Kahlil Gibran’s Infamous Novella — Bolder, Better, and More Star-Spangled Than Ever
My first introduction to Captain America took place at a fourth of July celebration. On a humid Wisconsin night, with cicadas humming, the porch lights dimmed, and the DVD player flicked on. Director Joe Johnston’s 2011 blockbuster, Captain America: The First Avenger, was the soldier’s first movie in over seventy years. The film returned audiences to Captain America’s glory days during World War II and sentiments felt by the comic series’ first readers.
A blonde beacon of hope, Steve Rogers, a scrappy boy from New York City emblazoned with American nationalism, debuted two years into the Second World War, fighting Nazis and saving puppies from trees. The first of many a pro-American superhero archetype, Captain America represents his country’s ideal of soldiers fighting for the American way of life. The captain remained in print in his original comic book form until 1949, when his role lessened in Marvel Comics until he was resuscitated to a post-war audience in the mid-1950s. With his best friend and loyal companion Bucky by his side, Mr. Rogers sprung back to life in 1954 to occupy himself in Cold War-era American politics with the goal of convincing the (then less eager) American populous of “the triumph of American good over collectivist evil,” according to Roy Thomas’s analysis of the captain’s twentieth-century portrayal.
In modern America, Steve Rogers continues to represent the perfect soldier; with his patriotic striped suit, starry shield, and do-gooder attitude, his Western morals and success serve as sentiments that the United States military pushes her troops to uphold.
On a brisk November afternoon, I walked into the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Special Collections library with the intention of viewing a special edition of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Captain America was the last thing on my mind. As I traipsed up to the ninth floor and took a seat in the glass reading room, I expected a somber cover fitting of the diaspora epic of one of Lebanon’s most famous twentieth-century authors. Instead, as a librarian laid the prized copy in front of me, I faced a red, white, and blue novella more akin to the all-American comic books of my youth.
A Comic Book?
The Prophet, a twenty-six-part poetry collection published in 1923, details the journey and wisdom of a young man, Al Mustafa, as he returns from a decade long exile to his homeland. Generally regarded as Gibran’s most infamous work, The Prophet “achieved cult status among American youth for several generations,” according to Britannica. Translated into over one hundred languages, the version of The Prophet I requested in Memorial Library was an Armed Services Edition, published with the intention of sailing to American soldiers stationed overseas.
Thirteen and a half centimeters wide and ten centimeters tall, the Armed Services Edition of Gibran’s masterpiece is pocket-sized, ready to fit into a military uniform on the go. Printed on pulpy, thin, slightly opaque paper, like a low-quality, mass-produced graphic novel, a blue stripe on the bottom of the cover alerts readers that “this is the complete book—not a digest.” Formatted into two columns to maximize space in this wide but short handbook, and with its pages connected via two staples as binding, this edition of The Prophet was clearly published with cost efficiency in mind.
Emblazoned with red, yellow, and blue color blocking, the cover, the most eye-catching feature of this tiny novel, reminds readers of the book’s role as an Armed Services Edition. On the back, white stars border the red of the back blurb, like an abstract American flag. This cover design feels overly peppy when reading “your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding” in Al Mustafa’s sermon on human pain. The Prophet’s analysis of the human condition is often portrayed with somber tones by western publishing houses. Does the juxtaposition of what was written and how it was visually portrayed impose an overtly American perspective on Gibran’s writing?
The Prophet as an Armed Services Edition
The container of a work of literature affects its contents. Viewing The Prophet as an Armed Services Edition in Special Collections changes how we view its history.
Gibran’s critically acclaimed novella combines the narrative of the young prophet Al Mustafa with theology and critiques of twentieth-century global politics. Gibran, born to a Maronite family in the late nineteenth century, lived through the expulsion of Lebanese Christians in 1895. Due to their perpetual position as national scapegoats and following particularly violent protests over economic instability, thousands of Maronite Catholics left Lebanon in the late nineteenth century in search of greener pastures. Many of these religious escapees, like Gibran and his family, moved to the United States. This diaspora from his homeland affected the religious and nationalist symbolism in The Prophet and complicated the reasoning behind the book’s distribution to American soldiers at war.
