Book: Broken Wings

Overview
Kahlil Gibran’s Broken Wings (1912) is a lyrical novella told as a first-person reminiscence of a youth’s irretrievable love in Beirut. Written in Arabic during Gibran’s early New York years, it blends narrative, prose poem, and aphorism to explore love’s sanctity against the constraints of family interest, ecclesiastical power, and social custom. The story is simple and fable-like, but the voice is meditative and incantatory, transforming private grief into an indictment of a society that sacrifices a woman’s heart to wealth and prestige.

Plot
The narrator, a young man returning to Lebanon from schooling abroad, is introduced to Selma Karamy through her father, Faris Effendi Karamy, a gentle friend of the narrator’s family. In the shaded garden of the Karamy home, the two youths meet, speak, and quickly recognize a bond that feels less like courtship than a revelation. Gibran depicts their affection in spiritual terms: love as mutual awakening, chaste yet total, sanctified by nature and silence.

Their happiness is short-lived. A powerful bishop, Bulos Galib, covets the Karamy estate and maneuvers to marry Selma to his nephew, Mansour Bey. Out of filial duty and under the weight of social expectation, Selma submits to a union that both lovers know is a living death. The marriage places her under the surveillance of a corrupt household; she is ornament and property, not companion. The narrator and Selma sustain their love through rare clandestine meetings, most poignantly in a decaying temple beyond the city, where they exchange vows of fidelity while refusing to profane their feeling with betrayal. Their restraint is both moral resolve and tragic resignation, as they sense that their purity is the one realm beyond the reach of coercion.

Rumor and intrusion tighten around them. Selma’s husband, indifferent except to status, and the bishop, keen to protect his influence, clamp down. Selma’s health wanes; her father dies; hope contracts to a single, fragile thread. In the final movement, Selma becomes pregnant, an ordeal that underscores her captivity, and dies in childbirth. The infant does not survive. At her funeral, the narrator understands that his first love has become a martyr to custom and greed. He departs Lebanon bearing a wound that will shape his art and outlook, convinced that true love belongs to a higher law than any church or clan.

Themes
Gibran opposes living spirit to dead tradition. Love, in his vision, is sacramental and liberating, the meeting of souls rather than a contract of families. Against it stand the corruptions of earthly power: arranged marriage, clerical manipulation, and social hypocrisy that prizes wealth over dignity. Selma embodies the vulnerability of women in a patriarchal order, her virtue defined by others even as her inner life burns with courage and intelligence. The lovers’ chastity, far from timidity, asserts sovereignty in a world that would commodify desire. Fate operates less as cosmic decree than as the sum of human cowardice and institutional coercion.

Style and Legacy
Broken Wings is written in rhapsodic, image-rich prose, alternating quiet dialogue with oracular reflections on love, sorrow, and freedom. The ruined temple, moonlit gardens, and sea-lit Beirut are emblems of both beauty and transience. The tone anticipates The Prophet: aphoristic cadences, spiritual universalism, and compassion for the oppressed. As a cornerstone of the Arab diaspora’s romantic movement, the book challenged clerical and social authority while offering a tender, enduring portrait of first love as a sacred, transforming loss.