“as if to be woman and to be memory were one and the same thing”: Prose of Etel Adnan
Sitt Marie Rose Translated from the French by Georgina Kleege Post-Apollo, 2011 (8th printing) First published in 1978 by the Editions des femmes, in Paris. $11.95 USD ISBN 978-0-942996-33-3, 105pp
Paris, When It’s Naked Post-Apollo, 1993 $15 USD ISBN 0-942996-20-8, 115pp
Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz) Post-Apollo, 1993 $14 USD ISBN 978-0-9429-9664-7, 85pp
Distributed by Small Press Distribution ph. 800.869.7553 (Toll-free within the US) www.spdbooks.org
Supplementary Materials
Biographical Notes
Etel Adnan was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. In Lebanon, she was educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. In January 1955 she went to the United States to pursue post-graduate studies in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael, California. Based on her feelings of connection to, and solidarity with the Algerian war of independence, she began to resist the political implications of writing in French and shifted the focus of her creative expression to visual art. She became a painter. But it was with her participation in the poets’ movement against the war in Vietnam that she began to write poems and became, in her words, “an American poet”. In 1972, she moved back to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976. In 1977, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris, and won the “France-Pays Arabes” award. This novel has been translated into more than 10 languages, and was to have an immense influence, becoming a classic of War Literature. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. In the late seventies, she wrote texts for two documentaries made by Jocelyne Saab, on the civil war in Lebanon, which were shown on French television as well as in Europe and Japan. There is more biographical information at http://www.eteladnan.com/.
Georgina Kleege is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Sight Unseen (1999) and Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006).
Short Descriptions
Sitt Marie Rose This extraordinary novel on the Civil War in Lebanon won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women's Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S. The story is about a handful of characters and how their relationships are affected by the war... the real protagonist is the city itself. Since the story is narrated in a staccato style, the text takes on a quality reminiscent of Picasso's Guernica. —Celfan Review, Temple University
Etel Adnan tells her story in a charged composite of many different forms of discourse: conversation, news bulletins, monologues, interviews and commentary... journalism and film. The influence of the distinguished Arabic poetic tradition, of which she is herself a part, is also evident. —Elizabeth Fernea
The incredulity toward meta-narratives that Lyotard characterizes as the post-modernist condition is embodied in the narrative technique of Sitt Marie Rose. —Thomas Foster, PMLA Journal
Paris, When It’s Naked … Etel Adnan tells a story of our time, a time when simply to sit and think is to be baffled by a thousand shifting currents of social and political (and therefore personal) possibilities. Beneath the daily round of the individual, and the habituations of Paris as a locale, move forces (market, military, demographic) that threaten to subvert and destroy, promise to challenge and enlighten. This conflict is made naked here, thanks to Adnan’s wonderful ability to level with herself and her readers. The light of the personal becomes all the brighter, among such giant shadows. —David Bromige
Paris, When It’s Naked amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarmé and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia. This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knows the French capital as wholly as she does Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of Sitt Marie Rose, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. Her new work is a philosophically charged lyric in porse. The élan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality. An indispensable book by an indispensable writer. —Morgan Gibson
Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz) Barcelona, Aix-en-Provence, Skopelos, Murcia, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Beirut. Etel Adnan’s Letters to Fawwaz, interlocutor, writer, and journal editor living himself in exile in Paris, were written in lieu of an essay on feminism promised to him for his magazine Zawaya. The lettered project, which begins in Barcelona in June 1990, at a feminist book fair, and concludes two years later in “post-war” Beirut in August 1992, is now, however, become a book of its own.
Of Cities and Women, at once correspondence and essay, summons for a reader of Etel Adnan’s previous work, such as the novel Sitt Marie Rose or the collection of poetry The Arab Apocalypse, the provocative combination of meditation, mediation — and immediacy — that has so distinguished her internationally acclaimed writing. That acclaim, even as it provides the site and the occasion for some of these letters — the Barcelona book fair, a seminar on Ibn ‘Arabi in Murcia, a poetry reading in Frankfurt followed by a public discussion of the Gulf War in Berlin — is relocated here in a deeply global sensitivity to the situations of women from country to country, across landscapes, seas, through city streets, and in their representations in art. Written against the background of war at the turn of the century, this millennium — the Gulf War, the Lebanese Civil War and the military occupations of that country, the author’s country of origin — these letters, Of Cities and Women, are in their turn now letters to cities and women — that we, that is, women and men alike, might eventually, before it is too late, ‘find the right geography for our revelations.’ —Barbara Harlow, University of Texas at Austin
