Gibran Gibran Khalil  

Becharré (Lebanon), 1882-New York, 1931

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His life raises one question: how to live exiles, with such multiple cities, languages, and cultures? Gibran Khalil Gibran divided himself between three cities, Beirut, Paris and New York; three languages, Arabic, French and English; three cultures, French, English and Arab; and finally, two modes of expression, literature and painting. A painter and writer, he neither chose between his two vocations, nor ceased to move from one to the other. The two modes of expression served to support a pictorial, literary and spiritual research; language and painting seeming to be located somewhere between Blake and Nietzsche, merging style and utilitarian language.

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Gibran, a Maronite from North Lebanon, approached what he saw with an inner exaltation that he brought to America, where he emigrated. In his youth, he lived in Chinatown from 1895-1898, and was taken care of by Holland Day, who encouraged him to make models and introduced him to some Bostonians. The Lebanese man from Chinatown would get it into his head to give a lecture to the whole of Boston, then to the whole of America. He succeeded in doing so much later. In 1898 he returned to Lebanon and enrolled at the Collège de la Sagesse, where he studied Arabic. One of his classmates was Youssef Hoyeck, the nephew of the Maronite patriarch and a future sculptor who became an important and complex figure on the cultural scene.

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From 1908-1909, Gibran lived in Paris. The memories of Hoyeck, who was with him, clearly show the influence he had over his friend. Gibran made his drawings, and it might be supposed that he pushed Hoyeck to become a sculptor so that he could see his own drawings come to life. To see sculpture as a mere craftsmanship was his revenge against on Rodin, whom he met only once under the secret sign of the poet Rilke and who was, in an imaginary relationship, the artistic father figure, both loved and loathed. 

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America was nevertheless Gibran’s fundamental experience. At the turn of the century, some Lebanese were migrating to Egypt, which welcomed intellectuals and merchants, while the greatest number went to America. Gibran perfectly illustrates the way in which the Lebanese dealt with this America. He expected full approval, and ended up getting it, in this country that he wanted to conquer and that, henceforth, only words could defeat.

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With the help an American schoolmistress, Mary Haskell, he touched the average American, fond of spirituality. She taught him how to write in English, and educated him in a field where she considered her student to be naturally superior. This relation inspired him, through projection, the character of the Prophet, a heterogeneous assembly of diverse influences. Of course it was a prophet for the rural farming communities of the Midwest, but it was because of these Americans that he was able to become what he was. The writer in slippers, turning in circles in his room in New York, turned himself into a thaumaturge, with a feeling for staging that was necessary for him to conjure the disasters that he foresaw.

The neurotic and slightly paranoid figure of Gibran carried within itself the failure of his project and of his ambition, and therefore the failure of the artist. Did he want to preach, to convert the whole of America to his theosophy and his mystique, to his religion of love, when he knew very well from his Oriental origins that love has no religion? Or was he too close to the Protestant reading of religion, that would not know how to embody love, with all the bodies populating both the dreams of Eden ant its nightmares ? He behaved like a tormented Oriental transformed into a Protestant pastor by the wanderings of exile.

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The mystery of the Orient and, beyond the American picturesque, a kind of revitalization lived within him from the start, mixed with Blake and Madame Blavatsky, the Bible and the Koran. He synthesised Jesus Christ, Blake, and Nietzsche, all of whom whipped up his energy and his ambition to say everything in one go, in a way of taking charge of what he had learnt from the West, and of the heritage of the entire Orient – or at least what he believed it to be, as a descendant of an old family that was originally from Iraq, a country with a mania for the most ancient gods.

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Was his mysticism serious? In the image one has of him, at least in Lebanon, the Maronite who has succeeded inspires a large part of ambivalence. After his death, this ambivalence had a greater impact on the selfless acts than on consciences. His private life consisted in playing with the millennium for the American lady who mothered him and, from afar, the suffering of May Zyadeh. He achieved, in his legend and writings at least, the synthesis of the prophetisms of the Orient and created a new religion for himself: literature. He achieved Blake’s dream, but as a Protestant pastor tortured by Nietzsche, for whom, the grace of the body being the first salvation, Heaven layed in the sweetness of words and the magic of the English language, capable of giving words the necessary pragmatism in order to give them more reality and closeness, in the desire and taste for the impossible. 

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At the outset, Gibran the writer had an undeniable presence. Ever since his first texts in Arabic, he had understood their distribution would be limited, and that a solitary rebellion could only have a never-ending discussion with itself. He stopped writing in Arabic in 1918.

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Gibran’s pictorial world is an illustration of his internal and poetic world; his poetry is manifested in the drawing. But, to him, drawing and painting were ultimately secondary activities. In his drawings, external bodies only existed to be immediately integrated into his fantasies, into the ambitions of the exile. 

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Much later, it was understood that this ambition concealed the imminent conjuring of the disaster, and that all these bodies were only dead to the eyes of absent gods. For the artist – that is to say, for the becoming man – the vital thing was to know how far he could stand his sufferings. Gibran lived through all these interior divisions without always finding an answer, and this is why he left unbalanced accounts to his readers. 

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The question that he asked, beyond the path of the individual, was about the relationship between worlds and cultures, and how one can fit in and function in each of them. 

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For the most part, his question was: how to confront the West, and how to respond to exile? In his writing, all his cultures were linked by the absolute need to stand out from them, to create his own language and his own form. This was, for him, the most difficult and painful part.

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Gibran had an exhibition in New York at the Montross Gallery in 1914, and then a second, in 1917, at the Knoedler Gallery. He also had two exhibitions in Boston. The museum that is dedicated to him in his home village, in Lebanon, has a collection of some of his drawings and canvases.