Issam Mahfouz, the late Lebanese writer, put together an amazing dialogue between Gibran Khalil Gibran, May Ziadeh, and the American Mary Haskell. The goal of this synthesis is to draw a close-up picture of Gibran, as it was not possible to imagine a tangible picture of Gibran’s personality except through dialogue, and specifically dialogue with others, not dialogue with oneself, because Gibran, and in the words of Issam Mahfouz, “He could not draw his own image except through the mirrors of others.” ».
The author of this synthesis did not resort to Gibran’s literary works, but rather to his private letters, in order to see in them what he described as Gibran’s “weakness,” which was not truly present, in his opinion, except in these letters. However, talking about weakness here remains a matter of debate, because what appears from the letters is the most intimate and sensitive side of Gibran’s personality, as we saw in Ghassan Kanafani’s correspondence with Ghada Al-Samman. Let us metaphorically say that it is the normal human weakness that does not contradict or negate strength, courage, and sometimes even self-esteem.
Gibran and May Ziadeh’s correspondence extended over a long period of time, twenty years, without them meeting once. Gibran was in his diaspora in the United States and Mai was in Cairo. Gibran avoided such a meeting, perhaps out of a desire to keep the distance between him and Mai, so that the relationship would remain free from the everyday norm. But whoever reads the aforementioned dialogue is amazed when he feels the intimate communication it contains and expresses, approaching places that only loving people usually approach, and it is also filled with details of the feelings that characterize their relationships: reproach, intense longing, and monologue.
Gibran is the one who said about himself that he is the man whom God placed between two women, one whose waking dreams were woven by him, and the other whose waking dreams were woven by him. If May was the latter, then Mary Haskell was the first, so his correspondence with her reflects, among other things, a dialogue between two civilizations: Western. And Eastern. The Western woman, taken by this dreamy Eastern man, is interested in the details of his upbringing, his family, his environment, and the sources of the formation of his culture. Gibran found pleasure in answering the questions she asked of him, so Issam Mahfouz worked on seven thousand pages that Mary Haskell had left in the library of the University of North Carolina in the United States. United States, aiming to present the main outlines of Gibran’s personality traits, who compared himself, in one of his letters to May Ziadeh, to “a small volcano whose crater has been extinguished.” We have to expect what happens to such a volcano. His boiling is transferred to the inside, when the calm external appearance does not reveal the ruptures and interactions that are raging in the soul.