Reviews
“Sitt Marie Rose, by Adnan Etel, translated by Kleege Georgina from the French original, Sitt Marie-Rose (1982),” Review of Middle East Studies, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026318400016394
Adnan “does not ignore Paris as ‘the heart of a lingering colonial power.’ She has taken the reader not only to the streets of Paris, but to the skies, and to the passing thoughts of the relocated Parisian who writes through circumstances, concerns, observations,” writes Laynie Brown in “Etel Adnan’s ‘Paris, When It’s Naked’, the poet’s novel” at Jacket2, http://jacket2.org/commentary/etel-adnans-paris-when-it%E2%80%99s-naked
“Etel Adnan: Of Cities and Women,” EPC, http://epc.buffalo.edu/ezines/treehome/tree03/adna_ofc.html
“‘Sitt Marie Rose: a partial narration of the Lebanese Civil War,” Outlook, http://outlookaub.com/2015/04/20/sitt-marie-rose-a-partial-narration-of-the-lebanese-civil-war/
Links
“Etel Adnan,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/etel-adnan
“Etel Adnan allows herself free rein while she vibrates with each city she visits, fully opening up to the multifold spectacles she offers (the personalization of the city as woman, here, is quite in tune with the climate of the book.),” writes Mona Takieddine Amyuni in “‘The Secret of Being a Woman” on Etel Adnan's Quest at Al Jadid, http://www.aljadid.com/content/%E2%80%98-secret-being-woman-etel- adnans-quest
“Transgressive Subjects: Gender, War, and Colonialism in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose,” by Sami Ofeish and Sabah Ghandour, Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist, https://books.google.com/books?id=8kinCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA121&lpg=PA121&dq=sitt+marie+rose+rev iew&source=bl&ots=Qn2sTpYFf2&sig=L2dbyvecasTCylyk7KMA_- PTNkw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiW-8S55cDVAhVnsFQKHZslBgk4ChDoAQhdMA8 - v=onepage&q=sitt marie rose revi
“The novel itself acts as a critique of various aspects of Lebanese culture, including critiques of ,by Etel Adnan,” Read Kutub (اﻟﺴﺖ ﻣﺎري روز) xenophobia as well as the role of women,” “Sitt Marie Rose https://readkutub.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/sitt-marie-rose-by-etel-adnan/
In “Contemplating Apocalypse: On the Work of Etel Adnan,” Lindsay Turner discusses the deep cartography and historical attentiveness of Etel Adnan’s work in Kenyon Review, http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2015-spring/selections/on-etel-adnan-738439/
“I can paint, but I can’t produce,” says Etel Adnan in this conversation with Lisa Robertson at BOMB Magazine, http://bombmagazine.org/article/10024/etel-adnan
“‘Sitt’ is an Arabic word, used in Lebanon and Syria mostly, and Egypt, to mean ‘madam.’ It’s not formal. A girl of five years old in conversation can be ‘little sitt so-and-so.’ ‘Sitt’ can also be for married or single women. It’s a colloquial way to address a woman. It carries some respect,” explains Etel Adnan in “Etel Adnan: Children of the Sun” at Bidoun, http://bidoun.org/articles/etel-adnan
Relevant News
“The uneasy beautification of Beirut,” Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/0a6ba06e-76a8-11e7-a3e8-60495fe6ca71
“Hezbollah boosted by battleground successes in Syria conflict,” Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/62187b82-f1ee-11e6-8758-6876151821a6
“Activists say the raids are part of a government campaign to harass Syrian refugees in the country, following growing anti-immigration sentiment,” “Beirut clamping down on Syrian refugee campaigns in Lebanon,” The New Arab, https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2017/7/18/lebanese-authorities-clamp-down-on-syrian- refugee-campaign
“Beirut Is Blocking Its World Famous Beaches From The People Who Actually Live There,” GOOD, https://www.good.is/features/beiruts-losing-public-spaces
“Dropping beats not bombs: How one man swapped minesweeping for music,” CNN Travel, http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/radio-beirut-local-music-lebanon/index.html
“‘The world’s most beautiful pollution’ — that's how blogger Claude El Khal [http://claudeelkhal.blogspot.com/2017/06/la-plus-belle-pollution-du-monde.html] referred to the coastal waters of Lebanon on his blog after LBCI shared the picture of a brown-colored area in the sea, close to the shore where people usually enjoy a swim in summer,” “Water pollution in Lebanon reaching dangerous levels,” Al-Monitor, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/07/lebanon-water-pollution-garbage-crisis.html
“Activists team up with Mashrou' Leila to detox Beirut's plastic binge,” The New Arab, https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/society/2017/8/6/greenpeace-mashrou-leila-team-up-to-detox- beiruts-plastic-binge
On the ongoing relevance of the Lebanese civil war: “Three Exhibitions Held In Beirut For People Missing During The Lebanese Civil War,” The961, https://www.the961.com/exhibitions-held-beirut-people-missing-lebanese-civil-war/
“Protesters in Paris rally against Israeli PM's visit,” Al Jazeera, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/protesters-paris-rally-israeli-pm-visit-170715160618529.html
“Railway havoc leaves holidaymakers stranded in Paris,” FRANCE 24, http://www.france24.com/en/20170731-holydaymakers-stranded-paris-station-trains-cancelled-france- tourism
“New swimming spot on Paris canal reopens after closure due to pollution,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/25/new-swimming-spot-on-paris-canal-closed-due-to- pollution
