The Bilingual Chasm

Chapter two discusses what is continuous and discontinuous in Gibran’s shift from one language to another or the concurrent use of the two. It demonstrates how the switch into English retains the universal spirit of his early Arabic writings and effaces their aesthetic inventiveness. This switch is characterised by uneasy self-translation, which is textually manifested in Gibran’s conscious adoption of the English biblical style that bears, for him, the trace of the Syriac Bible. This bilingual movement, the chapter also shows, entails that the originary hospitality of English as a foreign language occasion Gibran’s inscription into the host(ile) culture, which appropriates both the language and the foreign writer in essentialist terms. This is where the chasm occurs, where the Orient as Outside becomes the identitarian entity that veils the textuality of his English writings. This bilingual chasm, thus, creates different and seemingly irreconcilable incarnations or functions of Gibran, yet only a close attention to his texts would render, the chapter insists, what this (in)visible chasm makes invisible, namely the text itself: the interpretative horizon of the text that is irreducible to – albeit inseparable from – the writer’s identity and the culture of the foreign language he writes in.