Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet"

The Prophet is not a novel. Yet you can read it cover to cover, in a sitting or two, moving through the poems as easily as you traverse the chapters of a great tale of adventure or a love story. For any given reader, some of Almustafa’s teachings will seem exotic, like a spice market brimming with warm colors and fragrances. So many of us have not known life fully yet. So many of us never will know the extent of experience covered in The Prophet. The remarkable thing about Gibran’s masterwork, though, is not that all readers will be bewildered by one or more of his poems, but rather that all readers will be intimately familiar with one or more of them. 

Gibran’s message is non-denominational, pan-cultural, and timeless. It speaks not to anyone, and thus to everyone. And as a reader, this is a jarring experience because at some point in those twenty-six poems, you find yourself peering into a mirror of your own life. For me, this was in the poem, “On Pain”. Mustafa says, “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” (Gibran 52). I was immediately drawn back into throes of my own pain. How often I had written about it, how frequently had I described myself as “shattered” or “like, so, so many pieces”? Not only did I feel broken, but the world itself seemed a poor, fractured version of its former self. All I had known was floating around me, slowly reassembling into something new.

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Gibran goes on to say this, “Much of your pain is self chosen./It is the bitter potion by which the physician/ within you heals your sick self.” (52). I thought of the world the way I had once seen it, like the whole place was underwater or in zero gravity. It had given way to my new reality, but only as I learned new ways to breathe and move and think. Who would tell you to dwell in your pain? Who would know that the only way to move on is to stay, for as long as it takes, in the sorrowful chambers of your heart? Gibran knew that pain, when lived through, becomes a love true and fresh. Reeling in our pain is not the remedy for it, but the means of development of new lenses through which to perceive it, the preventative measure against resentment and bitterness. 

The most moving aspect of this and the rest of Gibran’s poetry is the unapologetic, un-judgemental philosophy from which it is written. Gibran frequently espouses the idea that there is not so much truth and falsehood as there is his truth and her falsehood. Law is always biased towards the lawmakers and reason is not a universal language of righteousness. It is not shameful to be in pain. Everyone’s human experience is different, the unifying element being experience itself. We are all in tears, in toil, in joy, in love, no matter how variably we wear it. And this variation, says Gibran, is something truly good. 

Gibran, Kahlil. The prophet. Oneworld Publications, 2012.