Kahlil Gibran: A Biographical and Intellectual Sketch Waïl S. Hassan
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Early Life Jubrān Khalil Jubrān (1883–1931) was born in the village of Bsharri, in Mount Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman province of Greater Syria, to Khalil Saad Jubrān and Kamila Rahme. Little is known about his childhood in Lebanon, except that he seems to have been a dreamy, withdrawn child who loved to draw and spend time outdoors in the scenic hills that would later inspire his writings about nature [PL. 24]. He had an older half-brother, Buṭrus, from his mother’s first marriage, and two younger sisters, Sultana and Mariana. His father disliked tending the walnut grove he owned and worked instead as a tax collector. A gambler and heavy drinker, he was arrested for embezzlement and his property was confiscated. Destitute, Kamila took her four children to Boston in 1895, settling in the immigrant slums of the South End. They were part of a large wave of Arab immigrants who left Greater Syria for the Americas in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In Boston, Kamila worked as a pack peddler until she was able to open a small shop that Buṭrus operated, while Sultana and Mariana worked as seamstresses. Only Khalil was sent to the Quincy School, where a clerk misspelled and shortened his name to Kahlil Gibran, by which he became known beyond the Arab world. He began to learn English at Quincy and to attend art classes at the nearby Denison House, where he soon met avant-garde photographer and publisher Fred Holland Day, who became interested in Gibran’s drawings. Day would have a profound and lasting impact on the twelve-year-old. As Gibran’s nephews and biographers Jean Gibran and Kahlil Gibran put it, Day photographed young Kahlil “in mysterious Arab burnooses, just as he dressed Armenians in turbans, blacks in Ethiopian regalia, Chinese with flutes, Japanese