Years ago, I stumbled upon the name May Ziadé (or Ziadeh). Unless studied in academic spaces, the average person will not be familiar with who she was. Yet Ziadé is credited as one of the first writers to invoke the phrase “women’s/feminist cause” in the Arab world, and is referred to as a “pioneering female model” in the Arabic literary canon. Despite this, her life’s work is not readily available for the masses, and has been mostly lost to time. The narrative behind Ziade’s career as a ‘woman writer’ has since taken on a life of its own.
Born in Nazareth in 1886 to a Palestinian mother and Lebanese father, Ziadé primarily studied in and lived in Egypt, and dedicated her life to writing and translating stories. She was known for advocating for women’s rights and was a proponent of studying women’s history when that was not encouraged. She was also the first professional writer to apply a critical lens to women’s stories or stories written by women. She published articles in her father’s newspaper, Al Mahrousa, under pseudonyms like “Shejia”, “Khaled Raafat”, “Isis Kobia”, “Aida”, “Kanar”, and “The First Marine Sindadah”. Her first published book was Fleurs de rêve (1911), a poetry collection in French.
“If men are the material, women are the soul. If men are the fiction, women are the prose.”
Every Tuesday, Ziadé would hold her women-run, gender-inclusive literary salon which was renowned for its intellectual freedom and a welcome space for literary production. However, there was always a double standard at play. Male colleagues like Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad would say, “What you talk is as pleasant as what you write after vision and preparation” only to fixate over “her looks that resemble a beautiful museum packed with good taste.”
Her 20-year relationship with Lebanese-American writer Gibran Khalil Gibran has proved most captivating for those writing about Ziadé’s life, centring their “complete[ly] virgin love” which unfolded over written correspondence only. Even the Al Jazeera documentary spends time on this element of Ziadé’s life, with some participants theorising whether Gibran truly loved her or whether she loved him more.
Unlike her work, endless speculation and conspiracies about Ziadé survived the test of time. One of few to condemn this phenomenon, Jihan Ghazawi Awni would write in a letter to Samira Azzam: “They accused her of being a lesbian, and claimed that she never loved anyone, not even Gibran. Others accused her of coldness and lack of emotions, as well as sexual perversion. Others claimed that she was extremely weak and pessimistic, to the extent that she lost control when her letters to Gibran were stolen. Not even one of her critics attempted to study Ziadé through what she wrote.”
In 1964, Ilene Abboud noted that “had our literary community switched from analysing Ziadé’s love life to analysing her literary works within the context of the time she lived in, it would have contributed to making her works popular among the majority of young men and women who remain unaware of such a great Arab writer and thinker.”
“I am a woman who has spent her life between her pens, stationery, books, and research. All my thoughts have been centred around ideals. This idealistic life has made me oblivious to how malicious people can be. I have ignored the malice and certain people’s deadly poison disguised as gentleness.”
During her 50s, Ziadé was accused of insanity by her own family, put on house arrest before being forcibly entered into a sanitarium. For a person who sought freedom for women, men and the nation, this functioned as a cruel punishment for being a successful woman.
It is clear reading about Ziadé that she suffered from mental health issues, namely depression after the passing of Gibran, her parents, and younger brother. However, like many women before her and many after her, this has been exploited to financially benefit the people around her.
Having voiced the sentiment that she did “not want to die outside of [her] home”, Ziadé was released after taking a “post-insanity” test. She gave a final speech at the American University of Beirut in the presence of judges overseeing an inheritance dispute between her and her same relatives who imprisoned her unjustly.
“I hope that after my death someone will do justice to me and find the sincerity and honesty contained in my small writings.”
In 1997, Joseph Zeidan wrote The Unknown Works of Mai Ziadeh which collated and edited many of Ziadé’s previously unpublished writings. In 2018, Algerian novelist Waciny Laredj wrote May — The Nights of Isis Copia (2018) which served as a fictionalised biography. In 2024, Carmen Boustani published La Passion d’écrire which also centred other Lebanese writers.
While many famous writers interacted with Ziadé and attended her salon, no one wrote about her life. Ziadé was rumoured to have written an autobiography titled The Nights of Usfouriyya during her captivity, however, it is said to have been lost to time. As such Ziadé, continues to be defined by the perceptions of other writers, even if the intention has shifted from that of undermining her intellect, womanhood and being to depicting her life, career and struggles with utmost care.
The onus remains for many readers and writers to discover who she was, what she did, and what happened to her, in the hope that her name lives on. While we can never truly know her, the least we can do is not parrot the very criticisms that hurt her during her life, and persisted long after her death in 1941, just a few years before the 1948 Nakba and where only three people attended her funeral.
Unfortunately, Ziadé was not praised for what she did or who she was, nor was she respected as a writer. Her writing was met with admiration but her personhood met with indifference. She was praised as a writer fighting against confines of gender, only to have that very label weaponised against her.
