In the way that the late Mahmoud Darwish used his poetry to express the struggle and suffering of the Palestinian people, another great Arab poet used his literary gifts to heal the hearts and minds of ordinary people seeking a balm for everyday pains and help negotiate the obstacle course we call life. It has been 77 years since Khalil Gibran drew his last breath but through his works he enjoys rare immortality.

How did one person embrace so much wisdom? This is the question asked by millions who still revere Lebanon’s best-loved philosopher, writer and poet, who remained unmarried and childless until the day he died.

How did a man who barely received any formal education in his youth due to his family’s poverty, take possession of such complex languages as Arabic and English and use them so expertly as tools to express the depth of his insights?

Only the writings of the English bard William Shakespeare and the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse surpass Gibran in terms of readership, which means Gibran’s messages imparting the meaning of love, marriage, friendship, freedom, work, pain, joy, sorrow and passing resonate in our subconscious minds.








Amazingly, his advice is not only beautifully framed but many contemporary psychologists would agree, it is also therapeutic. For example, rather than echo the sentimentally of two becoming one during marriage, in the Prophet he writes:

“But let there be spaces in your togetherness,And let the winds of theheavens 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.

Joy and sorrow are two sides of the same entity, he writes:

“Some of you say, ‘Joy is greater than sorrow’, and others say, ‘Nay, sorrow is the greater’.
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board,
Remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Further, he admonishes us not be upset when we are separated from a friend:

“When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain”.

He describes “evil” as “good tortured by its own hungry and thirst”; “beauty” as “eternity gazing as itself in the mirror”; “giving” as “life that gives unto life – while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness”. He tells us to view our “house” as “a mast” rather than “an anchor” and “not to dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living”.

Each of us must interpret Gibran in our own way according to our own parameters. But to me, he speaks of personal freedom, of the need to let go of worn-out concepts, and the mistakes people make striving to find their own inner security in people or things.

A personal favourite quote deals with boundaries within marriage:






“Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow”.

Gibran’s best-known work is “The Prophet”, which has dominated the best-selling lists ever since it was first published in 1920 and has been translated into 26 languages.

Born Gibran Khalil Gibran bin Mikhael bin Saad, his English teacher in the US anglicised his name to Khalil Gibran. Soon after, at the age of 12, he emigrated to New York with his mother, half-brother and two younger sisters.

While his alcoholic father remained in the northern Lebanese town of Bsharri, (then part of Syria), his mother was forced to become a door-to-door saleswoman to survive until she managed to save enough to open a dry goods store.

At the age of 15, he returned to Lebanon to pursue his studies and after co-founding a college literary magazine, he was elected ‘College Poet’. Just weeks before his return to Boston in 1902, tragedy struck; his sister died of tuberculosis and a year later his brother’s young life was similarly cut short, while his mother died after being ravaged by cancer.

Perhaps it was these terrible losses that afflicted his young existence that gave him an insight into the futility of trying to hang onto those we love.

His family decimated by disease, the most important people in Gibran’s life, apart from his surviving sister Mariana, were an American school mistress Mary Elizabeth Haskell ten years his senior and the Lebanese artist Youssef Howayek, with whom he studied, (and became a lifelong friend of), in Paris under Auguste Rodin.
Gibran’s relationship with Mary – generally believed to have been platonic, although emotive – was complex as can be seen from their letters; extracts of which have been published. It is known that Mary Haskell became his editor and patron, facilitating his studies in Paris and enabling him to concentrate on his artistic and literary pursuits.

On April 10, 1931, Gibran succumbed to TB and cirrhosis of the liver, leaving his studio and its contents to Mary Haskell and his book royalties to his hometown Bsharri. In his Will, he asked to be buried in his beloved Lebanon.
 

The Palestinian poet Salma Khadra Jayyusi once wrote that Gibran’s “vision of a world made sterile by dead mores and conventions” was “redeemable through love, goodwill, and constructive action”.

It is because the spirit that still shines from his words is uplifting and positive, his messages are as relevant today as they were on the day he filled his pen with ink to so beautifully enrich posterity and make his country proud.