A new monument in Lower Manhattan has ignited a fierce debate about identity, history, and who has the right to name the dead. Glen Kalem-Habib traces the paradox at the heart of the controversy - and offers an answer no plaque can contain.
By Glen Kalem-Habib | Kahlil Gibran Collective · May 2026
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On the evening of January 5, 1929, a packed ballroom at the Hotel McAlpin in New York filled with some two hundred guests - men in black tie, women in evening dress - gathered to honour one man. The occasion was a testimonial dinner for Gibran Kahlil Gibran, on the twenty-fifth year of his literary and artistic activities, organised by the members of the Arrabitah - the Pen Bond - of which Gibran was president. The Syrian World magazine recorded it under the headline: "Syrians Show Pride in Writer Who Has Brought Honor to Race."
Gibran, we are told, received the honour "with visible emotion" and "spoke of his pride in his race." His race. His community. His people. Called, in that room, on that night, Syrians. This is the central paradox of the debate now unfolding around a new monument in Lower Manhattan - and it is a paradox that demands not a simple answer, but an honest one.
On April 30, 2026, New York City's Parks Department unveiled Al Qalam: Poets in the Park at Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza in the Financial District. The $1.6 million monument - a bright yellow abstract sculpture of the Arabic word for "the pen" - was commissioned by the Washington Street Historical Society (WSHS) to honour the literary legacy of Little Syria, New York's first Arabic-speaking neighbourhood. Nine poets and writers are named, including Kahlil Gibran, Ameen Rihani, Mikhail Naimy, Elia Abu Madi, Afifa Karam, Nadra Haddad, Nasib Arida, and Rashid Ayoub. Notably, the monument also recognises Agabia Malouf, bringing visibility to women writers too often overlooked in the mahjar canon.
The Gibran quote chosen for inscription on the monument is telling in itself: "The whole world is my homeland, and the human family is my tribe." A universalist sentiment - deliberately borderless. It is a quietly revealing choice, and one that sits in interesting tension with the plaque's decision to label these same writers by a single national identity.
The accompanying plaque describes them collectively as "Syrian poets (writers)." 
In Lebanon, the response was immediate and fierce - and it has not subsided. Since the monument's unveiling, a growing chorus of Lebanese cultural figures, institutions, and government bodies have formally objected to the "Syrian poets" designation. Among the most prominent voices:
Dr. Henri Zoghaib - poet, director of the Centre for Lebanese Heritage at the Lebanese American University, and one of Lebanon's most respected Gibran scholars - published a sharp critique in An-Nahar and Asswak al-Arab, arguing that the monument is "wrong in time, because it considers time to have stopped at the end of the 19th century." He drew the same parallel we draw here: Gibran's 1918 US Registration Card lists his origin as Turkey - does that make him a Turk? His point is devastating in its simplicity.
Dr. Paula Abi Hanna - Beirut-based academic and cultural commentator, a regular contributor to leading Lebanese media on questions of national identity and heritage - has written that the monument amounts to the erasure of Lebanon's claim over its greatest literary son.
The Gibran National Committee (GNC), the Bsharri-based organisation that maintains the Gibran Museum and guards his legacy in Lebanon, issued a formal statement of objection, as did the Lebanese Historical Society.
Most significantly, the Lebanese government itself has entered the fray: two Lebanese ministries have formally communicated their objection through official diplomatic channels - an extraordinary step that signals this is not merely a cultural dispute but one touching on national identity at the highest institutional level.
The debate has spread rapidly across Arabic and English media - from An-Nahar and Nida al-Watan in Beirut to diaspora publications across Australia, Brazil, and the United States.
It is worth noting, however, that not all voices in this debate are Lebanese. Some Syrian commentators have pushed back from the opposite direction, arguing - with their own textual evidence - that Gibran identified as Syrian, pointing to his letters to Mary Haskell in which he wrote of "poor Syria" and her people, and a letter to Emile Zaydan in which he described himself as one who believed in "the geographic unity of Syria." This counter-narrative - that Lebanon has been engaged in a project of "Lebananisation" of Gibran - exists and deserves to be acknowledged, even if, as this article argues, Gibran's own dying words make his final choice of identity clear.
