Born in Palestine in 1886 but spending most of her creative life in Cairo where she presided over a literary salon frequented by some of the most important writers of her day, the Palestinian-Lebanese writer May Ziadé (or Ziadeh) is perhaps best-known today for her biography, with this sometimes threatening to overshadow her substantial literary and cultural achievements.
Late in life, after she had returned to Lebanon from Cairo, she was imprisoned in the Asfoureih asylum in Beirut by members of her family who seem to have been acting to promote their own interests rather than hers. Earlier in life, and continuing until his death in 1931, she took part in a 19-year correspondence with the Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran, author of The Prophet which almost came to define Arabic literature for many readers in the West, without the two writers ever meeting in person.
Even those who know nothing else about May Ziadé and her long and astonishingly productive career are likely to have heard of these two aspects of her life, quite possibly without being able to explain how they fit into the rest of her biography let alone her writing career.
Enter Lebanese academic Carmen Boustani, a researcher with the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, who has now produced what is probably the fullest biography of May Ziadé to date.
Published earlier this year by Editions des femmes in Paris, her book, entitled May Ziadé, la passion d’écrire, complements her other works on Lebanese women writers, among them a well-received biography of the novelist Andrée Chedid (L’Ecriture de l’amour), and more theoretical works on writing and gender, among them Effets du feminine, variations narratives francophones and Oralité and gestualité, la différence homme/femme.
Boustani begins her biography towards the end of May Ziadé’s life when she found herself imprisoned in the Asfoureih asylum and struggling to get out. Two features of this may strike contemporary readers, with both running through Boustani’s biography like red threads.
The first is the uproar that this imprisonment, engineered by May Ziadé’s cousins, caused across the Arab world and not only in Lebanon. When news of it leaked out, the reaction was almost instantaneous, with newspapers and magazines running articles demanding her release and testifying both to her fame and to the affection with which she was held by readers across the region.
A protest article that appeared in the newspaper Al-Makshouf was taken up by Al-Ahram in Cairo, which had earlier published many of May Ziadé’s articles when she lived in Egypt. Al-Ahram reproduced a letter from Prince Abdallah ibn Hussein to President of Lebanon Emile Eddé demanding May Ziadé’s release, Boustani says, running the gauntlet of threats by her cousins in investigating the situation and running articles about it.
The second is the determination that May Ziadé showed, even when locked up in a cell in Asfoureih, to continue to write. Western readers may be reminded of writings by Anglo-American and other feminist writers on similar themes of psychological distress and patriarchy at the same time, among them texts by the English writer Virginia Woolf.
However, Boustani, alive to these comparisons, nevertheless reframes them: while May Ziadé was almost certainly aware of the writings of such Western writers, at least in the case of Woolf, her references as far as foreign literatures were concerned were, like Boustani’s, mostly French. Boustani uses quotations from French writers Simone de Beauvoir and Colette among many others to enliven her text.
May Ziadé, though similar in some ways to some Western writers of the same time and earlier, was also less concerned with some of their preoccupations and more concerned with others that find no echo in their work. Writing on her travel books describing her journeys across the Eastern Mediterranean from Lebanon through Palestine to Egypt, complemented by many later trips to Europe, Boustani compares them to the writings of some 19th-century women travellers from Europe, among them the Englishwoman Lady Hester Stanhope who explored the Levant in Bedouin disguise.
“These women did not speak the same language, each having her own, and yet they were united by a sort of underground language and obsessed by themes of escape, the passage of time, the expression of feelings, and the transformation of the self,” Boustani says. “These women travellers had the courage to travel at a time when it was stigmatised for women. They were prepared to run the risks of long journeys in unfamiliar circumstances.”
“They thought of the Orient as a land of dreams that they then mythologised… It was all about the exaltation of the imagination,” frowned on at home. For May Ziadé, on the other hand, “the Orient was her homeland, a real place.” She used her travels as a way of extending her lecture tours, frequently carrying out engagements in Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt.
Moreover, “as a modern woman, her overriding concern was to contribute to the progress of the Orient.”
Coming to Arabic: One feature of May Ziadé’s writing life is that she came to write in Arabic comparatively late, having been educated in Christian missionary schools in Palestine and Lebanon and immersed from an early age in French.
Her first literary works were in French, and she continued to write in that language throughout her life, considering it to be as much hers, and as much a language of the Middle East, as Arabic. In becoming a major writer in Arabic as well as in French, she had the support of her family, her father having originally been a teacher of Arabic. When the family moved to Cairo in 1908, he was made editor of the newspaper Al-Mahroussa, which began to publish her articles.
