Gibran and Gebran lead here.
For other persons named Gibran, Gebran, Jibran, Jebran, see Gebran
Khalil Gibran was a Lebanese artist, poet, and writer.
Born in the town of Bsharri in the north of modern-day Lebanon, as a young man he immigrated
with his family to the United States, where he studied art and began his literary career,
writing in both English and Arabic.
In the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a literary and political rebel.
His romantic style was at the heart of a renaissance in modern Arabic literature, especially prose
poetry, breaking away from the classical school.
In Lebanon, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.
He is chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book The Prophet, an early
example of inspirational fiction including a series of philosophical essays written in
poetic English prose.
The book sold well despite a cool critical reception, gaining popularity in the 1930s
and again especially in the 1960s counterculture.
Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Laozi.
Life Early years
Khalil Gibran was born into a Maronite Catholic family from the historical town of Bsharri
in northern Mount Lebanon, then a semi-autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire.
His mother Kamila, daughter of a priest, was thirty when he was born; his father Khalil
was her third husband.
As a result of his family's poverty, Gibran received no formal schooling during his youth
in Lebanon.
However, priests visited him regularly and taught him about the Bible, as well as the
Arabic and Syriac languages.
Gibran's father initially worked in an apothecary, but with gambling debts he was unable to pay,
he went to work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator.
Around 1891, extensive complaints by angry subjects led to the administrator being removed
and his staff being investigated.
Gibran's father was imprisoned for embezzlement, and his family's property was confiscated
by the authorities.
Kamila Gibran decided to follow her brother to the United States.
Although Gibran's father was released in 1894, Kamila remained resolved and left for New
York on June 25, 1895, taking Khalil, his younger sisters Mariana and Sultana, and his
elder half-brother Peter.
The Gibrans settled in Boston's South End, at the time the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese-American
community in the United States.
Due to a mistake at school, he was registered as "Kahlil Gibran".
His mother began working as a seamstress peddler, selling lace and linens that she carried from
door to door.
Gibran started school on September 30, 1895.
School officials placed him in a special class for immigrants to learn English.
Gibran also enrolled in an art school at a nearby settlement house.
Through his teachers there, he was introduced to the avant-garde Boston artist, photographer,
and publisher Fred Holland Day, who encouraged and supported Gibran in his creative endeavors.
A publisher used some of Gibran's drawings for book covers in 1898.
Gibran's mother, along with his elder brother Peter, wanted him to absorb more of his own
heritage rather than just the Western aesthetic culture he was attracted to.
Thus, at the age of fifteen, Gibran returned to his homeland to study at a Maronite-run
preparatory school and higher-education institute in Beirut, called "al-Hikma".
He started a student literary magazine with a classmate and was elected "college poet".
He stayed there for several years before returning to Boston in 1902, coming through Ellis Island
on May 10.
Two weeks before he returned to Boston, his sister Sultana died of tuberculosis at the
age of 14.
The year after, Peter died of the same disease and his mother died of cancer.
His sister Marianna supported Gibran and herself by working at a dressmaker's shop.
Debuts, growing fame, and personal life Gibran was an accomplished artist, especially
in drawing and watercolor, having attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910, pursuing
a symbolist and romantic style over the then up-and-coming realism.
Gibran held his first art exhibition of his drawings in 1904 in Boston, at Day's studio.
During this exhibition, Gibran met Mary Elizabeth Haskell, a respected headmistress ten years
his senior.
The two formed an important friendship that lasted the rest of Gibran's life.
The nature of their romantic relationship remains obscure; while some biographers assert
the two were lovers but never married because Haskell's family objected, other evidence
suggests that their relationship never was physically consummated.
Haskell later married another man, but she continued to support Gibran financially and
to use her influence to advance his career.
She became his editor, and introduced him to Charlotte Teller, a journalist, and Emilie
Michel, a French teacher, who accepted to pose for him as a model and became close friends.
In 1908, Gibran went to study art in Paris for two years.
While there he met his art study partner and lifelong friend Youssef Howayek.
While most of Gibran's early writings were in Arabic, most of his work published after
1918 was in English.
His first book for the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, in 1918, was The Madman,
a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical cadence somewhere between poetry
and prose.
