“And I Too Am My Own Forerunner”: My Reading Of Kahlil Gibran

Predicated upon the towers of collapse while T.S. Eliot the representative modernist in order to re-construct his culture out of the debris of its imperialist past concluded his Waste Land (1922) by looking Eastward into the all-pervading ?shantih? of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad Kahlil Gibran a Lebanese American authored The Prophet (1923) to deconstruct such enterprise and retrieve a culture that was swirling in-between Darwinian metaphors and Nietzschean Nihilism. He who was exterior to the ?omnipotent definitions? of the West saw in ?Beauty? the ?eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.? So to him ?you are eternity and you are the mirror.? This book is a reading of Kahlil Gibran's life and works: his life as a text and his works as the terrains of a never-ending journey. It opens up those fissures and ruptures that make Gibran and his writings relevant vis-á-vis the socio-political cultural and religious urgencies that the world is grappling with today. Often misconstrued as a mystic or an Oriental Wise Man Gibran dwells in an amorphous placeless-ness within the academic space and outside of it. ?Forerunner? in its own way this book by unfolding the process of 'reading' as a mode of travelling subverts such stereotypes and tries to reveal to the readers that 'outlandish' lonely intellectual who through his works fashioned a self and a land ?out of place? rather in a ?non-place? for dismantling and up-setting monolithic cultures and their decadent notions.