
Maurice Blanchot, “Prophetic Speech,” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 79.
- 21.
Gibran has two pieces of poetic prose entitled “ruʾyā”, where he tries to embody in aesthetic terms what he “sees” and “hears” in his vision, his “hearing eye” as he calls it in al-Musīqa [Music] (1905). What matters here is not so much vision per se as the way in which it discloses itself in language, which is dramatized or defamiliarized in the excessive and novel use of metaphors, metonymies and similes.
- 22.
See William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989), xv.
- 23.
Adonis, al-Thābit wa al-Mutaḥawwil, 166. All translations from the Arabic in this essay are mine unless otherwise stated.
- 24.
“Why should not art in general go through the same fire which I go through? If we are all marching towards the Absolute, which is a simplified vision of Life, art should not stay where it is now,” he once wrote to Mary Haskell.” Beloved Prophet: The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell (London: A. Knopf Inc., 1972), 122. I will only refer to the date of the letter or journal entry in following citations from this book.
- 25.
I use this term, partly in the sense that Paul Ricoeur, despite the Christian, European context within which he speaks, uses, which for him stands for the kind of faith that goes beyond “prohibition, accusation, punishment and condemnation,” and is both “destructive and liberating.” See “Religion, Atheism, Faith,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 441–445.
- 26.
References to “longing,” and sometimes he calls it “desire,” as an ontological and metaphysical force of being as becoming are recurrent in Gibran, “desire for more of itself [the soul], hunger for that which is beyond itself,” he wrote to Mary Haskell (Feb. 10, 1916). In his play Iram Dhāt al-ʿImād [Iram, the City of Lofty Pillars], the Sufi female figure says, “man is able to long [yatashawwaq] and long until longing uncovers the veil of phenomena over his sight so he can now contemplate or witness [yushāhid] his being” [emphasis mine]. Gibran deliberately employs the verb yushāhid here, which is reminiscent of the Sufi maqām or station of mushāhada, contemplation or witnessing of the Real. See al-Majmūʿa al-Kāmila li Muʾallafāt Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān bi al-ʿArabiyya [The Collected Works in Arabic] (Lebanon: Kitābuna li an-Nashr, 2014), 333.
- 27.
KG to MH 10 Feb 1916.
- 28.
See “God’s fool” in Gibran, The Collected Works (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 54–56.
- 29.
Ibid., 110, 157.
- 30.
Ibid., 129, 130; “We cannot fully understand the nature of God because we are not God, but we can make ready our consciousness to understand, and grow through, the visible expressions of God.” KG to MH 6 Jan 1916. [emphasis in the original].
- 31.
“God is not the creator of man. God is not the creator of the earth. God is not the ruler of man nor of earth. God desires man and earth to be like Him, and a part of him. God is growing through His desire, and man and earth, and all there is upon earth, rise towards God by the power of desire. And desire is the inherent power that changed all things. It is the law of all matter and all life.” KG to MH 30 Jan 1916.
- 32.
Gibran, The Collected Works, 66, 73, 122, 140.
- 33.
Gibran. “The Greater Sea,” Ibid., 37, 38. Almost the same piece features under the same title in Arabic. See The Collected Works in Arabic, 312, 313.
- 34.
“My God, my aim and my fulfilment; I am thy yesterday and thou art my tomorrow. I am thy root in the earth and thou art my flour in the sky, and together we grow before the face of the sun.” Ibid., 6.
- 35.
Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 7.
- 36.
In his essay “al-jabābira” [The Giants] published in The Tempests, Gibran writes, “to me, this law [evolutionism] applies to both immaterial and material (sensory) living entities, for it transforms religions and nations to the better as much as it transforms all creatures from the fitting to the fittest. Therefore, there is only retrogression in appearance and decadence in the superficial,” going on to contend that though it does sometimes manifest itself unjustly and adversely, its invisible force is “just and enlightening.” The Collected Works in Arabic, 248.
- 37.
I would argue that the notion of death as passage or bridge in the Abrahamic monotheistic religions is that which makes this embrace of reincarnation possible for Gibran, as both are antithetical to what Heidegger calls the being-towards-death.
- 38.
Adonis, al-Thābit wa al-Mutaḥawwil, 210. [emphasis in the original].
- 39.
Motifs such as “I am God,” “Higher Self,” “holism,” “reincarnation” and “universal interconnectedness” prevalent in the New Age movement share an affinity with Gibran’s notion of the Greater Self and his evolutionary religious vision. The latter, however, insofar as it is prophetic, remains essentially Abrahamic, if unorthodox, evolutionist and non-eschatological. For a remarkable scholarly account of the New Age thought, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht, 1995), especially 176–190, 222–231.
- 40.
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marking the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001), 16, 17.
- 41.
Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins, Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998), 330 (note 107).
- 42.
