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27 October 2004

Kahlil Gibran Day Celebrated in Boston

Lebanese-American actor stages one-man play about Gibran's life

By Elizabeth Kelleher
Washington File Special Correspondent

Washington -- Thomas M. Menino, mayor of Boston, recently proclaimed ‘Kahlil Gibran Day' to honor the late Arab-American poet, who was born in Besharri in what is today northern Lebanon in 1883 and emigrated to Boston at age 12 with his mother and siblings.

Gibran lived there and later in New York as he forged a successful literary and artistic career. He died in New York City in 1931 and was buried in Lebanon.

Menino's proclamation calls Gibran's masterpiece, The Prophet, "an American classic" and says, "Greater Boston has been a cradle for over a century to a vibrant American-Lebanese Community." Michael A. Sullivan, mayor of the adjacent city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, joined Menino in proclaiming September 18 Kahlil Gibran Day.

The date coincided with a dramatic presentation of Gibran's life and work at the Kresge Theatre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was sponsored by the Lebanese Club at MIT. "A Child of Life" was written and performed by Michel El-Ashkar, 40, who, like Gibran, emigrated from Lebanon to America as a young man.

El-Ashkar's one-man show offers a chronological sequence of scenes from Gibran's life. In addition to playing Gibran, El-Ashkar plays seven other characters and converses with people whose presence on stage is left to the imagination.

The dramatist struggled to title the play. Like any immigrant, or for that matter any artist, El-Ashkar has felt in exile. Both Lebanese and American, he wished his play to form a bridge between the two places, to free him from deciding which country is home and to help Western and Arab peoples know each other.

Gibran understood the immigrant's predicament. In his story "A Ship in the Mist," from a collection titled The Storm, the narrator reports, "...I left Venice and returned to Lebanon, returning like one who had spent a thousand centuries in the depths of fate. I returned like every Lebanese returns -- from exile to exile." Gibran, in fact, returned to Lebanon to study Arabic during his high school years and again later, though the second visit is not documented, according to biographer Suheil Bushrui.

A solution came to El-Ashkar when he was reading the passage on children in The Prophet. Something "socked" him, he said. Now he saw the immigrant's place in the larger context of humanity. He chose the title "A Child of Life" based on Gibran's description of how a child transcends his parentage. El-Ashkar likens it to the way all humans transcend differences of national origin:

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you."

El-Ashkar said his play aims to show U.S. audiences a positive image of an Arab man ("For years, I struggled with auditions because I was cast to play the terrorist," he said) and to show Arab audiences the freedom that America gave Gibran to flourish artistically.

The play quotes heavily from The Prophet; its sets display prints of Gibran paintings published with the text. That work, with chapters on aspects of life such as marriage, work, friendship, pain, and death, "is a road map for a life," said Gibran's cousin and namesake, Kahlil Gibran, 82, a Boston sculptor. With his wife, Jean, the sculptor wrote a detailed biography of the poet's life in America. He said his own favorite passages from The Prophet have varied "as life varies."

The sculptor attended the performance at the Kresge and was transfixed by the portrait El-Ashkar drew. The sculptor was nine and a half years old when the poet died but remembers him, his sister Mariana, and Mary Haskell, the poet's influential mentor. He said that having the name Kahlil Gibran has had drawbacks although the name was also a blessing. "Sometimes it closed doors, because people thought I was rich [and didn't need work]," he said. "But the name to me was a horizon. I knew the man; he let me use his paintboxes."

In addition to performing in Boston and other U.S. cities, El-Ashkar has performed his play in Amman, Jordan, and will perform it in Lebanon for the first time in January.

He is scheduled to perform it in April at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, in conjunction with the opening of a show featuring Gibran paintings. The paintings, while less well known than Gibran's writings, were remarked upon by the French sculptor August Rodin as similar to those of the romantic, British poet and painter William Blake.

But before Gibran could establish himself as a painter, which was his intention, he had begun publishing Arabic newspaper essays in the United States that caused a stir. At age 29, he moved to New York City, where he joined a circle of Arab writers dedicated to modernism. By then he had begun writing in English. The Prophet, which his biographers report has sold more copies than the Bible in the United States, was published in English in 1923, when he was 40 years old.

According to Bushrui, critics get it wrong when they say Gibran brought "an eastern form of mysticism" to the West. Gibran "discovered an America that was religious, but that was tired of old methods of expressing spiritual values. He brings a new interpretation, a restatement in simple language of a biblical nature," Bushrui said, noting that Gibran was a Christian steeped in the Bible. Bushrui said the passage on love in The Prophet (When love beckons to you follow him/Though his ways are hard and steep) echoes Paul's letter to Corinthians 1:13 (Love suffereth long...beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things).

Gibran brought change to the Arab literary world and Arabic language. He subscribed to the school of romantic poetry, which hadn't existed in Arabic poetry. In Arabic, Bushrui said, "nature writing was decorative, but here was someone in communion with nature." He said Gibran's poems allow a "living force to express itself through the words."

Bushrui today heads the Gibran research project of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He hosted a conference several years ago at which El-Ashkar first produced his play.

El-Ashkar said he has been encouraged by the reaction of a 14-year-old Jordanian girl who was a fan of Britney Spears in Amman, Jordan. She told him after the play that she wanted to know more, about Gibran and about America.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)