Garden to Honor ‘Prophet’ Author

They’re going to build a little garden here, across from the British Embassy where the statue of Winston Churchill, hand raised in a “V” signal, evokes an awful war.

The garden will celebrate peace and understanding, and a writer whose words helped four decades of young Americans out of the maze of adolescence into the unsure world of adulthood.

It is a garden that almost wasn’t.

Lebanese-Americans mobilized in the last few months to raise most of the $1 million or so needed to beat a National Park Service deadline and break ground for the wooded, two-acre plot dedicated to their countryman, Kahlil Gibran, author of “The Prophet.”

Romantic Dialectic

Gibran’s romantic dialectic was severely criticized by academics, but nevertheless captured the interest of generations, notably in the 1960s, with passages such as:

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.

And he answered:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

“The Prophet,” Gibran’s most popular book, is the best-selling hard-cover title on the Alfred A. Knopf list. It has racked up 6 million sales since it was first printed in 1923, and still sells 100,000 copies a year. The deluxe edition has sold another 363,000 copies at a steady rate of 11,500 a year, and the paperback has sold 1,886,000 at the rate of 40,000 a year. An audio tape version brought out in 1986 sells about 10,000 copies a year.

But the plans for a memorial for Gibran were not nearly as successful, and it looked for a while as if the modest project might founder.

Lebanese Woman’s Vision

It was the idea of Sheryl Ameen of Washington, who felt despair over the plight of Lebanon, wracked by civil wars and invasion. She said she couldn’t stand “the vision of all this bloodshed . . . and I felt it was not the true image of the Lebanese,” who for 4,000 years had been merchants and travelers, descendants of the ancient Phoenicians.

In 1983, the 100th anniversary of Gibran’s birth, she determined to soften that image by building a memorial of some sort to the gentle writer whose words had helped sustain the Rev. Lawrence Jenco during his captivity in Lebanon. Jenco still quotes Gibran: “Not everyone in chains is subdued,” and “Hell is not torture. Hell is an empty heart.”

Ameen, who is president of the Khalil Gibran Centennial Foundation, had heard that comedian Flip Wilson also liked to quote Gibran, and Wilson appeared before Congress to endorse the memorial. A resolution to dedicate parkland to a Gibran garden was written by Sen. George Mitchell (D-Me.) and Rep. Abraham (Chick) Kazen Jr. (D-Tex.), since deceased. Both men came from Lebanese parentage.

Funds Lined Up

The planning was easier than getting the funds. Finally, another Lebanese, Bill Baroody, former head of the Office of Communications under President Gerald R. Ford and director of the American Enterprise Institute, came to the rescue. He organized some other prominent Arab-Americans, and money began trickling in.

This summer, dinners in seven cities, from Boston to Los Angeles, are planned to raise almost half the $1 million needed. The rest is expected to come from organizations, wealthy donors and the general public. The deadline for breaking ground is Oct. 19.

“It’s off the ground, and it’s going to conclude on target, on time,” Baroody said. “It’s been a struggle.”

He said that in the past, Lebanese came to America tended to assimilate totally, but in recent years they have tended to reconnect with their ethnic pride, partly in response to what was happening in their tiny native land.

“That’s why I’m so excited about this project,” Baroody said. “With all of the tragedy around Lebanon, the Palestinians, the whole Middle East situation, this has an incredibly uplifting potential.”

Ameen and Baroody want the garden and the foundation to reflect what they believe Gibran stood for: peace and understanding, mediation and consensus, rational debate and discussion.

Gibran has plenty of critics in academic circles. They say his writing is not poetry, that it is more like romantic drivel, an exercise in dialectics. What does Baroody think of Gibran’s detractors?

“Basically,” he said, “I feel sorry for them.”

The garden site, in a lush woods near the vice president’s residence and the Naval Observatory, will feature a pool and walkways where visitors can meditate.