Lebanese Forces: Who is this person who tried to falsify these geniuses’ belonging to Lebanon?

The Cultural Department of the Media and Communication Apparatus of the Lebanese Forces said that “what happened in a public park in New York, where a number of pioneering Lebanese members of the Pen League were classified as ‘Syrian poets and writers,’ whether due to ignorance or malice, is an attempt to assassinate Lebanese culture and identity, and it cannot pass unnoticed.”

The department added in a statement: “After all these years, we regret that we are still trying to affirm the obvious: that the pioneers of Mahjar literature, such as Gibran Khalil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, Elia Abu Madi, Rashid Ayyoub, Afifa Karam, and others, are Lebanese and belong to Lebanese towns and villages. Although states in their current meaning were not geographically defined between the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century because of the Ottoman occupation, identities had been known for hundreds of years: what was Lebanese was known, what was Syrian was known, and what was Palestinian was also known. Whoever is trying today to commit the crime of falsification knows full well that these poets and writers lived part of their childhood and youth on the 10,452 square kilometers of Lebanese soil, and that their minds, imaginations, and culture were imbued with the customs and traditions of this land and the spirit of its people.”

It noted that “these great figures from Lebanon emigrated to the West against their will, compelled to flee Ottoman oppression, ignorance, and corruption. In New York, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires, they wrote texts in which they shaped Lebanon as a land of dream, beauty, and freedom. This is Mahjar literature, which we do not see merely as a literary phenomenon or a passing literary trend, but as a laboratory for forging a new identity for Lebanon—an identity formed in exile and then returned to impose its presence on the homeland.”