Early and personal life

May Ziadeh was the daughter of Elias Zakhur Ziadeh, a Lebanese Maronite from Chahtoul village and Nuzha Khalil Mu'mar, a Palestinian Christian of Syrian origin.^[9][10][11] She was born in Nazareth, Ottoman Palestine.^[12][13] Her father had been a teacher and the editor of Al Mahrūsah.

May Elias Ziadeh attended primary school in Nazareth. As her father came to the Keserwan region of Mount Lebanon, she was sent at the age of 14 to Aintoura to pursue her secondary studies at a French convent school for girls.^[2] Her studies in Aintoura exposed her to French and Romantic literature, to which she took a particular liking.^[14] She attended several Roman Catholic schools in Lebanon before returning to Nazareth in the year 1904 to be with her parents.^[2] She is reported to have published her first articles at the age of 16. In 1908, she and her family immigrated to Egypt.^[2]

Ziadeh never married,^[1] but from 1912 onward, she maintained an extensive written correspondence with one of the literary giants of the twentieth century, the Lebanese-American poet and writer Khalil Gibran. Although the pair never met, the correspondence lasted 19 years until his death in 1931.^[15][2]

May's father, Elias Ziadeh

Between 1928 and 1932, Ziadeh suffered a series of personal losses, beginning with the death of her parents, a number of her friends, and above all Khalil Gibran. She fell into a deep depression and returned to Lebanon where her relatives placed her in a psychiatric hospital to gain control over her estate.^[1] Nawal El Saadawi alleges that Ziadeh was sent to the hospital for expressing feminist sentiments.^[8] Ziadeh was profoundly humiliated and incensed by this decision; she eventually recovered and left after a medical report proved that she was of sound mental health. She returned to Cairo where she died on October 17, 1941.^[2][16]

Journalism and language studies

Ziadeh's father founded Al Mahroussah newspaper while the family was in Egypt. She contributed to a number of articles.^[2] She also published articles in Al Hilal, Al Ahram and Al Muqtataf.^[17]

Ziadeh was particularly interested in learning languages. She studied privately at home alongside her French-Catholic education, and later at a local university for a Modern Languages degree while in Egypt. She graduated in 1917.^[1] As a result, Ziadeh was completely bilingual in Arabic and French, and had working knowledge of English, Italian, German, Syriac (as an integral part of her ethnoreligious Lebanese Maronite identity), Spanish, Latin, as well as Modern Greek.^[18]

Key Middle Eastern literary figure

Ziadeh was well known in Middle Eastern literary circles, receiving many male and female writers and intellectuals at a literary salon she established in 1912 (and which Egyptian poet Gamila El Alaily attempted to emulate after Ziadeh's death). Among those that frequented the salon were Taha Hussein, Khalil Moutrane, Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, Antoun Gemayel, Walieddine Yakan, Abbas el-Akkad and Yaqub Sarruf.^[2]

Ziadeh is credited with introducing the work of Khalil Gibran to the Egyptian public.^[19]

Feminism and Orientalism

Unlike her peers Princess Nazli Fazil and Huda Sha'arawi, May Ziadeh was more a 'woman of letters' than a social reformer. However, she was also involved in the women's emancipation movement.^[20] Ziadeh was deeply concerned with the emancipation of the Middle Eastern woman; a task to be effected first by tackling ignorance, and then anachronistic traditions. She considered women to be the basic elements of every human society and wrote that a woman enslaved could not breastfeed her children with her own milk when that milk smelled strongly of servitude.^[2]

She specified that female evolution towards equality need not be enacted at the expense of femininity, but rather that it was a parallel process.^[2] In 1921, she convened a conference under the heading, "Le but de la vie" ("The goal of life"), where she called upon Middle Eastern women to aspire toward freedom, and to be open to the Occident without forgetting their Oriental identity.^[7] Despite her death in 1941 her writings still represent the ideals of the first wave of Lebanese feminism. Ziadeh believed in liberating women and the first wave focused on doing just that through education, receiving voting rights, and finally having representation in government.^[21]

Romanticism

Bearing a romantic streak from childhood, Ziadeh was successively influenced by Lamartine, Byron, Shelley, and finally Gibran. These influences are evident in the majority of her works. She often reflected on her nostalgia for Lebanon and her fertile, vibrant, sensitive imagination is as evident as her mystery, melancholy and despair.^[2]

Feminist works

Ziadeh is considered by many as integral to the feminist movement having published many autobiographies of women between 1919-1925, this was part of her advocacy for the empowerment of women, examples of women featured in her work include Egyptian feminist Malak Hifni Nassef in her book Bahithat-ul-Badia. ^[23][24] She was credited as being the first woman to use the term "women's cause" in the Middle East according to critic Hossam Aql, "She was the first professional writer to take a critical approach to women's stories or novels" .^[25][26][27] Her fiction often included strong female characters and discussed the condition of Middle Eastern women, for example in one of her short stories, she illustrates the evil of frequent divorce and remarriage which she blames on men and patriarchal society.^{[28] [29]}