Resurrecting the Mother as a Landscape

Ali Cherri

Only recently I came across Kahlil Gibran’s portrait of his mother titled Towards the Infinite, a drawing dating back to 1916, thirteen years after the death of Kamila Rahme Gibran at the age of fifty. Gibran drew his mother’s profile in strange alignment with the horizon, forming a mountain peak or an enormous sand dune that has been shaped over millions of years by wind and water—a surface whose morphology is constantly in a process of change.

Gibran’s abstraction of the face into lines, shapes, and textures makes visible how the world penetrates the human interior and dissolves the distinctions between subject and object. The mother becomes a material object, represented as a sensory agent interacting with the world, rather than a being that transcends it. This postmortem portrait of the mother as a landscape has two aspects that are united and that feed upon each other in a symbiotic fashion: the body and its phenomenological relationship to the surrounding world. The face becomes a fascination, a subject of its own; there is no given, self-evident “reality” outside of this depsychologized topography.

In this abstraction, the arid face is revealed as tenuous, fragile, and ever-changing, and at the same time, as complete and concrete in and of itself—not a representation of something else. Gibran regards and reveals this landscape in its inherent beauty and mystery.

By resurrecting the mother’s face as a landscape covered in a veil of sand, Gibran creates a union with the topography and camouflages her presence in the world. He activates the spirit of the dead that is latent in the sand where the dead are buried. Kamila’s face augments the very notion of the landscape, making it thrive with an erotic charge.

Resurrection is an act of faith that lies in a utopia: the desired subject can only return to a sweeping, deeply fulfilling world rich with natural beauty. For resurrection to happen, the same person must exist simultaneously on earth and in the afterlife. The embodiment of a deceased person is the work of a miracle that can only exist outside of the natural order of things.

In his novella The Broken Wings, Gibran writes, “Everything in nature bespeaks the mother.” Mother Earth is often revered as a goddess in world mythology. Gibran reveals his interest in people, in landscapes, and in the relationship between them without succumbing to a romantic vision of the world.

In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes: “Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert.” This quest for the infinite can only be expressed through a back-and-forth between a face that takes the shape of a sloping hill and a mountain that mimics a mother’s profile.

Towards the Infinite, 1916