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YOU HAVE YOUR LEBANON AND I HAVE MINE

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Salameh F.

Rocznik Orientalistyczny

2008

vol. 61

issue 1

34-43

This study seeks to demonstrate that Kahlil Gibran, one of modern Lebanon's most celebrated cultural figures of the past 100 years, was not only a man-of-letters, but also an inspired national poet who incarnated and inaugurated the modern Lebanese national idea. Indeed, widely accepted wisdom in the modern-day Lebanon holds that the prevalent narrative of Lebanese history - the one that claims Lebanon to be the progeny of some Phoenician ancestor, not the direct descendant of an Arab progenitor - was the brainchild of young francophone Lebanese poets and artists who burst onto the intellectual and political scene in the early 1920s. To some extent, those young intellectuals - among whom the most renowned were Charles Corm and Michel Chiha - were instrumental in normalizing and intellectualizing the Phoenicianist myth of origin and of the non-Arab pedigree of the modern Lebanese. But, as this study will attempt to show, it was in fact Kahlil Gibran who provided the early impulses and the intellectual moorings to this Lebanonist national narrative. However, given that the bulk of his work was in English - a language well-nigh incomprehensible to the bulk of the Lebanese of his generation - and given that his other works, in the Arabic language, were claimed to the 'genius' of modern Arabic literature, the Phoenicianist references, similes, imageries and metaphors with which Gibran infused his literary output were misplaced or lost to the Arabist narrative. A careful reconsideration and vetting of Gibran's work, both in Arabic and in English, reveals a Phoenicianist par excellence, and an exceptional exponent of the Phoenician Lebanese national narrative.

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1 Rocznik Orientalistyczny

1 Salameh F.

1 2008

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YOU HAVE YOUR LEBANON AND I HAVE MINE