I founded the Kahlil Gibran Collective to document precisely this history. Writing this, I feel the weight of all sides. What follows is my attempt to hold them all honestly.
"Little Syria" communities sprang up across America - Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, and beyond. But New York and Boston were the most important, the most densely populated, and the most intellectually alive. Before Gibran ever walked Washington Street, he arrived in Boston - in the South End, where a vibrant Syrian-Lebanese immigrant community had already taken root. It was there he met Fred Holland Day, the photographer who recognised his genius, and Mary Haskell, the educator and patron who would fund his Paris studies and remain his closest confidante for life. The banner they marched under - "Syrians of Boston" - told the world exactly what they called themselves. It was the only word available.
When Gibran eventually moved to New York and settled into his studio on West 10th Street - which he called "The Hermitage" - he was not leaving Lebanon behind. He was carrying it with him, city by city, page by page.
The first wave of immigrants from Mount Lebanon began arriving in America around 1880. They came overwhelmingly from villages in what is now Lebanon - Bsharri, Baskinta, Freike, Miziara, Koura, Amsheet. They were mostly Maronite Christians, Greek Orthodox, Melkite (Greek Catholic) and Druze, fleeing the Ottoman boot, the tax collector, and the spectre of the Great Famine of 1915-1918 that killed nearly half the population of Mount Lebanon. But not all came from Lebanon. Nasib Arida was born in Homs, Syria. Elia Abu Madi was born in the village of Al-Muhaydithah, now part of Bikfaya, Lebanon. Rashid Ayoub was born in Baskinta, Lebanon. Afifa Karam was from Amsheet, Lebanon.
What they were called on arrival - Syrian, Turkish, Arab, and even Assyrian - was the label of empire, not of self. Immigration officers at Ellis Island recorded country of origin as the Ottoman administrative unit, not the village someone actually came from.
No single life illustrates this more starkly than Gibran's own. He passed through Ellis Island three times, recorded differently each time. In 1895, arriving as an eleven-year-old boy, he was listed as "Jubran Rhamé" - his mother's maiden name - nationality Syrian. In 1902, he appeared as "Gibran K. Gibran", again Syrian. His 1918 US Registration Card identified him as a Turkish subject. In 1910 he was recorded as "Kahlel Gebian", nationality Turkey, Syrian. A Philadelphia newspaper in 1914 called him "an Armenian artist."
Three landings. Four nationalities. Five spellings of his name. Not one of them Lebanese - because Lebanon, as a state, did not yet exist.
Francesco Medici documented all of this in our 2018 article "The Strange Case of Kahlil Gibran and Jubran Khalil Jubran."
This is what reducing identity to paperwork actually looks like. Does any of it make Gibran a Turk? An Armenian? A Syrian in the modern political sense? Of course not. So why should a 2026 monument treat the same bureaucratic logic as settled truth?
And yet - the Detroit banquet. The New York dinner. "Syrians Show Pride in Writer Who Has Brought Honor to Race." These were not labels imposed from outside. These were the community's own words, in their own magazine. The term "Syrian" in their era was a broad, culturally inclusive umbrella - a word of solidarity, not erasure. This is the full complexity that the monument's critics, and its defenders, must both reckon with.
The Mokarzels are not the whole story - they are a window into it.
Across the diaspora, there were many champions of the Lebanese cause: intellectuals, journalists, clergy, and poets working from New York to Paris to São Paulo, lobbying and dreaming of a free Lebanon. Patriarch Huwayyik's Paris delegation and a wide constellation of diaspora voices made Greater Lebanon a reality on September 1, 1920.
The Mokarzel brothers - Naoum, who attended the Paris Peace Conference and helped design the flag of Mandatory Lebanon, and Salloum, his publisher brother - illustrate the paradox perfectly. Because six years after the borders of Greater Lebanon were defined, Salloum sat down and founded a magazine. He called it The Syrian World.
