Saint Gibran

from Drawing Papers 153 A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran: A Biographical and Intellectual Sketch

Jordan Nassar

In the Upper West Side apartment where I grew up, one whole wall in the dining room was lined with built-in bookshelves. The white bookshelves, contrasting with the burgundy walls of the room, housed rows and rows of books, interrupted only by a doorway leading to the central hallway of the apartment, towards the living room and bedrooms. The bookshelves carried everything from small, leather-bound, gold-embossed volumes of Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, to a plastic-ring-bound, use-worn copy of Lebanese Cuisine by Madelain Farah, to the bright green, black, and white keffiyeh-print-covered The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism by family-friend, more like an uncle, Muhammad Muslih. Down towards the bottom, to the left of the doorway, near the floor-toceiling wrought-iron wine rack in the corner, my father kept his old medical volumes: Gray’s Anatomy and DSM-I through IV. In the center of the wall, to the right of the doorway, was the only shelf without books; instead it housed trinkets and objets—small spherical glass votive candle holders, tiny carved olivewood camels and horses from Bethlehem, a Nutcracker or two that had escaped the Christmas storage boxes, little painted wooden eggs from Poland, black-and-white photos of great-grandparents standing in ornate metal frames. There was one shelf above the doorway upon which, between a pair of bronze bookend-busts of Abraham Lincoln, lived a row of books, some tall, some stout, each embossed with the name Gibran Kahlil Gibran.

Gibran was my grandfather’s name, Gibran “George” Nassar. This coincidence contributed to my childhood assumption that Gibran Kahlil Gibran was related to us: maybe a great-uncle or at least a distant cousin. The way I’d heard this name mentioned had reinforced this idea; it was familiar, it was family, assumed, obvious, yes, of course, Kahlil Gibran.

My grandmother, Jemelia Nassar, née Haddad, was born in the 1920s in Little Syria, the once-booming nineteenth-century lowerManhattan Arab neighborhood that was demolished in the 1940s to make way for the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Little Syria was an epicenter of arts and culture, the first Arab American community after the initial wave of Arab immigration in the 1880s to which my own family belonged. Famously, this is where Gibran Kahlil Gibran lived for many years, amidst many of the great Arab (American) writers, journalists, and publishers of the time, and it was where he published The Prophet. Our family histories are intertwined.

I had never read a word of The Prophet or any other of his works, until I was in my twenties. The role of Kahlil Gibran in my young life had little to do with his words, his writings. His presence was more like the Virgin Mary in Catholic households, perhaps—her image in the background, up on a shelf, always looming but not a central focus in the lives of its inhabitants. Actually, maybe Mary is too big. Kahlil Gibran was, for our family, a local saint, like in a sleepy little village in the south of France, say, just farmland, horses and donkeys and stone villas, a nondescript one of dozens, but this town, unlike the town over, was the birthplace of a nun in the 1200s who had become a saint. Everyone in town are the only ones who remember her. They feel proud of her and proud of the fact that they’re from where she’s from, maybe someone names a daughter after her every so often, but no one else in the country or the world knows about her, excepting the rare student at a seminary. Saint Dorotea of Montau, Saint Emilie de Villeneuve.

As an adult and an artist, and as a Palestinian American, I think often about my culture and about cultural heritage more generally— how we inherit that which is passed down, how traditions, foods, and music are carried around the world, retained but often skewed, or at least recontextualized. My work is about this cultural heritage, my unique library that I can borrow from, and Kahlil Gibran anchors those bookshelves for me. His words become titles of artworks and exhibitions, as do those of other Arab, Arab American, and Middle Eastern writers and artists: Mahmoud Darwish, Etel Adnan, Monir Farmanfarmaian, Umm Kulthum. Whereas these others I discovered along my way, coming across their exhibitions or learning about them from friends, Gibran has always been there for me, inherited, a tradition, our own personal patron saint, Saint Gibran of Little Syria.