May Ziadé

I learned this morning from Google that today is the anniversary of May Ziadé's birthday:

Ziadé was an early 20th Century Palestinian-Lebanese poet and feminist, writing that women are "the basic elements of every human society and...that a woman enslaved could not breastfeed her children with her own milk when that milk smelled strongly of servitude."[1]  It appears that the majority of her poetry was written in French, but this is one that I liked entitled À Mademoiselle C.

Vos yeux si beaux, chère belle,
Que leur regard est torturant;
Votre nom je l'aime et l'épelle
Votre nom de flot murmurant.

Je suis brune et vous êtes blonde,
Ce contraste est délicieux,
Un peu des profondeurs de l'onde
Se mêle à l'azuré des cieux.

Car je suis la Nuit, vous le Jour,
Un Jour rose et bleu qui scintille;
Moi, le lac; vous, l’astre qui brille;
Vous, le rêve et moi... moi l'amour.

(May Ziadeh, Fleurs de Rêve, 1910,
sous le pseudonyme d'Isis Copia)

Interestingly, Ziadé appears to have developed a lifelong correspondence, though never actually meeting in person, with Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran.


Khalil Gibran is apparently the third most-selling poet of all time behind only Lao-Tzu and William Shakespeare, and through their mutual letter-writing he developed quite an infatuation for Ziadé.  Causing him to write these verses:

Where are you, my beloved? Do you hear my weeping
From beyond the ocean? Do you understand my need?
Do you know the greatness of my patience?
Where are you, me beloved?
Oh, how great is Love!
And how little am I!
- Excerpt from A Lover’s Call XXVII by Gibran Khalil Gibran

Khalil Gibran was not the only poet inspired to poetry by Ziadé as Jawdat R. Haydar wrote this poem appropriately titled "May Ziadé":

Me thinks that perfection descended from the skies
That is a nymph with a twin of dark piercing eyes
Paraissent le Dimanche in the French Images
As the quessn thought of all bards in all languages

Tell me, O tell me! by the planets that are above
Who is the heavenly herald who is the dove
That thrilled to our midst from yon horizon and sea
To cry live Egypt live independent and free

She is Venus and the marrow of liberty
She came to carve with letters of perpetuity
Over Egypt in the sky withal on the sea
Live Egypt down the ages and God be with thee

Nablus,
1931

I am curious as to what she might have to say in regards to the gender situation in the Arab world today, on the anniversary of what would have been her 126th birthday.