One of the champions of modern Lebanon named his publication after the very identity the movement had worked to supersede. This was not hypocrisy. It was an honest snapshot of how complicated the immigrant experience actually was. In 1926, "Syrian" remained the term Americans understood. Greater Lebanon was six years old and thousands of miles away. You spoke the language your audience understood. And then, in the very first issue of that magazine - July 1926 - Gibran published his now-famous address: "Gibran's Message to Young Americans of Syrian Origin."
Read it carefully and the paradox leaps off the page. Gibran writes to "Young Americans of Syrian Origin" - and within the same text says: "I believe you can say to the founders of this great nation, 'Here I am, a youth, a young tree, whose roots were plucked from the hills of Lebanon, yet I am deeply rooted here, and I would be fruitful.'"
Syrian in the address. Lebanese in the body. Written for Mokarzel's magazine. In 1926.
This single document contains the entire identity debate in miniature. Gibran knew exactly who he was writing for, and he knew exactly where his roots were. The two were not in conflict - they were simply the two languages of the same life: the public label and the private truth.
This complexity echoes through every Lebanese-Australian, Lebanese-American, and Lebanese-Brazilian family that has ever had to explain, in a foreign country, where exactly they are from. It echoes still - including in a plaque on a monument in Lower Manhattan in 2026.
It would be a disservice to this monument - and to history - to reduce the Pen Bond to a Lebanese story alone. It was not.
The al-Rabitah al-Qalamiyya had its roots in 1916, co-founded by Nasib Arida and Abd al-Masih Haddad, and was formally reconstituted in 1920 with Gibran as its president and Mikhail Naimy as its secretary. Ten members in total - each from a different point on the Levantine map, all carrying their origins into a literature that transcended all of them.
Kahlil Gibran - born Bsharri, Lebanon. Chairman. The most widely read Arab writer in history.
Mikhail Naimy - born Baskinta, Lebanon. Secretary, critic, author of The Book of Mirdad. He returned to Baskinta in old age and lived there until his death at 99.
Ameen Rihani - born Freike, Lebanon. The founding father of Arab-American literature and the first Arab-American novelist.
Rashid Ayoub - born Baskinta, Lebanon — the same village as Naimy. Known as "the Dervish Poet," his collections carry a frontispiece illustration by Gibran himself.
Elia Abu Madi - born Al-Muhaydithah, now part of Bikfaya, Lebanon. One of the most widely quoted poets in the Arabic language, he came to America via Egypt.
Nasib Arida - born Homs, Syria. Co-founder of the Pen Bond and founder of Al-Funun, the first exclusively literary Arabic magazine in America.
Abd al-Masih Haddad - born Homs, Syria. Co-founder alongside Arida, and editor of As-Sayeh, the Bond's literary voice.
Nadra Haddad - born Homs, Syria. Brother of Abd al-Masih, poet and translator whose work remains less celebrated than it deserves.
William Catzeflis - born Tripoli, Lebanon, of Greek descent. The only member who knew French well — a rare bridge between the Arab literary world and the Francophone culture simultaneously shaping Lebanon's future.
Wadi Bahout - born Kafarmatta, Lebanon. An intimate friend and commercial partner of William Catzeflis. Friendly and lighthearted by all accounts, he contributed one piece to the Bond's Annual Collection — an article entitled "The Mosquito" — which was warmly received.
Elias Attalla — born Beirut, Lebanon. An associate member of the Bond who had published humorous articles in various newspapers before the association was founded, though he produced little thereafter. Described as a man of genuine literary taste - one who could, as his contemporaries noted, "skillfully distinguish tasteful writing from banal."
Eleven writers. Lebanese, Syrian, Greek-Lebanese. Together they forged in New York what the Levant itself, divided by empire and politics, could not yet produce at home: a unified Arabic literary renaissance.
The monument honours nine of them. But all eleven deserve to be named. So do I name them here.
Within this constellation, Gibran's Lebanese identity is the specific nerve that the Al-Qalam monument has struck - and the reason kahlilgibran.com feels compelled to weigh in.