Gibran also took part in the New York Pen League, also known as the "immigrant poets",
alongside important Lebanese-American authors such as Ameen Rihani, Elia Abu Madi and Mikhail
Naimy, a close friend and distinguished master of Arabic literature, whose descendants Gibran
declared to be his own children, and whose nephew, Samir, is a godson of Gibran's.
Death Gibran died in New York City on April 10,
1931, at the age of 48.
The causes were cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis.
The young emigrant from Lebanon who came through Ellis Island in 1895 never became an American
citizen; he loved his birthplace too much.
Before his death, Gibran expressed the wish that he be buried in Lebanon.
This wish was fulfilled in 1932, when Mary Haskell and her sister Mariana purchased the
Mar Sarkis Monastery in Lebanon, which has since become the Gibran Museum.
Written next to Gibran's grave are the words "a word I want to see written on my grave:
I am alive like you, and I am standing beside you.
Close your eyes and look around, you will see me in front of you."
Gibran willed the contents of his studio to Mary Haskell.
There she discovered her letters to him spanning twenty-three years.
She initially agreed to burn them because of their intimacy, but recognizing their historical
value she saved them.
She gave them, along with his letters to her which she had also saved, to the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library before she died in 1964.
Excerpts of the over six hundred letters were published in "Beloved Prophet" in 1972.
Mary Haskell Minis donated her personal collection of nearly one hundred original works of art
by Gibran to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia in 1950.
Haskell had been thinking of placing her collection at the Telfair as early as 1914.
In a letter to Gibran, she wrote "I am thinking of other museums ... the unique little Telfair
Gallery in Savannah, Ga., that Gari Melchers chooses pictures for.
There when I was a visiting child, form burst upon my astonished little soul."
Haskell's gift to the Telfair is the largest public collection of Gibran's visual art in
the country, consisting of five oils and numerous works on paper rendered in the artist's lyrical
style, which reflects the influence of symbolism.
The future American royalties to his books were willed to his hometown of Bsharri, to
be "used for good causes".
Writings Style and recurring themes
Gibran was a great admirer of poet and writer Francis Marrash, whose works he had studied
at al-Hikma school in Beirut.
According to orientalist Shmuel Moreh, Gibran's own works echo Marrash's style, many of his
ideas, and at times even the structure of some of his works; Suheil Bushrui and Joe
Jenkins have mentioned Marrash's concept of universal love, in particular, in having left
a "profound impression" on Gibran.
The poetry of Gibran often uses formal language and spiritual terms; as one of his poems reveals:
"But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between
you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the
shores of your souls."
Many of Gibran's writings deal with Christianity, especially on the topic of spiritual love.
But his mysticism is a convergence of several different influences: Christianity, Islam,
Sufism, Judaism and theosophy.
He wrote: "You are my brother and I love you.
I love you when you prostrate yourself in your mosque, and kneel in your church and
pray in your synagogue.
You and I are sons of one faith—the Spirit."
Reception and influence Gibran's best-known work is The Prophet, a
book composed of twenty-six poetic essays.
Its popularity grew markedly during the 1960s with the American counterculture and then
with the flowering of the New Age movements.
It has remained popular with these and with the wider population to this day.
Since it was first published in 1923, The Prophet has never been out of print.
Having been translated into more than forty languages, it was one of the bestselling books
of the twentieth century in the United States.
The opening lines of "The Prophet" plays heavily on the "immortal" quatrains of the largely
discredited works of French "seer" Nostradamus.
Interestingly, Gibran's full name is Gibran Khalil Gibran and to which the "number of
the beast" 666 of the Book of Revelation could easily have been ascribed by Gibran as referring
to himself.
These unfortunate coincidences most likely inspired Gibran's opening lines of "The Prophet".
One of his most notable lines of poetry is from "Sand and Foam", which reads: "Half of
what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you".
This line was used by John Lennon and placed, though in a slightly altered form, into the
song "Julia" from The Beatles' 1968 album The Beatles.
Johnny Cash recorded Gibran's "The Eye of the Prophet" as an audio cassette book, and
Cash can be heard talking about Gibran's work on a track called "Book Review" on Unearthed.
Visual art
His more than seven hundred images include portraits of his friends WB Yeats, Carl Jung
and Auguste Rodin.
A possible Gibran painting was the subject of a June 2012 episode of the PBS TV series
History Detectives.
Religious views Gibran was born into a Maronite Christian
family and raised in Maronite schools.