Airbnb, housing crisis, and trying to make ends meet: “The dark side of tourism: Barcelona residents either put up or move out” addresses income inequality in Barcelona at Euronews, http://www.euronews.com/2017/08/08/barcelonas-tourism-battle
“The staff are protesting against low pay and poor working conditions in a series of staggered, hour-long strikes every Friday, Sunday and Monday until 14 August, when a 24-hour walkout is planned if the dispute is not resolved,” “Barcelona airport strikes cause severe delays,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/04/barcelona-airport-strikes-cause-major-delays
“Herrou told BFM television he “has no regrets” and won’t stop helping migrants, calling it his citizen’s duty,” reports Arab News in “French activist farmer convicted for helping migrants,” http://www.arabnews.com/node/1141366/world
“Skopelos gets heaviest snowfall in 30 years,” Ekathimerini, http://www.ekathimerini.com/215120/gallery/ekathimerini/in-images/skopelos-gets-heaviest-snowfall- in-30-years
“Worrying drought conditions for Alicante and Murcia,” RTN Online, https://www.rtnnewspaper.com/2017/07/worrying-drought-conditions-for-alicante-and-murcia/
“Stray cats find a home on an Amsterdam houseboat,” Pocono Record, http://www.poconorecord.com/news/20170809/stray-cats-find-home-on-amsterdam-houseboat
Amsterdam’s “new residents tell Joy Lo Dico why they were wooed by its canals, creativity and EU membership” at the Evening Standard, https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/why-londons-tech-and-media-workers-are-being- wooed-into-relocating-to-amsterdam-a3607551.html
“A new LGBTI house and techno club is opening in Amsterdam,” Mixmag, http://mixmag.net/read/a-new-lgbti-club-jack-is-coming-to-amsterdam-news
“The Netherlands: Amsterdam on collision course over social assistance experiments,” Basic Income Earth Network, http://basicincome.org/news/2017/08/the-netherlands-amsterdam-on-collision-course-over-social- assistance-experiments/
“Tech scene targets Berlin and Google moves in,” South China Morning Post, http://www.scmp.com/presented/business/topics/invest-overseas-properties/article/2106073/tech-scene- targets-berlin-and
“There are almost no libraries with Arabic books or institutions for Arab culture here," said Muhannad Qaiconie, the 30-year old founder of the centre” in “Migrant centre in Berlin brings Germany Arabic culture,” Yahoo! News, https://ca.news.yahoo.com/migrant-centre-berlin-brings-germany-141003105.html
“Berlin 24/7: How welcome are LGBTI refugees in Berlin?,” Deutsche Welle, http://www.dw.com/en/berlin-24-7-how-welcome-are-lgbti-refugees-in-berlin/a-39953376
“Berlin duo launch a supermarket with no packaging,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/sep/16/berlin-duo-supermarket-no-packaging- food-waste
“Two thousand years ago, Rome could pride itself on having the world’s most advanced aqueducts, exporting the technology throughout Europe and the Middle East. Today, the city is literally running out of water — thanks in part to its crumbling infrastructure,” reports The Washington Post in “Romans are about to go eight hours a day without water,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/28/romans-are-about-to-go-eight- hours-a-day-without-water/?utm_term=.64cb5751d6e6
“Rome bans drinking on public streets in the evening,” Food & Wine, http://www.foodandwine.com/news/rome-bans-drinking-on-public-streets Discussion Questions
• What are some of the recurring images in Sitt Marie Rose? What about Paris, When It’s Naked? Of Cities & Women? How does Etel Adnan use this imagery? Can you trace the images’ origins and trajectories?
• On page 3 of Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan describes a portion of the contemporary Lebanese population as “Christian, modernized Lebanese who go wherever they like with their touristo- military gear.” How else does Adnan portray violence in Sitt Marie Rose, Of Cities & Women, and Paris, When It’s Naked? What is the role of violence in the books and where do the books connect to history?
• Name some of the thematic elements of these three books. How does the geography of each book connect to these elements? For instance, what can you say about the north-south line dividing Beirut in Sitt Marie Rose? About expatriation in Of Cities & Women? About geographic distributions of wealth and power?
• How does Adnan use fragments (for example, “Cement has mixed with the earth, and little by little has smothered most of the trees. If not all.”) in her writing?
• What is the function of Adnan’s diaristic approach to these three texts?
• Say something about the relationship between work and war in Sitt Marie Rose. Who does what? To what ends?
• What are some of your favorite quotes from Sitt Marie Rose, Paris, When It’s Naked, and Of Cities & Women? Why do these stand out?
• How do the violence of men, violence of patriarchy, and confrontation of masculinity play out in Sitt Marie Rose?
• Consider the boat and sea metaphors that populate these texts. Why do you think Adnan chose them?
• In Paris, When It’s Naked, Adnan writes, “Information and propaganda have become so entangled that those who specialize in them acquire severe reality problems” (60). What does she mean by “reality problems”? How is this perspective relevant today?
• What current events are addressed in Paris, When It’s Naked?
• What is present in Paris, When It’s Naked? What is absent?
• Discuss merchandise, pollution, and environments in Of Cities & Women. How do they change? How are they site-specific, and how do they relate to each other?
• How do relationships between geography and personal, cultural, and political insights unfold in Sitt Marie Rose, Paris, When It’s Naked, and Of Cities & Women?