Joan Acocella, “The Prophet Motive: the Kahlil Gibran Phenomenon.” The New York Times, Jan 7, 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/01/07/prophet-motive.
- 43.
See Ziad Elmarsafy, “User-friendly Islams: Translating Rumi in France and the United States,” in Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora, ed. Ella Shohat and Evelyn Alsultany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 264–281.
- 44.
Ibid., 265, 272.
- 45.
See also, Amira El-Zein, “Spiritual Consumption in the United States: The Rumi Phenomenon,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 11, no, 1 (2000): 71–85.
- 46.
Almustafa, the principle character of the book, is leaving the island of Orphalese in which he stayed for 12 years to return to his homeland. In other words, he speaks as an exile. The invented character(s) and setting as well as the language of The Prophet could themselves be understood as essentially exilic, to the extent they represent an imaginary world that does not “mimic” but stands “outside” the world as we know it, even outside, if on the surface, the linguistic world of Arabic. In other words, what we have here is a metamorphosis of an immigrant experience into an exilic literary and metaphysical expression, one that exile marks even its “genre,” since one of the difficulties of dealing with The Prophet lies in its categorization.
- 47.
KG to MH, 12 June 1918.
- 48.
Jean Gibran and Kahlil G Gibran, Khalil Gibran: His Life and World (New York: Interlink Books, 1998), 313.
- 49.
Steven G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), x.
- 50.
Ibid., 2.
- 51.
Ibid., 16.
- 52.
MH Journal, 6 May 1918.
- 53.
Jean and G Gibran, Kahlil Gibran, 363, 364.
- 54.
Abdelfattah Kilito, Je parle toutes les langues, mais en Arabe [I Speak all Languages, but in Arabic] (Arles: Sindibad-Actes Sud), 2013.
- 55.
KG to MH, 22 Oct 1912.
- 56.
See Gibran Khalil Gibran, Iqlib al-Ṣafḥa yā Fatā: Makhtūtāt lam Tunshar [Turn the Page: Hitherto Unpublished Manuscripts], (Lebanon: Gibran’s National Committee, 2010), 20.
- 57.
Gibran, The Collected Works in Arabic, 193.
- 58.
Gibran, The Collected Works, 6, 8, 33, 35, 39.
- 59.
Ibid., 53.
- 60.
The name of the principle character in The Prophet, and one of the names ascribed to prophet Muhammad, meaning the chosen one.
- 61.
Gibran, The Collected Works, 479, 514.
- 62.
Fethi Meskini, al-Hawiyya wa al-Ḥurriyya: Naḥwa Anwār Jadīda [Identity and Freedom: Towards a New Aufklärung] (Beirut: Dār Jadāwil, 2011), 16.
- 63.
The Collected Works, 37, 38.
- 64.
Drew M. Dalton, Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009), 57.
- 65.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1978), 49–51.
- 66.
We should not forget that in that historical context, the distribution of identity and imaginative geography along racialist and essentialist hierarchical terms was entrenched in the cultural discourse of Euro-America.
- 67.
Blanchot, “Prophetic Speech,” 79, 80.
- 68.
Jean and G Gibran, Kahlil Gibran: Beyond Borders (New York: Interlink Books, 2016) 304.
- 69.
Ibid., 305; The Evening Post, 29 March 1919, 10.
- 70.
Jean and G Gibran, Kahlil Gibran: Beyond Borders, 305.
- 71.
Ibid.
- 72.
Robin Waterfield, Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 216.
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
See Stephen Willian Forster, “The Exotic as a Symbolic System.” Dialectical Anthropology 7, no. 1 (September 1982): 21–30.
- 75.
Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices: An Introduction to Contemporary Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 27, 95.
- 76.
Said, The World, 39.
- 77.
To the best of my knowledge, this remains, along with Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Literature (Utah: University of Utah Press, 1988), the only two serious anthologies of American literature to include Gibran’s work.
- 78.
Waterfield, Prophet, 260, 261.
- 79.
“By “significant geographies” we mean the conceptual, imaginative, and real geographies that texts, authors, and language communities inhabit, produce, and reach, which typically extend outwards without (ever?) having a truly global reach.” This notion is “a way of ensuring sensitivity to the richness and plurality of spatial imaginings that animate texts, authors, and publics in the world.” Karima Laachir, Sara Marzagora and Francesca Orsini, “Significant Geographies in Lieu of World Literature,” Journal of World Literature 3 (2018): 293–94 [emphasis in the original].
- 80.
I prefer to describe his English work as Arabic literature in English, rather than in exile, that is to say, as Arabic literature that went beyond its linguistic boundaries, therefore belonging to two linguistic and cultural worlds.
- 81.
A comparative study of The Prophet’s translations into Arabic and French has been recently published by Najwa Salim Nassir, under the title, The Prophet, Arabic and French Translations: A Comparative and Linguistic Analysis (Beirut: Librairie de Liban, 2018). French translations of Gibran’s English and Arabic works are also numerous. https://gibranchair.umd.edu/news/new-analysis-arabic-and-french-translations-prophet.
