May Ziadeh

Ziadeh was born to a Lebanese Maronite father (from the Chahtoul family) and a Palestinian mother in Nazareth, Palestine. Her father, Elias Ziadeh, was editor of al-Mahrūsah.

Ziadeh attended primary school in Nazareth. As her father came to the Kesrouan region of Mount Lebanon, she was sent at 14 years of age to Aintoura to pursue her secondary studies at a French convent school for girls.[2] Her studies in Aintoura exposed her to French literature and Romantic literature, to which she took a particular liking.[7] She attended several Roman Catholic schools in Lebanon before returning, in 1904, to Nazareth to be with her parents.[2] She is reported to have published her first articles at age 16. In 1908, she and her family emigrated to Egypt.[2]

Ziadeh never married,[1] but from 1912 onward, she maintained an extensive written correspondence with one of the literary giants of the twentieth century, the Lebanese-American poet and writer Khalil Gibran. Although the pair never met, as he was living in New York City, the correspondence lasted 19 years until his death in 1931.[8][2]

Between 1928 and 1932, Ziadeh suffered a series of personal losses, beginning with the death of her parents, a number of her friends, and above all Khalil Gibran. She fell into a deep depression and returned to Lebanon where her relatives placed her in a psychiatric hospital to gain control over her estate.[1] Nawal El Saadawi submits that Ziadeh was sent to the hospital for expressing feminist sentiments.[6] Ziadeh was profoundly humiliated and incensed by this decision; she eventually recovered and left after a medical report proved that she was of sound mental health. She returned to Cairo where she died on October 17, 1941.[2][9]

Ziadeh's father founded Al Mahroussah newspaper while the family was in Egypt after 1908. She contributed to a number of articles.[2]

Ziadeh was particularly interested in learning languages. She studied privately at home alongside her French-Catholic education, and later at a local university for a Modern Languages degree while in Egypt. She graduated in 1917.[1] As a result, Ziadeh was completely bilingual in Arabic and French, and had working knowledge of English, Italian, German, Spanish, Latin as well as Modern Greek.[10]

Ziadeh was well known in Arab literary circles, receiving many male and female writers and intellectuals at a literary salon she established in 1912 (and which Egyptian poet Gamila El Alaily attempted to emulate after Ziadeh's death). Among those that frequented the salon were Taha Hussein, Khalil Moutrane, Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, Antoun Gemayel, Walieddine Yakan, Abbas el-Akkad and Yacoub Sarrouf.[2]

Ziadeh is credited with introducing the work of Khalil Gibran to the Egyptian public.[11]

Unlike her peers Princess Nazli Fazil and Huda Sha'arawi, Mayy Ziyadah was more a 'woman of letters' than a social reformer. However, she was also involved in the women's emancipation movement.[12] Ziadeh was deeply concerned with the emancipation of the Arab woman; a task to be effected first by tackling ignorance, and then anachronistic traditions. She considered women to be the basic elements of every human society and wrote that a woman enslaved could not breastfeed her children with her own milk when that milk smelled strongly of servitude.[2]

She specified that female evolution towards equality need not be enacted at the expense of femininity, but rather that it was a parallel process.[2] In 1921, she convened a conference under the heading, "Le but de la vie" ("The goal of life"), where she called upon Arab women to aspire toward freedom, and to be open to the Occident without forgetting their Oriental identity.[5] Despite her death in 1941 her writings still represent the ideals of the first wave of Lebanese feminism. Ziadeh believed in liberating women and the first wave focused on doing just that through education, receiving voting rights, and finally having representation in government.[13]

Bearing a romantic streak from childhood, Ziadeh was successively influenced by Lamartine, Byron, Shelley, and finally Gibran. These influences are evident in the majority of her works. She often reflected on her nostalgia for Lebanon and her fertile, vibrant, sensitive imagination is as evident as her mystery, melancholy and despair.[2]