Friday's Read: Gibran, Rihani & Naimy: East-West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature

Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy: East-West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature. Anqa Publishing (April 1, 2010)


Aida Imangulieva’s Gibran, Rihani, and Naimy (2010) is a recent translation into English of an older, Soviet-era Azerbaijani work, originally published in Russian in 1991. This is thus not only an important work on early Lebanese-American Arabic literature, but also a window onto Russian Arabic scholarship from the Cold War. Imangulieva explores the influences of Western literary movements on the work produced by Lebanese émigrés, locating in the works of these three writers strains of European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism; this was a movement of syncretism, interpretation, and adaptation, not cultural mimicry. After setting up the history of the Lebanese immigrant community in America and the different literary traditions of her analysis in chapter one, Imangulieva moves to more focused studies of the literary outputs of the three authors in chapters two, three, and four. Gibran, for example, is argued to show the influence of Emerson and Whitman, which when combined with the elevated style and rich metaphor of the Arabic literary tradition led to his extraordinary The Prophet. Rihani, a friend of Gibran’s and cofounder of Al-Rabitah al-Qalamiyah (“The New York Pen League”) is similarly presented as straddling and weaving together the two disparate literary traditions. Finally, Naimy, a fellow member of the Pen League, is argued to have been influenced by the Russian Critical Realists, including Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov, in the final chapter of Imangulieva’s work.