Her husband never followed his family.

In Tears And Laughter Gibran is perhaps alluding to his lost father in a parable called “The Criminal.”His message is that poor people are made bad by the greed and selfishness of rich people. In the parable a good “young man of strong body weakened by hunger” stretches his hand to all who passed, begging and repeating his sad song of this defeat in life. He’s suffering from hunger and from humiliation. Weeping bitterly while hunger eats his insides, he tells God:

I went to the rich man and asked for employment, but he turned away because of my shabbiness; I knocked at the school door, but was forbidden solace because I was empty-handed; I sought any occupation that would give me bread, but all to no avail.

The criminal becomes “robber, killer and destroyer of souls” crushing all who oppose him. The criminal’s “riches and false position” cause the emir to appoint him deputy in the city. Stealing is then legalized and “oppression supported by authority.” Gibran concludes that “humanity’s selfishness make[s] criminals of the humble…killers of the sons of peace.”

Even as a young man, Gibran seems to have had the intense presence of movie star Omar Sharif. (Photographs of the two men in mid-life show a marked similarity.) In Boston, the child found upper class patrons and supporters. He was encouraged to draw and write at a settlement house. He was sent back to Beirut, Lebanon, for high school and then to Paris to study art. When he returned to Boston at age 19, tragedy stalked him again. His sister, half brother, and mother died. That the young man survived to write this life–affirming volume is tribute to his spiritual strength and artistic genius.

At the end of his parable, “Laughter And Tears,” Gibran joyfully proclaims that looking at slumbering nature he finds spiritual love:

something no power could command, influence acquire, or riches purchase. Nor could it be effaced by the tears of time or deadened by sorrow. [Love] gathers strength with patience, grows despite obstacles, warms in winter, flourishes in spring, casts a breeze in summer, and bears fruit in autumn.

I would like to have known Kahlil Gibran. To read Tears And Laughteris to encounter a noble human being.

 

Susan Braudy

New York, New York 2011

SUSAN BRAUDY is an author and journalist. She did graduate study in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and was an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College. She blogs for The Huffington Post and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Ms. Magazine, New York Magazine and Yale University’s The New Journal. She has also been a vice president of Warner Brothers.

Susan Braudy is the author of five books; her most recent, Family Circle, The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has also written Between Marriage and Divorce, A Woman’s Diary; This Crazy Thing Called Love, a non-fiction account of the Woodward Family; and the novels Who Killed Sal Mineo? and What The Movies Made Me Do.

Ms. Braudy lives with Joe Weintraub in New York City.

Timeline

1883

Gibran is born on January 6th to a poor Maronite family in Besharri, a town in what is now northern Lebanon near the famed “Cedars of Lebanon.” At the time, Lebanon was a Turkish province under Ottoman rule.

1885

Birth of sister Marianna.

1887

Birth of sister Sultana.

1895

Gibran’s father is jailed on charges of graft and his family is left homeless; Gibran, mother Kamila, half-brother Butros, and two sisters emigrate to Boston in the US, leaving his father behind. Kamila makes a living as a peddlar until Butros opens a small shop and supports the family while Kahlil goes to school.

1896

Gibran shows talent in drawing classes. Meets Boston art photographer Fred Holland Day, who has a significant artistic impact on Gibran.

1897

Gibran returns to Lebanon to continue his Arabic-language education; attends Madrasat-al-Hikmah high school in Beirut, including classes in religion, ethics, Arabic and French languages and literature.

1902

Gibran returns to Boston. He loses his sister Sultana and brother Butros to tuberculosis, and his mother Kamila to cancer in the same year.

1904

Holds a picture exhibit at Fred Holland Day’s studio. Meets Mary Haskell, an American school head mistress who begins to support Gibran financially and with his writing in English: she will spend hours with Gibran going over his wording, correcting his mistakes and suggesting new ideas to his writings; their friendship will endure for Gibran’s lifetime.

1905

Gibran publishes in Arabic a small pamphlet on “Music” and begins to publish his prose poems in the al-Muhajir (“The Emigrant”) newspaper.

1906

Publishes Spirit Brides in New York in Arabic. This collection of three short stories reflects his fascination with the Bible, the mystical, the injustice of religious persecution and the nature of love. Begins to get the attention of expatriate Arab intellectuals.

1908

Publishes a second book of short stories, Spirits Rebellious. Goes to Paris to study art through the generosity of Mary Haskell; is influenced by the Symbolist movement.

1910

Returns to Boston. Publishes a book of prose poems, Beyond the Imagination, in Cairo.

1911

Rents a small studio apartment in New York. Begins his manuscript for The Madman in English.