2023-05-31 13:19:29
New Yorkers and present-day residents enjoy the artwork left over from a hundred years ago by an old neighbor, Gibran Khalil Gibran. The writer, poet and painter lived his childhood in the Lebanese town of Bsharri, his youth in Boston, and his youth in New York. Between them, he spent four years in Paris and Beirut.
Much is being written now about the exhibition “Gibran’s Return to New York”. Much has been written about him since his death. Statues were erected for him in America and France. It was translated into forty languages, and his books sold millions of copies, especially “The Prophet.” I was among the thousands who wrote, and I have nothing new to add to what I wrote or what they wrote. But I have to apologize. Not for Gibran, but for his most famous companion and best friend, Michael Naima.
I read Gibran, like everyone else, when I was fourteen, the age of grief, love and rebellion. And we all hated the biography that Naima wrote about him. We saw envy, grudge and revenge in it. I saw that Naima tried to belittle his friend, betrayed the trusts, and narrated small details about his life that could have been dispensed with. And I remained with that conviction. And he added that I did not like Naima’s style of writing because it was dry, and he did not emerge from the roughness of the village, as Gibran did. While Gibran’s birds fluttered across the big universe, Naima failed to fly away.
As I watched Gibran’s return to New York, I discovered by chance that I had made a big mistake with Naima. The man put his colleague’s biography on the American way: bitter facts, especially the dramatic ones. Naima wrote in an objective style, and we read in a partisan and partisan way that has more to do with the grudges of the villages than with literary criticism, biography, or the modernity that Naima had discovered and learned from while he was touring between Ukraine and the American states, and fighting in the American army during the First World War.
Naima had to undertake the defense of his book on Gibran. and explain the motives. Especially since he was aware more than anyone else that great ignorance surrounded the people of that stage, and that a strong emotion was controlling them in everything related to Gibran. After 100 years, there is still some refraction in Naima’s wings. New York remembers and New York forgets. New York moves between Gibran’s gardens, where he spent much of his short life, but not from a wooden seat for his companion, “Misha”, as he affectionately called him. In any case, I hope the apology will be accepted even if it means no one.
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#Apologies #Misha