May Menassa

May Menassa (مي منسى‎; 20 July 1939 - 19 January 2019) was a Lebanese journalist, writer, editor-in-chief, critic and translator, best known as the author of Walking in the Dust and I Killed My Mother in Order to Live.

She was the first woman to enter the Lebanese television business and joined the only public television network at the time Télé Liban.

She wrote a lot of articles and about ten novels.

May Menassa was born 1939 in Beirut, Lebanon, in a Maronite Christian family.

She is the sister of the Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata  and cousin of Latifé Moultaka and Zad Moultaka.

Her father was strict but cultivated.

He used to read books such as Les Misérables by Victor Hugo to his children before they go to sleep.

She studied French Literature at university before perusing a career in journalism.

She became a novelist and a journalist.

She only married once and had a son, Walid Menassa, before getting a divorce later on.

May Menassa started her career in 1959 as a broadcaster, she was the first woman at the time to enter the Lebanese television business.

She was the host of the talk show called "Women of Today" (nisa' alyawm / نساء اليوم) that aired on [ Télé Liban].

She graduated with a degree in French Literature but ten years later, in 1969, she shifted to Arabic and she became part of the cultural team for the Lebanese paper An-Nahar,she worked as literature and music critique and was in charge of the cultural articles.

She wrote multiple sorties that where about music, theater and literature.

She was 34 years old when the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975.

During this war, she continued doing her job as a journalist, visiting regions where both parties where fighting.

She used to observe how people were living there despite of all what is going on around.

May Menassa never thought of giving up and migrating, yet she always fought for the right word to be said.

Her vision was that people in her country, Lebanon, should put their hands together, disregarding who their leader is, to build a new improved country.

May Menassa started her career as a TV presenter at Télé Liban.

She was one of the first cast at this TV channel, since she applied when they were first opening the channel, although she didn't know very much about television and or about the requirements of the job.

Her father was against this job at first because he thought that it was like an acting job.

This pushed her father to go with her while applying for the oral and written exam where she was competing against 120 people, but she passed both superiorly.

She worked for 8 years there as a TV host.

However, she used to get disturbed by the limitations put upon her due to the nature of this job, such as time limitations.

And she always wanted to get into journalism, yet she didn't know how to get into that field.

One day she got a call from An-Nahar offering her a job to be responsible for the new section of entertainment they were planning on opening.

This section discussed women related topics, which was the main subject concerned in May Menassa's TV shows.

She directly accepted the offer feeling it was a way for her to work freely using pen and paper for expressing her ideas.

While writing articles at An-Nahar, Ghassan Tueni, one of her closest friends and owner of An-Nahar, advised her to write novels.

Since then, she published 10 novels and simultaneously wrote kids' stories, such as her first book that was in French "Le jardin de Sarah".

At first, her brother and mother were her main inspiration.

Most of her writings find essence from painful and melancholic stories.

But before being a writer, she was a reader.

In an interview with journalist Nadia Nouaihed, she declared that her favorite writers and poets were Jean Racine, Arthur Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, Molière and many other in French literature.

In 1986, she left An-Nahar to become the editor-in-chief of a women's magazine distributed in the Arab world called: Jamalouki.

In 1998 she publishes her first novel in Arabic: "Awraq min dafater chajarat rumman" (أوراق من دفاتر شجرة رمان، رواية، دار النهار) that talks about a past family tragedy: her brother's sickness.

This same tragedy was brought up by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (at that time living in Paris, France) in French in the Novel: "Une maison au bord des larmes".

They released their books at the same time, that evoke a similar tragedy.

=== During the Lebanese Civil War ===