These two writers have in common what can be summarized in two points: the angle of inclination and interest, and the power of “general attraction.” Both of them had – in the language of our time – an active “correspondence mail” and an interactive account laden with “friend requests” answered in the salon register, the door of the heart being closed to them. Both of them had a literary status, to which the hearts of the writers of their time yearned.
The Andalusian princess, Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, made the courtyard of her house a dual cultural center, where she established a “literary salon” and founded a women’s institute for literature and the arts of the oud.
As for the Palestinian-Lebanese Miss May Ziadeh, she had a famous literary salon that looked like Walada’s salon and rivaled it in elitism, with a slight difference in titles. The patrons of Walada’s “salon” were ministers with political power, and the patrons of May’s salon were princes of literary eloquence.
The two teams – and their princesses – did not lack rhetorical genius or literary production, for they were equal in that regard. Moreover, the common denominator did not stop at this point, but it seemed that the girl of Cordoba and her counterpart from the Levant had set up their salons to be – by chance or by premeditation – a field of competition for the throne of their hearts, to “inflame” – in the battle of monopolization – whoever inflamed out of passion, and to “inspire” whoever inspired out of passion.
We do not care about the story of the first, for the limits of its “yield” are the folds of its raging ribs. Rather, it is enough for us from the story of the second that it yielded a fresh, immortal production and a blossoming preserved literature. For the Arab library and the literary arena, there was a way out of that giving, the sign of which – in the version of Birth – is the popular poetic ode (Ibn Zaydoun’s Nuniyyah), and its sign – in the version of May Ziadah – is the revelation of a thought and the inspiration of a genius in which the charger of grammar reached the electricity of inspiration, so that the ink of composition and recitation would be dispersed among the men of its literary salon, then – for the reader – from the inspiration of that painful dimension would be the admirable poem of Ibn Zaydoun: “The Separation Has Become…”, and the miraculous trilogy of Al-Rafe’i: “Letters of Sorrows”, “Leaves of the Rose”, and “The Red Clouds”.
However, the points of agreement and features of similarity between the two versions of the struggle of the writers over the hearts of the two beloved female writers continued on their face until the end of their lives, which ended with the same hot paradox: the dissolution of the literary salon – which was opened by the Butterfly of Cordoba and the Butterfly of Nazareth – without the competition resulting in the translation of love into marriage, with a difference in the level of tragedy, as Walada overcame Ibn Zaydoun’s emptiness and did not want to fill it, until she died on the bed of old age in Cordoba.
As for May Ziadeh, she was shocked by the luckiest of competitors for her heart after a long correspondence, and she died on a bed of withering, after suffering between the prison of civil quarantine and the bed of mental illness, in a tragedy that satisfied her “audience,” and made her loved ones restless, and she summed it up – in her memoirs – in a phrase closer to an “explanatory blog post” and a farewell sigh, when she wrote:
“In the name of life, my relatives threw me into a madhouse… I am dying slowly, and I am dying little by little.”
On her tombstone in Cairo, there is a testimony of her time in her right that: “Here lies the genius of the East, the leader of Arab female writers, the highest example of literature and society.”
While two verses attributed to her are inscribed on the “Love Monument” of Walada in the “Martilla” Square in Cordoba, which serve as a poetic memorial to the mental connection between the names of Walada and Ibn Zaydoun:
I am jealous of you from my eyes and from myself
From you, your time and place
Even if I hid you in my eyes
Until the Day of Resurrection, it is not enough for me.
God knows best whether they are from her poetry or were impersonated, to be a text that serves the erect statue of two communing hands symbolizing the relationship of suspended love, which they met before “the pleasantness of their meeting was replaced by their estrangement.” And if the two parties to the relationship – at the end of their collective life – were distant from each other, “Gibran May” remained close from each other, but the “geographical distance” was nullified in both cases, and here lies the agreement, despite the difference in the form of the final response.
Although the fate of the marriage between Gibran and May was extinguished after the circle of literary competition narrowed, and there was no malicious plot behind it, the threads of competition for Walada’s heart became intertwined and tightened, so that Ibn Zaydoun ended up being excluded and banished, and politics is not innocent of clouding the serenity of their relationship.
History has its wisdom when it makes what was most likely to be expected from the beginning the most unlikely to come true in the end.