May Ziadé was soon an established name not only in Al-Mahroussa, but also in Al-Ahram, Al-Hilal, and Al-Moktataf in Arabic and various other publications in French. She began attending classes at the newly founded Egyptian University, now Cairo University, making her one of the first intake of students and the first woman, and she developed friendships with some of the most important intellectuals of the time, including Ahmed Lufti al-Sayyid, first president of the University, fellow Lebanese writer Yacoub Sarrouf, Mahmoud Abbas al-Aqqad, with whom she did not always see eye to eye, and later Taha Hussein.
She also founded her famous salon, held in the family apartment in Downtown Cairo apparently in the building then also occupied by Al-Ahram. Perhaps modelled on the famous salons held by aristocratic women in 18th-century Paris and attended by writers and philosophers like Diderot and Voltaire, May Ziadé’s salon, presided over by a woman, was also attended by women like writer Amy Kher and feminist Hoda Shaarawi. Al-Sayyid, al-Aqqad, and Hussein all attended at one time or another, along with many others, both Egyptian and Arab, and foreigners like French orientalist Louis Massignon.
Diligent as always in scouting out the surviving records of these evenings – like many other records of May Ziadé’s life and work a great deal has not survived – Boustani devotes some pages in her book to reconstructing what went on in them. While the surviving records, mostly accounts in later memoirs, are unanimous in praising May Ziadé’s intelligence, tact, and charm, there are sadly few accounts of who said what to whom.
May Ziadé was perhaps at the height of her powers in the 1920s, when she seems to have been personally happiest and most productive and to have been developing her thoughts and writings in new directions. Among these were her biographies of Egyptian women writers, her travel books, her occasional pieces and journalism on different subjects, her translations, her autobiographical pieces, and of course also her creative work in various genres and languages.
Boustani devotes a rewarding chapter in her book to the biographies that May Ziadé wrote of women like Malak Hifni Nasif, pen name Bathiyat al-Badiya, or “Seeker in the Desert,” Lebanese woman poet Warda al-Yaziji, and Aicha Teymour, a 19th-century aristocrat and accomplished writer.
With none of these women did she always see eye-to-eye, but they had established a modern tradition of women’s writing in Arabic, living in some ways, like May Ziadé herself, experimental lives. In reconstructing their lives and thoughts in her biographies, May Ziadé might be thought to have been both differentiating her own ideas from theirs and testing out different possibilities from those pioneered by others. For Boustani, the biographies also had the additional function of establishing a new genre in modern Arabic in the shape of broadly feminist life-writing.
The collected edition of May Ziadé’s work, published in Beirut in 1982, while not complete brings together most of the book-length publications published in her lifetime. It contains numerous other materials originally published in the 1920s, among them journalism and essays, often on issues such as the Arabic language, the position of women, and the character and future of Arab societies, as well as translations, and autobiographical pieces.
As Boustani notes in her book, this collection, indispensable in many ways, must be supplemented by the other volumes of uncollected writings that have appeared since it was published, usually in Lebanon, together with the hope that some of the materials that May Ziadé is known to have written, among them much of her correspondence and her record of her confinement in the Asfoureih asylum, now lost and believed destroyed, may eventually reappear.
Then there is the correspondence with Gibran, among the most famous items that May Ziadé wrote, but of which tantalisingly little remains, with his surviving letters outnumbering hers.
Boustani looks at different ways of framing this, suggesting that it can be compared to the correspondence of well-known 18th-century letter writers, among them, when considering women, Madame de Sevigné or Madame du Châtelet, companion of Voltaire. Whatever may have been Gibran’s intentions, it seems that there was never any intention on May Ziadé’s part to see the correspondence published, despite the enormous efforts she seems to have put into it, and it was not simply a correspondence between two writers sharing successes or setbacks and reflecting on the literary world or even trying out ideas for possible later use, like the correspondence of her contemporary Virginia Woolf.
It is, among other things, a romantic correspondence, though reading Boustani’s long account of it, interspersed with frequent quotations, one might wonder how the two people involved would have fared had they actually met. Gibran often seems to want to place May Ziadé within his own mental universe, seeing her as a connection to his homeland (he was mostly writing from New York) or as a kind of female muse, whereas May Ziadé, like Woolf distrusting of inherited models for creative women, was not happy with the idea of simply tending to or inspiring his work.
There is so much in this stimulating and rather rambling book that it is a pleasure to accompany the author through it, while making it impossible to summarise. While Boustani’s focus is on May Ziadé and her carving out of a space for herself as an intellectual woman, there is also much on the intellectual and literary debates of the time in major centres like Beirut and Cairo.
Carmen Boustani, May Ziadé, la passion d’ecrire, Paris: des femmes-Antoinette Fouque, 2024, pp315.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 17 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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