The Many Worlds of Etel Adnan

Klaudia Ruschkowski

The certitude of Space is brought to me by a flight of birds. Etel Adnan

tel Adnan is a poet, a philosopher and a painter, the author of essays and of plays, writing across languages, cultures, and continents. Born in Beirut Ein 1925, she describes herself as an “alchemical product.” Her father was a Muslim from Syria, born in Damascus, an officer in the Ottoman military forces, her mother a Greek from Smyrna, in Turkey. At home she lived with two religions, two languages, and two civilizations: the Islamic and the Greek. Her school in Beirut was French, with no reference to the Arab world outside. “Already as a child,” she says, “I had to construct my personality, to build myself up, in order to be something.”1 Her parents were living in a country not their own, and Adnan discovered quickly that they—and she—were somehow “in between.” On the other hand, the cosmopolitan milieu where she grew up made her understand the diversity of people and the world.

Around 1950, she wrote her first poems in the French language, Le Livre de la Mer. She adored Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, and Arthur Rimbaud. In 1949, when she moved to Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne—a leap for a young Lebanese woman—she followed their traces. In 1954, the Algerian War started and Adnan stopped writing in French as a reaction against French colonialism. As in Paris she lived in the Pavillon Americain and met Americans who became friends and supported her. In January 1955, she decided to go to the United States with a scholarship for Berkeley and Harvard. Only a few years later she was teaching philosophy at Dominican College, in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, and entered American culture with enthusiasm: “I thought the world was full of geniuses and happenings. The sixties were the best period in the world. But they were also the years of the Vietnam War.”2 With her first poem in English language, “The Ballad of the Lonely Knight in Present-Day America,” published

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00383 by guest on 24 September 2021 in 1965 in the S.B. Gazette, a free literary review in Sausalito, California, Adnan became part of the American Writers Against the Vietnam War. She integrated herself into American life, but never lost contact with Lebanon. During the sixties, she made several trips back tracing the blossoming of a young generation, which gave hope for a new cultural scene. But it is in the U.S. that she became aware of the situation in the Middle East and particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “I hadn’t heard much about it at home, nobody spoke about it, but now, in Berkeley it became a reality.”3 In Berkeley, she discovered the dimensions of the Arab World, a kind of flash that, as she says, simply changed her life.

At San Rafael College, Adnan had created a special teaching subject that corre- sponded very much to her interests: philosophy of the arts. She herself started drawing and painting at the O’Hanlon Workshop in Mill Valley and had her first exhibition there already in 1960. Educated with words, she discovered that “painting is a language that can go as far as any other language.” She became aware of the mutuality of different languages. The reflection that “writing by hand can be drawing and reciprocally drawing can be handwriting” led her to the creation of fanfold books.4 Through graphic characters, Arab hieroglyphics, watercolor spots, pencil and ink—through mixing words and handwritten poetry with colors, symbols, lines—one unfolds a scroll, entering a text, a landscape, a philosophical thought and, altogether, a theatrical moment. On this special surface or stage—in this special space—in various languages, she reflects on the perception of what determines our life: moments of daily routine, thoughts and ideas, form and function of objects, nature in its manifold changes, emotions, sensitivities and states of mind, views onto others and into ourselves, apocalyptic situations, catastrophes, wars. The leporellos, which likely are a basis of Adnan’s work as a whole, seem to be a philosophical perceiving/writing/drawing/perfor- mance reflecting our multifaceted, micro- and macrocosmic reality.

In 1966, she traveled to Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan, meeting poets and artists, exploring and comparing the living conditions in the Maghreb and the Arab East for a documentary film project conceived with an American friend to promote the knowledge of the Arab World in the U.S. In the same period, she published her first poetry book in English, called Moonshots, that came out in Beirut. The letters from Beirut that she received at her Californian home, in the beginning of the seventies, had a more and more desperate tone. She, who looked at things also from the other side of the globe, sensed the approaching catastrophe. She felt the urge to create poems that could be a kind of warning, a mise-en-garde: “Something in me still believes in the might of poetry.”5 In San Rafael, she wrote two long poems on the Palestinian conflict and on the increasing crises in Lebanon, “Jebu” and “The Beirut-Hell Express.” Beirut was fast slither- ing into violence and devastation. She decided to return to her city of birth. In

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00383 by guest on 24 September 2021 1972, she started to work as a cultural editor for two daily newspapers, first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour, becoming intensely engaged in the cultural and political processes in Lebanon. During that time, she met the Syrian-Lebanese artist Simone Fattal.

In 1975, the Lebanese Civil War erupted. From her balcony on a tenth-floor apart- ment in East Beirut she saws the bombs falling on a camp called Tell Zaatar—the Hill of Thyme—and heard the explosions, knowing that after every explosion people were dying—mostly women, children, and the elderly. The siege of Tell Zaatar took fifty-nine days. In fifty-nine poems she would publish the Arab Apoca- lypse, in 1980. Three years earlier, she had left with Simone Fattal for Paris where she wrote her novel about the Lebanese Civil War, Sitt Marie-Rose, which won the France-Pays Arabes Award and also inspired death threats. It has been translated into more than ten languages, and was to have an immense worldwide influence, becoming a classic of war literature. In her view, this war destroyed the sense of history and the sense of future. She is convinced that it was not only the defeat of the Arabs but the defeat of everyone, Americans included.

