Gibran’s life and works
After Shakespeare and Lao Tzu, the poet is the world’s most widely-read in history
Gibran Khalil Gibran (known as Kahlil Gibran) was born on January 6, 1883, to the Maronite family of Gibran in Bsharri, a mountainous area in Northern Lebanon.
Over the years, the world has come to know of this man’s beauty and wisdom. His words of love echo from Beirut to New York City, and they will be sung this month across the globe in Salma Hayek’s The Prophet.
Among Gibran’s best works is The Prophet, published in 1923. It has since been translated into more than 50 languages and has never been out of print. It is a book of 26 essays that talk about love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, selfknowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.
The Prophet has sold more than 100 million copies. It is said that after Shakespeare and Lao Tzu, Gibran is the world’s most widely read poet in history, and it is for this reason among many others that his story must be told.
In the movie, Gibran’s poems are transformed into musical numbers.
Leaving an irresponsible husband behind, Gibran’s mother, Kamileh Rahmeh, gathered her four children — Peter, Khalil (12 at the time), Mariana and Sultana — and sailed to the US; the family set foot on the shores of New York on June 25, 1895.
The Gibrans settled in Boston’s South End. Gibran started school on September 30, 1895. The new student had no previous formal education. His early knowledge was developed from visits to a village priest who taught him the essentials of the Bible as well as the rudiments of the alphabet and language. During his school years, Gibran had a strong inclination for the arts and drawing.
In 1898, he returned to Lebanon to study Arabic and French at the College La Sagesse in Beirut. However, in 1902, Gibran received news of his sister’s death and returned to Boston. Sultana had died of tuberculosis. A few months later Gibran also lost his halfbrother and mother.
One influential person in Gibran’s life was Mary Haskell, a teacher from South Carolina, whom he met in 1904. Haskell provided financial support to Gibran and used her influence to advance his career. She also became his editor.
Gibran began writing a column, Tears and Laughter, for the Arabic newspaper Al Mohajer (The Emigrant). This became the basis for A Tear and a Smile, [Dam’a wa Ibtisama], published in 1914.
He moved to Paris in 1908 to pursue further artistic training in the symbolist tradition. In 1910, he returned to the US and settled in New York. Gibran’s first book in English was The Madman, published in 1918.
The poet also founded, along with other Arab and Lebanese co-writers and poets living in the US, a literary society called Al Rabitat Al Qalamiya (The Pen League Society). Gibran died in 1931 at the age of 48 in New York after a battle with cancer. The citizens of Lebanon happily received his coffin celebrating their “prophet’s” homecoming. A two-day vigil was held in his honour on the streets of New York, and his death was mourned both in Lebanon as well as in the US. Today, his body rests in the monastery of Mar Sarkis (Saint Serge), which was purchased by Haskell and his sister Mariana, and has since became the Gibran Museum.