The Kahlil Gibran Collective is not a political organisation - not the Lebanese government, not the GNC, not any cultural lobby. We are researchers, writers, and documentary makers who have spent years building the world's most comprehensive archive of Gibran's life and work - well-learned individuals with a wide network, deep resources, and a commitment to getting the record right. It is that commitment that compels us here. And it arrives at a charged moment: in 2026, Lebanon is navigating an existential relationship with all of its borders, its identity, and sovereignty alive and urgent in a way not seen for decades. A monument calling Lebanon's greatest literary son "Syrian" does not land in a historical vacuum. It lands in a live nerve.
And yet - Gibran's relationship to identity was more complex than any single label holds. He drew a euphoric illustration called "Free Syria" when the Ottomans were driven out. One scholar notes a draft play among his papers "defines Gibran's belief in Syrian nationalism with great clarity, distinguishing it from both Lebanese and Arab nationalism." He served as secretary of the Syrian-Mount Lebanon Relief Committee. He was a man who held Lebanon, Syria, and the wider Arab world simultaneously in his heart — not as competing claims but as concentric circles of belonging.
None of this makes him less Lebanese. It makes him more Gibran.
He had been excommunicated by the Maronite Church for Spirits Rebellious (1908). He was suspicious of all power structures - Ottoman, French, and ecclesiastical alike. When Patriarch Huwayyik went to Paris in 1919 to negotiate Greater Lebanon's borders, Gibran was in his West 10th Street studio writing The Procession. His absence was not accidental. It was a statement.
His poem "You Have Your Lebanon and I Have Mine" makes this plain: "Your Lebanon is a political knot, a national dilemma, a place of conflict and deception. My Lebanon is a place of beauty, of mountains and rivers and olives and the songs of the villagers between the hills."
This was not a rejection of Lebanon. It was its deepest expression. Rihani wrote The Heart of Lebanon. Naimy saw Baskinta as the most beautiful place on earth. Abu Madi cried: "O Lebanon, God has a secret in you not yet revealed."
These are not bureaucratic records. They are confessions of the soul - and the irreplaceable primary record of who these men actually were, in their own words, on their own terms.
In 1921, Gibran published Al-'Ahd al-Jadid - "The New Dawn" - in the Egyptian journal Al-Hilal. It was not a political manifesto. It was a moral challenge at a hinge moment: the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, Greater Lebanon had been proclaimed, new borders were being drawn. And Gibran wrote not about which flag to fly, but about what kind of person each human being would choose to be. Are you a parasite — one who takes from the nation? Or are you an oasis - one who gives, who serves, who nourishes?
A call to conscience over politics. Gibran did not go to Paris to negotiate borders. He went to his desk and asked his people to be worthy of whatever country they built.
Al-'Ahd al-Jadid also sits at the centre of one of the most debated entanglements in literary history - its connection to Kennedy's 1961 line, "Ask not what your country can do for you." The story of how a 1965 mistranslation manufactured that connection is documented in full on kahlilgibran.com — "The 'Ask Not' Controversy: Gibran and JFK."
In their definitive biography Gibran: His Life and World, Jean and Kahlil Gibran suggest he might have taken comfort in words written by a poet some 2,000 years before him — an ancient verse left unnamed, letting it speak for itself:
"If Syrian, what the marvel then?
stranger, we all have yet
one fatherland, the world; all men
one Chaos did beget."
Gibran always was, and always will be, too large for any single label to contain. He was Lebanese by birth and blood. Syrian to his community by the terms of their era. Arab in his literary ambitions. American by adoption. A citizen of the world his pen was building. The monument calls him Syrian. His immigration form calls him Turkish. His own dying words call him Lebanese. And a 2,000-year-old poem reminds us that all men share one fatherland. All of these things are true. Only one of them was his choice.
The fire in the house is not necessarily a disaster. It is also light. This controversy has illuminated something that quietly needed illuminating: the extraordinary complexity of the mahjar identity - people who were Lebanese at heart, Syrian on paper, Arab in language, and American by address.
The Kahlil Gibran Collective was created to hold that complexity with care and honesty. Not to flatten the mahjar writers into a single national narrative, but to document who they actually were - in all their richness, their paradox, and their irreducible humanity.
The monument is beautiful. The plaque is incomplete. The conversation is necessary - and long overdue.
