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| Kahlil Gibran | |
|---|---|
| جبران خليل جبران | |
| Gibran in 1913 | |
| Born | January 6, 1883 Bsharri, Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Syria |
| Died | April 10, 1931 (aged 48) New York City, United States |
| Resting place | Bsharri, Lebanon |
| Nationality | Lebanese and American |
| Occupation | Writer, poet, visual artist, philosopher |
| Notable work | The Prophet, The Madman, Broken Wings |
| Movement | Mahjar (Arabic literature), Symbolism |
| Signature | |
Gibran Khalil Gibran (Arabic: جبران خليل جبران, ALA-LC: Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān, pronounced [ʒʊˈbraːn xaˈliːl ʒʊˈbraːn], or Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān, pronounced [ʒɪˈbraːn xaˈliːl ʒɪˈbraːn];[a] January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran[b] (pronounced /kɑːˈliːl dʒɪˈbrɑːn/ kah-LEEL ji-BRAHN),[3] was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected the title.[4] He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.[c] Born in a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite family, the young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895. As his mother worked as a seamstress, he was enrolled at a school in Boston, where his creative abilities were quickly noticed by a teacher who presented him to photographer and publisher F. Holland Day. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fifteen to enroll at the Collège de la Sagesse in Beirut. Returning to Boston upon his youngest sister’s death in 1902, he lost his older half-brother and his mother the following year, seemingly relying afterwards on his remaining sister’s income from her work at a dressmaker’s shop for some time.
In 1904, Gibran’s drawings were displayed for the first time at Day’s studio in Boston, and his first book in Arabic was published in 1905 in New York City. With the financial help of a newly-met benefactress, Mary Haskell, Gibran studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910. While there, he came in contact with Syrian political thinkers promoting rebellion in the Ottoman Empire after the Young Turk Revolution;[6] some of Gibran’s writings, voicing the same ideas as well as anti-clericalism,[7] would eventually be banned by the Ottoman authorities.[8] In 1911, Gibran settled in New York, where his first book in English, The Madman, would be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1918 with writing of The Prophet or The Earth Gods also underway.[9] His visual artwork was shown at Montross Gallery in 1914,[10] and at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co. in 1917. He had also been corresponding remarkably with May Ziadeh since 1912.[8] In 1920, Gibran re-founded the Pen League with fellow Mahjari poets. By the time of his death at the age of 48 from cirrhosis and incipient tuberculosis in one lung, he had achieved literary fame on “both sides of the Atlantic Ocean,”[11] and The Prophet had already been translated into German and French. His body was transferred to his birth village of Bsharri (in present-day Lebanon), to which he had bequeathed all future royalties on his books, and where a museum dedicated to his works now stands.
As worded by Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins, Gibran’s life has been described as one “often caught between Nietzschean rebellion, Blakean pantheism and Sufi mysticism.”[8] Gibran discussed different themes in his writings, and explored diverse literary forms. Salma Khadra Jayyusi has called him “the single most important influence on Arabic poetry and literature during the first half of [the twentieth] century,”[12] and he is still celebrated as a literary hero in Lebanon.[13] At the same time, “most of Gibran’s paintings expressed his personal vision, incorporating spiritual and mythological symbolism,”[14] with art critic Alice Raphael recognizing in the painter a classicist, whose work owed “more to the findings of Da Vinci than it [did] to any modern insurgent.”[15] His “prodigious body of work” has been described as “an artistic legacy to people of all nations.”[16]
Life
Childhood
The Gibran family in the 1880s[d]
The Gibran family’s home in Bsharri, Lebanon
Gibran was born January 6, 1883, in the village of Bsharri in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Empire (modern-day Lebanon).[17] His parents, Khalil Sa’d Gibran[17] and Kamila Rahmeh, the daughter of a priest, were Maronite Christians. Kamila was thirty when Gibran was born, and Gibran’s father, Khalil, was her third husband.[18] Gibran had two younger sisters, Marianna and Sultana, and an older half-brother, Boutros, from one of Kamila’s previous marriages. As a result of his family’s poverty, Gibran received no formal schooling for his first twelve years in Lebanon: in 1888, Gibran entered Bsharri’s one-class school, which was run by a priest, and there he learnt the rudiments of Arabic, Syriac, and arithmetic.[19][20][21]
Gibran’s father Khalil initially worked in an apothecary, but he had gambling debts he was unable to pay. He went to work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator.[22][23] In 1891, while acting as a tax collector, he was removed and his staff was investigated.[24] Khalil was imprisoned for embezzlement,[25] and his family’s property was confiscated by the authorities. Kamila decided to follow her brother to the United States. Although Khalil was released in 1894, Kamila remained resolved and left for New York on June 25, 1895, taking Boutros, Gibran, Marianna and Sultana with her.[22]
F. Holland Day, c. 1898
Photograph of Gibran by F. Holland Day, c. 1898
Kamila and her children settled in Boston’s South End, at the time the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese-American community[26] in the United States. Gibran entered the Josiah Quincy School on September 30, 1895. School officials placed him in a special class for immigrants to learn English. His name was registered using the anglicized spelling ‘Kahlil Gibran’.[2][27] His mother began working as a seamstress[24] peddler, selling lace and linens that she carried from door to door. His half-brother Boutros opened a shop. Gibran also enrolled in an art school at Denison House, a nearby settlement house. Through his teachers there, he was introduced to the avant-garde Boston artist, photographer and publisher F. Holland Day,[25] who encouraged and supported Gibran in his creative endeavors. In March 1898, Gibran met Josephine Preston Peabody, eight years older than him, at an exhibition of Day’s photographs “in which Gibran’s face was a major subject.”[28] Gibran would develop a romantic attachment to her.[29] The same year, a publisher used some of Gibran’s drawings for book covers.
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The Collège maronite de la Sagesse in Beirut
Kamila and Boutros wanted Gibran to absorb more of his own heritage rather than just the Western aesthetic culture he was attracted to.[24] Thus, at the age of 15, Gibran returned to his homeland to study for three years at the Collège de la Sagesse, a Maronite-run institute in Beirut. In his final year at the school, he created a student magazine with other students, including Youssef Howayek (who would remain a lifelong friend of his),[30] and he was made the “college poet.”[30] Gibran graduated from the school at eighteen with high honors, then went to Paris to learn painting, visiting Greece, Italy, and Spain on his way there from Beirut.[31] On April 2, 1902, Sultana died, aged 14, from what seems to have been tuberculosis.[30] Upon learning about it, Gibran returned to Boston, arriving two weeks after Sultana’s death.[30][e] The year after, on March 12, Boutros died of the same disease and his mother died of cancer on June 28.[33] Two days later, Peabody “left him without explanation.”[33] Marianna supported Gibran and herself by working at a dressmaker’s shop.[25]