- 82.
Jubrān Khalil Jubrān, The Compete Collected Works Arabized (in Arabic), trans. Nadim Naimy (Beirut: Nawfal, 2015).
- 83.
Geoffrey Nash makes the generalized claim that “Muslim Arabs might find the title of his most celebrated work [The Prophet] offensive from the beginning.” The Arab Writer in English: Arab Themes in a Metropolitan Language, 1908–1958 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), 13. Such assumptions, which betray unawareness of the reception of Gibran’s English work in the Arab world, run the risk of essentializing the “Muslim Arabs”–a gesture that echoes old Orientalist clichés about Arabs and Muslims as static and intolerant–while engaging in a “postmodernist” critique of Gibran’s English works by “applying” Western theories (Jameson and Eagleton) on them.
- 84.
Wail Hassan makes a similar contention: “A title such as The Prophet would have been offensive to Arab readers,” he writes, going as far as contending that “even though the book was later translated into Arabic, it remains, together with his other books translated from English, far less known than his earlier, Arabic work.” Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 70. There are at least four elements to which Hassan’s account fails to attend: Gibran’s Arab Christian origins, the literary/aesthetic and fictional nature of his adoption of the poet-prophetic stance, the Arab scholarship on his work as well as the dynamics and heterogeneity of modern Arab culture and society. Generalized comments about Arab Muslim readers and the intimation of their intolerance towards the different may paradoxically reproduce the same Orientalist stereotypes that such critical engagements set out to unravel.
- 85.
See Adonis, al-Thābit wa al-Mutaḥawwil, 210.
- 86.
Fethi Meskini is the distinguished professor of philosophy at Tunis University. Largely, but not exclusively, interested in German philosophy, he is one of the new philosophical voices in the Maghreb and the Arab world that have risen to prominence over the last two decades, with many significant publications including Falsafat al-Nawābit [Philosophy of al-Nawābit] (1997), al-Dīn wa al-Imbrāṭūriyya [Religion and Empire] (2005) and al-Hawiyya wa al-Ḥurriyya [Identity and Freedom] (2011), as well as ground-breaking translations into Arabic of philosophical works such as Heidegger’s Being and Time, Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals and Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
- 87.
The essay’s title in Arabic is “Barāqiʿ al-ʿAql, aw Jubrān wa al-Anā al-Majnūn” in Fethi Meskini, al-Kojīto al-Majrūḥ: Asʾilat al-Hawiyya fi al-Falsafa al-Muʿāṣira [The Wounded Cogito: Questions of Identity in Contemporary Philosophy] (Algiers: Editions el-ikhtilef; Riyadh, Beirut: Dhifaf Publishing, 2013), 191–196.
- 88.
Fethi Meskini, Falsafat al-Nawābit [Philosophy of Nawābi] (Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalīʿa, 1997), 33–47.
- 89.
Meskini, The Wounded Cogito, 191.
- 90.
Ibid.
- 91.
Petr Zima, “Problems of Reading-Response Criticism: From Hermeneutics to Phenomenology,” in The Philosophy of Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 59.
- 92.
Gibran, The Collected Works, 5.
- 93.
Ibid.
- 94.
Meskini, The Wounded Cogito, 194.
- 95.
Ibid., 192.
- 96.
Gibran, The Collected Works, 5; Meskini, The Wounded Cogito, 193.
- 97.
Meskini, The Wounded Cogito, 192, 193.
- 98.
Ibid.
- 99.
Ibid.
- 100.
I borrow this elegant phrase from Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s Born-Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
- 101.
See Fethi Meskini’s “Fikrat al-Nabiyy fi al-Fikr al- ʿArabī al-Muʿāṣir [The Notion of the Prophet in Contemporary Arab Thought],” where Gibran’s The Prophet and Naimy’s The Book of Mirdad (1948)–both originally written in English–are seen as Arab romantic restatements of the notion of the prophet which, under the secularizing conditions of modernity, has become available as an icon of public use in the modern nation-state, as opposed to its re-deployment as a political, moral and military icon in some strands of Islamist thought in the twentieth century (Sayyid Qutb and al-Maududi). Both deployments–the Romantic and the Islamist–are “post-religious” for Meskini, in that “the prophet” would not be available as an icon/symbol available for public use were it not for the profound normative transformation of this notion in modernity. Taʾwīliyyāt [Hermeneutics], ed. Mohamed Mahjoub 1 (Winter 2018): 44–55.
- 102.
Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 5.
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Arslane, G. (2022). Arabic, American and/or World Literature: Kahlil Gibran’s Bilingualism and the Problem of Reception. In: Tihanov, G. (eds) Universal Localities. Schriften zur Weltliteratur/Studies on World Literature, vol 13. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-62332-9_5
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