Before closing, something must be said that critics of this monument have largely left unsaid.
Getting something like Al Qalam: Poets in the Park built in New York City is extraordinarily difficult. The project was first conceived in 2011. When Hurricane Sandy damaged the neighbourhood in 2012, the WSHS raised $15,000 for repairs and used the moment to press the city for something permanent - catalysing the expansion and rebuilding of Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza. The monument that followed took another fourteen years to realise. None of it happened quickly. I know this because I have been walking the same road myself.
Todd Fine — whom I first met at the Second International Conference on Kahlil Gibran at the University of Maryland in 2010 - was among the first to bring the last remaining buildings of Little Syria to public attention, advocating loudly for "Save Washington Street" as early as 2013. Without people like Todd working quietly in the background, there would be no park, no monument, and no plaque to debate.
The organisation's director, Dr. Linda K. Jacobs, has shepherded the Al-Qalam project with remarkable tenacity. A scholar with a PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology, she is the author of two books on the 19th-century Syrian diaspora - and crucially, all four of her grandparents were members of the New York Syrian Colony. This is not an outsider's project. It is a grandchild's act of remembrance. Linda also sits on the board of the Moise Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University, where her own family collections are housed. Her work bridges the personal and the scholarly in exactly the way this subject demands.
For the past six years, I have been pursuing my own monument project - a sculpture of Gibran at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, the very venue where The Prophet received its first public reading in 1923. The idea was born in 2019, during a research trip to Mexico with Todd Fine and researcher Tania Sammons, where we were exploring one of the largest Gibran material archives outside of Lebanon - held at the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City. Immersed in that extraordinary collection of Gibran's paintings and drawings, and with the centenary of The Prophet approaching, the three of us felt the absence of a Gibran monument in New York - the city where he lived, worked, and died - was something that simply had to be addressed. The project has the sculpture designed and the historical case made. It has also confronted every obstacle anyone who has tried to honour a poet in a major city will recognise: funding gaps, institutional timelines, and the grinding difficulty of turning cultural passion into permanent stone. L'Orient Le Jour · The Liberum
Linda and the WSHS have supported my project with advice and encouragement over the years, as I have supported theirs. Co-founder of the Kahlil Gibran Collective, Francesco Medici, alongside Todd, Linda, and others who rarely seek the spotlight, has invested years of quiet dedication toward a better and more unified narration of this community's history - almost entirely without financial support.
This moment - when mahjar identity has finally become something our broader community is arguing about and caring about - is exactly the right time to ask: what can we do to support these efforts? The scholars, archivists, project directors, and website builders working at their own expense are quietly building the infrastructure of our collective memory. They deserve more than appreciation. They deserve backing.
If this conversation has value — and I believe it does — let it move from debate to action.
"If Lebanon were not my country, I would have chosen Lebanon to be my country."
He did not say Syria. He did not say the Ottoman Empire. He said Lebanon — by name, with love, with the weight of a dying man's final reckoning.
The pen was Lebanese. It was also universal. And it belongs, ultimately, to no plaque and no politics — only to the page, and to the reader, and to the enduring question of what it means to be human in a world that is always, still, drawing new borders around us.
The plaza itself carries a quiet history worth naming. Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza (1960–2013), a Yale-educated civic leader and President of the Alliance for Downtown New York, who dedicated her career to making Lower Manhattan more human — helping lead its restoration after September 11 and championing the creation of this very green space. She died of cancer at 53, never knowing that the park she fought for would one day become the permanent home of a monument to the poets of Little Syria. There is something fitting in that: a woman who gave her life to a neighbourhood now lends her name to the ground where that neighbourhood's greatest writers are finally, and permanently, remembered.
Glen Kalem-Habib is the founder of the Kahlil Gibran Collective and an executive member of the Australian Lebanese Historical Societies of Victoria and NSW. He is the founder and creator of LebanonWithoutBorders.org, documenting Lebanese migration across the globe. An award-winning documentary film producer, he has spent more than 25 years researching the life, work, and legacy of Kahlil Gibran. For Gibran's immigration papers and the full 'Ask Not' research, visit kahlilgibran.com.
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