Gibran and Orientalism

Gibran and Orientalism WAÏL S. HASSAN AHLIL GIBRAN (1883–1931) is the best-known Arab-Amer- ican writer. National monuments are dedicated to him in Bos- K ton and Washington, D.C. His best-known work, The Prophet (1923), has sold over eight million copies and has been translated into more than fifty languages, and it remains Alfred A. Knopf’s best-selling title ever. The Prophet was adapted as a religious drama, repeatedly per- formed at New York’s church of St. Mark’s In-the-Bowery, in which services drawn entirely from Gibran’s poetry were also held, and whose pastor described another of Gibran’s books, Jesus Son of Man, as “The Gospel according to Gibran,”1 “thus making of Gibran the fifth Evan- gelist.”2 Gibran’s other English-language books, and translations of his Arabic ones, remain in print today, unlike the English-language works of his immigrant Lebanese contemporaries, which have long gone out of print. Gibran’s phenomenal popularity is in large part based on his aura as spiritual guru or Oriental wise man, bolstered by his self-styled prophetic posture, his use of biblical idiom, his universalist, didactic, and often aphoristic writings, and his paradoxical blend of the Romantic visionary, Nietzschean idealist, Eastern mystic, and Christian evangelist. Gibran was not the first Arab-American to publish in either Arabic or English. Ameen Rihani (1876–1940) was already a celebrated author in 1 Barbara Young, This Man from Lebanon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945): 33. 2 Irfan Shahid, “Gibran and the American Literary Canon: The Problem of The Pro- phet,” in Tradition, Modernity and Posmodernity in Arabic Literature: Essays in Honor of Professor Issa J. Boullata, ed. Kamal Abdel-Malek & Wael Hallaq (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000): 324. 66 WAÏL S. HASSAN ^ Arabic before Gibran’s first literary work, Dam’a wa ibtisamah, appeared in 1914. Before Gibran published his first English-language book, The Madman (1918), Rihani had also published the first Arab-American poetry collection, Myrtle and Myrrh (1905), the first Arab-American play, Wajdah (1909), and the first Arab-American novel, The Book of Khalid (1911), among other works. Likewise, Abraham Mitrie Rihbany (1869– 1944) published the first Arab-American autobiography, A Far Journey (1914), which was followed by several well-received books on Christian- ity, Syrian history, culture, politics, and USA–Syrian relations. Yet Rihani and Rihbany are today known only to academic specialists, whereas Gib- ran’s tremendous success and lasting fame have led many Arab-American writers to find in him an exemplary and inspirational predecessor, and some even to regard him as the progenitor of Arab-American literature. This lionization of Gibran is perhaps understandable for members of a US minority that suffers from entrenched anti-Arab racism, and whose literary tradition struggles for recognition in the face of a market-driven culture industry. Reclaiming one of America’s most beloved and commer- cially successful writers as the founding father of Arab-American literature is one way of gaining favour with the mainstream. As Khalil Hawi writes, the Lebanese immigrants […] further[ed] the fame and the greatness of their prophet in the eyes of the Americans who looked down on them, considering them as members of the yellow race whose sole purpose in life was the accumulation of money. Gibran’s spiritual writings in English furnished them with proof that they came from a better race and had higher aims in life.”3 Yet Gibran has never been taken seriously by scholars and critics, some of whom regard him as a “charlatan,”4 or as a writer whose work is no more than “fast food” poetry,5 a “welcome escape route”6 for those “ill 3 Khalil Hawi, Kahlil Gibran: His Background, Character and Works (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1963): 73. 4 Evelyn Shakir, “Arab-American Literature,” in New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage, ed. Alpana Sharma Knippling (Westport CT: Greenwood P, 1996): 4. 5 Gregory Orfalea & Sharif Elmusa, Grape Leaves: A Century of ArabAmerican Poetry, ed. Orfalea & Elmusa (Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 1988): xvi. 6 Khalil Hawi, Kahlil Gibran: His Background, Character and Works, 281. .

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