He was influenced not only by his own religion but also by Islam, and especially by the mysticism
of the Sufis.
His knowledge of Lebanon's bloody history, with its destructive factional struggles,
strengthened his belief in the fundamental unity of religions, which his parents exemplified
by welcoming people of various religions in their home.
Gibran had a number of strong connections to the Bahá'í Faith.
One of Gibran's acquaintances later in life, Juliet Thompson, reported several anecdotes
relating to Gibran.
She recalled Gibran had met 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the leader of the religion at the time of
his visit to the United States, circa 1911–1912.
Gibran was unable to sleep the night before meeting him in person to draw his portrait.
Thompson reported Gibran later saying that all the way through writing Jesus, the Son
of Man, he thought of `Abdu'l-Bahá.
Years later, after the death of `Abdu'l-Bahá, at a viewing of a movie of `Abdu'l-Bahá,
Gibran rose to talk and proclaimed in tears an exalted station of `Abdu'l-Bahá and left
the event weeping.
A noted scholar on Gibran is Suheil Bushrui from Gibran's native Lebanon, also a Bahá'í,
published more than one volume about him and serves as the Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values
and Peace at the University of Maryland and winner of the Juliet Hollister Awards from
the Temple of Understanding.
Political thought Gibran was by no means a politician.
He used to say : "I am not a politician, nor do I wish to become one" and "Spare me
the political events and power struggles, as the whole earth is my homeland and all
men are my fellow countrymen."
Nevertheless, Gibran called for the adoption of Arabic as a national language of Syria,
considered from a geographic point of view, not as a political entity.
When Gibran met 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 1911–12, who traveled to the United States partly to
promote peace, Gibran admired the teachings on peace but argued that "young nations like
his own" be freed from Ottoman control.
Gibran also wrote the famous "Pity The Nation" poem during these years, posthumously published
in The Garden of The Prophet.
When the Ottomans were eventually driven out of Syria during World War I, Gibran's exhilaration
was manifested in a sketch called "Free Syria" which appeared on the front page of al-Sa'ih's
special "victory" edition.
Moreover, in a draft of a play, still kept among his papers, Gibran expressed great hope
for national independence and progress.
This play, according to Khalil Hawi, "defines Gibran's belief in Syrian nationalism with
great clarity, distinguishing it from both Lebanese and Arab nationalism, and showing
us that nationalism lived in his mind, even at this late stage, side by side with internationalism."
Works In Arabic:
In English, prior to his death:
Posthumous, in English:
Collections:
Other: Beloved Prophet, The love letters of Khalil
Gibran and Mary Haskell, and her private journal Memorials and honors
Lebanese Ministry of Post and Telecommunications published a stamp in his honor in 1971.
Gibran Museum in Bsharri, Lebanon Gibran Khalil Gibran Garden, Beirut, Lebanon
Gibran Khalil Gibran collection, Museo Soumaya, Mexico.
Kahlil Gibran Street, Ville Saint-Laurent, Quebec, Canada inaugurated on September 27,
2008 on occasion of the 125th anniversary of his birth.
Gibran Kahlil Gibran Skiing Piste, The Cedars Ski Resort, Lebanon
Kahlil Gibran Memorial Garden in Washington, D.C., dedicated in 1990
Elmaz Abinader, Children of Al-Mahjar: Arab American Literature Spans a Century
Gibran Memorial Plaque in Copley Square, Boston, Massachusetts see Kahlil Gibran.
Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public high school in Brooklyn, NY, opened in September
2007 Kahlil Gibran, Bust, Yerevan, Armenia 2007
Khalil Gibran School Rabat, Moroccan and British international school in Rabat, Morocco
Pavilion K. Gibran at École Pasteur in Montréal, Quebec, Canada
Khalil Gibran Park in Bucharest, Romania Gibran Kalil Gibran sculpture on a marble
pedestal indoors at Arab Memorial building at Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil
Gibran Khalil Gibran Memorial, in front of Plaza de las Naciones, Buenos Aires.
Date?
Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Bust Gibran Khalil Gibran Cultural Space in northern
Caracas, Venezuela.
2013 February Bankstown, Sydney Australia.
Corner of Restwell St and South Terrace.
Bust of Gibran Notes
References
Sources
External links Online copies of texts by Gibran
Works by Khalil Gibran BBC World Service: The Man Behind the Prophet
The New Yorker: Prophet Motive