“I was
eighteen years of age when love opened my eyes with its magic rays and touched
my spirit for the first time with its fiery fingers, and Selma Karamy was the
first woman who awakened my spirit with her beauty and led me into the garden
of high affection, where days pass like dreams and nights like weddings.”
This is how
“The Broken Wings” starts; the poetic novella of ten chapters consisting
precise expressions of emotions and relations, and one of the finest works of Kahlil
Gibran.
Everyone
has his/her own first lovestory. It would be either sweet and accomplished or one-sided
and unrequited or broken and miserable. But
successful relation that has led into marriage never makes a good lovestory – I
observe – or even if it does, it never produces aching sentimental songs and
sorrowful lyrics upon its recollection to one as does by the love that was
intervened and ended so callously.
We remember
our first love because it opens the bud of our maturity and measurement of the
feeling is deepest then. “ Every
young man remembers his first love and tries to recapture that strange hour,
the memory of which changes his deepest feeling and makes him so happy in spite
of all the bitterness of its mystery. “
Set in the
backdrop of corrupt Lebanon society during Gibran’s youth, The Broken Wings is
the recount of the poet’s first love whom he loses not only to rapacious power
holders in the town but also to the ultimate death.
Selma
Karamy is the woman “who taught me ( Gibran ) to worship beauty by the
example of her own beauty and revealed to me the secret of love by her
affection; she was the one who first sang to me the poetry of real life.” But
fate turns against their love and Selma is forfeited by her father, Farris
Effandi Karamy, in marriage to Mansour Bey Galib, the nephew of the Bishop,
Bulos Galib.
Against her
will, she is betrothed to the miser who hatched the proposal of marriage with a
selfish motive of acquiring Selma’s inheritance as she’s the only successor of
her father’s prosperous fortune. In solitude, the old man soon passes away, as
wished by his fortune hunters, entrusting the poet to care his daughter as his
own sister, but only to be soon followed by his daughter who gets rescued by
her son – “born at dawn and died at dusk” – from the oppression she
suffers miserably from her miserly husband.
The book
ends, “As the grave digger disappeared behind the poplar trees, I couldn’t resist
anymore, I dropped down on Selma’s grave and wept.” So did my heart,
hearing the poet’s mourn over his precious loss, in the dead silence of the
night.