Al Mustafa’s island exile connects him to a greater power. Readers are introduced to The Prophet as he begins a return journey to his home nation, but along his path to his home-bound ship the islanders he lived with ask for one last gift: words of wisdom. His neighbors know something essential about Al Mustafa: his isolation granted him divine knowledge. The Prophet, with its thinly veiled comparisons, parallel Gibran’s own exile and religious exploration with Al Mustafa’s journey to rediscover a homeland.
The Prophet’s main ideas of morality, war, violence, and peace shift in the context of being read by soldiers actively at war. The soldiers reading The Prophet might have related to Al Mustafa and his quest to survive the dangerous journey ahead and finally return home. When reading “for what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?” young militiamen may have aligned with Gibran’s claim that the perils they faced lent them knowledge only available to those experiencing the loss of exile.
Beyond the American Bubble
Rather than solely publishing books that placed the American military in the right, by promoting Gibran’s prose the publishing company provided literature with themes that a person in war would be pondering. In catering to their audience by providing an overtly philosophical and theological novella, the Editions for Armed Services served their mission: giving soldiers books relevant to their own needs. These soldiers shipped overseas, away from the American bubble, would have grappled with the same questions of God, faith, and ethics countering Western philosophy that present themselves in Gibran’s masterpiece. In Al Mustafa’s sermon about laws, Gibran argues that man-made laws and legal systems of power exist to serve the lawmakers and that those listening to him, and thus everyone reading his novel should be distrustful of their overseers and who they are willing to follow.
The Armed Services Edition of The Prophet simultaneously conforms with American pro-war sentiments. Formatted more like a Captain America novel than a heartfelt love story between a man and his homeland, the peppy, patriotic exterior aligns itself with the classic Armed Services Edition blueprint but sits at odds with The Prophet’s main sentiments.
The colorful exterior probes the reader to question whether the Editions for Armed Services’ intentional display of bold American imagery on The Prophet’s cover draws the reader away from Al Mustafa’s theology or pulls them deeper into it. Although Gibran’s wording has not changed, this specific publication impacts his writing. With a new target audience, and with the personal understanding of human atrocities that this audience brings, did Gibran’s messaging shift drastically enough to be viewed as a different piece of literature? Does the intended audience hold that much power over the intimacies of a novel’s contents?
Beyond Special Collections
Published in 1945, twenty years after The Prophet was originally distributed but only three years after Captain America’s initial circulation, as an Armed Services Edition, The Prophet reflects more on American sentiments at the precipice of the second great war than of Gibran’s early-twentieth-century Lebanese expatriate audience. The Prophet survives as a relic of American wartime sentiments, as it served as a messenger of American values overseas parallel to the nation’s favorite superhero.
Just as the U.S. government used Captain America as a promotional tool for patriotism, The Prophet morphed with its published form to promote American ideas. As you read the Armed Services Edition of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, over a century after the novel’s original publication, aren’t you proud to be an American?
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Funding for this series—which allowed HH to pay student writers and editors—was generously provided by the Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries. Special thanks are due, as well, to the staff of Special Collections, and especially to Lisa Wettleson, who guided students through the process of learning how to conduct original research in rare book and archival libraries.
About the author: Michelle Simdon is a first-year undergraduate chemistry and Spanish student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A lifelong Madison resident, she enjoys water sports and baking bread. An avid knitter and passionate intramural basketball star, Michelle can be found outdoors when she’s not studying for exams.
Further Reading
A list of the first 774 books published for American armed forces overseas : listed by number and alphabetically by author - Catalog - UW-Madison Libraries (wisc.edu)
Religion in the East: or, Sketches, historical and doctrinal, of all the religious denominations of Syria drawn from original sources - Catalog - UW-Madison Libraries (wisc.edu)
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