With Simone Fattal she re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home between 1979 and 2012, with frequent stays in Paris, on the Greek island of Skopelo, and later also in Beirut, dedicating herself to writing and painting. Many of her poems, essays, and fiction were published by the Post- Apollo Press, established by Simone Fattal in 1982, and specializing in poetry and experimental writing.

Adnan collaborated on Robert Wilson’s multi-country opera the CIVIL warS in 1984, writing the French part, which was her first experience in the field of dra- matic writing. Through that collaboration she came to know Heiner Müller, who was working on the German section of the production. Two decades later she would be responsible for Drucksache N.F. 7—The Sun is Melting on the Tongue, a volume in the series dedicated to Müller. Since 1990, Adnan has written several plays that have been performed in the U.S. and in Europe. “Some ideas simply came to my mind as a dialogue, as a play,” she explains. Several of her poems and texts have become theatrical performances, presented by international artists, including her poem “Jenin,” adapted for the stage and produced at Attis Theatre Athens, in 2005; “To Be in a Time of War,” produced at the German festival Ruhrfestspiele, in 2014; and a book-length poem called Night performed at Volksbühne Berlin in 2016. Adnan’s poetry has also been set to music by contemporary composers. Gavin Bryars composed The Adnan Songbook, which premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre in 1996. Annea Lockwood’s Luminescence, based on her poem “Sea,” was presented at the Sounds Like Now Festival at La MaMa, New York, in October 2004. Zad Moultaka’s opera Ur, commissioned by

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In 2012, the artist had a large space devoted to her work at dOCUMENTA (13) and decided to dedicate her essay for an accompanying booklet not to her paint- ings but to love: “People were talking about sexuality and violence, but no one was talking about love. We have lost that word,” she explains in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, “a strange situation. We live in a hedonistic society, but without joy. A joyless hedonistic society—it’s a contradiction.” Similarly, her play At A Certain Hour of the Night, written in 2013 and premiered in October that same year at Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, deals with the theme of love in a philosophical poetic dialogue between two former lovers that takes place in a single night. Adnan reflects on what remains of a passionate love after years of separation, asking how the void that such a love always leaves changes lives.

In recent years, Adnan’s artworks have been exhibited in important museums and galleries worldwide, in the U.S. at the New Museum, the Whitney Biennial and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York; the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, in San Francisco; and Mana Contemporary, in Jersey City. Her 2014 retrospective at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, titled Etel Adnan: In All Her Dimensions, was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and featured eleven dimensions of her work, including literature, painting, drawing, and carpets.

Also in 2012, the Al-Madina Theatre, Beirut, celebrated Etel Adnan in a three-day homage. The Greek filmmaker Vouvoula Skoura presented her portrait Etel Adnan: Words in Exile. The young ensemble of Al-Madina showed the scenic collage In the Heart of the Heart of Another Body, a play on the title of her book In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country—itself a play on the title of a William Gass novel— and performed her play Crime of Honor. For the occasion the Al-Madina Theatre initiated the Etel Adnan Award for Female Playwrights in the Arab World. That same year Adnan settled in Paris. The following year she received the Lambda Literary Award for her poetry book Sea and Fog, and in 2014 was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Etel Adnan, who has lived through many crises, wars, and political earthquakes, is convinced that “in times of trouble we need even more art and not less. It is not an extra, it is not superfluous, something marginal: it is something funda-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00383 by guest on 24 September 2021 mental.”6 A pioneer in many things—unwillingly, she adds—she has always lived beyond nationalities and boundaries: “I feel like a citizen of planet Earth. I am sensitive to geography and am aware of the fact that we are a planet in space.”7 In spite of all displacements, she seems to inhabit the most beautiful home ever, Earth itself, and in marvelous spaces created by her books.

KLAUDIA RUSCHKOWSKI is an author, curator, and translator, who has also worked as a dramaturg in German theatres. In 1991, she co-founded the European Culture Center of Thuringia, and formerly held the posi- tion of associate editor of Via Regia, international journal for cultural communication. From 1999 to 2010 she conceived a series of workshops for the International Heiner Müller Society, Berlin, and served as associate editor of several publications on the plays of Müller. Her current activities include curating art and documentary exhibitions, as well as literary and translation projects, and radio plays. For the last decade, she has collaborated with Etel Adnan in translating her poetry and is now working on the author’s literary biography. She lives in Volterra, Italy.

NOTES 1. Adnan in discussion with Frank Berberich, “Experiencing the Middle East,” Paris, October 1, 2012. 2. Adnan, “In California the news struck me like a shock,” unpublished article, trans. Hans-Ulrich Müller-Schwefe, September 23, 2003. 3. Ibid. 4. Adnan in discussion with the author, Paris, December 19, 2011.

5. Adnan, “Experiencing the Middle East,” 2012. 6. Adnan in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Fall 2011. 7. Ibid.

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