Monument to Mahjar writers in New York opens a debate over memory and identity

The Guardian reported on Oct. 21 on “Al Qalam: Poets in the Park,” a 7-foot yellow stainless-steel sculpture that spells the Arabic word for “the pen.” It was unveiled on April 30 in Elizabeth H Berger Plaza in lower Manhattan, in honor of the Pen League, the circle of writers that Kahlil Gibran led in the early 20th century in the neighborhood once known as Little Syria. The Guardian said it was the first commemorative artwork unveiled under Mayor Zohran Mamdani and that it was designed by the artist Sara Ouhaddou. It described the writing that came out of the community as the Mahjar literary movement, with New York as its western center.

According to the Guardian, Lebanese officials objected to a nearby parks department sign that called the honorees Syrian. It said Lebanon’s foreign minister, Youssef Rajji, announced in May that he had directed Lebanon’s ambassador in Washington and its consul general in New York to contact the relevant authorities “with the aim of correcting the text,” and that the Gibran National Committee, which runs the poet’s museum in Bsharri, Lebanon, also issued a formal objection.

The Guardian reported that a revised sign was in place by July, and that the word “Syrian” was removed six times from the text. It said Jonathan Kuhn of the parks department described the signs as temporary and open to change over time. Bob Madey, whose grandfather Elia Abu Madi is among the writers featured, called the new sign “an erasure of the writers and what they wrote about,” the Guardian reported. The historian Todd Fine said he sympathized with the Lebanese objection but believed the revisions went too far.

The article also cited the historian Hani Bawardi, who said descendants of early immigrants told him “we were all Syrians.” The Guardian wrote that Gibran is recorded as Syrian in his Ellis Island entries and in the community magazine The Syrian World, and that Lebanon was assembled as a state on Sept. 1, 1920.

Linda Jacobs, a historian who led the Washington Street Historical Society through the project’s final years and wrote the monument’s first sign, told the Guardian in an email in October that the history of the first Arabic-speaking community in the United States is “finally being recognized and memorialized.” The Guardian put the monument’s cost at $1.6 million, $1.4 million of it from the Mellon Foundation.