Description

For the lithograph “My Wish”, eL Seed was inspired by one of his artwork he created in Beirut in 2017. He painted a quote from the Lebanese writer Ameen Rihani.

Ameen Rihani was a champion of a new kind of Arabic literature. In the early 1900s in the United States, Rihani and his friend and fellow author Khalil Gibran started a body of writing that was Arab in its concern and characteristic but in the English language. Importantly, it was intrinsically spiritual and as such, collapsed cultural and religious boundaries. Rihani was the first Arab to write English essays, poetry, novels, short stories, that examined the divisions and parallels between notions of ‘east’ and ‘west’ and he published his works in America during the first three decades of the 20th century.

Being brought up in Paris to Tunisian parents, eL Seed is also fascinated with Rihani’s ideas and so, when he visited Beirut for the first time, he immediately gravitated towards his words: Lebanon, after all, is the native home of both Rihani and Gibran.

On a small wall in the city’s Achrafieh neighbourhood, eL Seed painted these words in a circular pattern:

My wish is to live without disliking anyone,
To love without being jealous of anyone,
To rise without being elevated over anyone and,
To advance without stepping on anyone or becoming envious of those above me.