Why does the name Etel Adnan always give you a little luck trick? Why do you warmly think of someone who has published a book called “Arab Apocalypse”? Why is the death of a nearly centenarian seen as such a great loss?
To start with the last question: Because Etel Adnan’s work always testifies to the present of its creation, because her texts have always emerged from the now and in this way never appear as something complete, even as something entirely belonging to the past.
Adnan, born in Beirut in 1925, doesn’t have one big work, she has written many small, big works, works in which she has reinvented herself again and again, or in which, that is probably closer to the matter, the world in hers many manifestations have found their respective form: essays, conversations, stories, and last but not least: pictures.
The English of their new surroundings became the language of their poetry
Etel Adnan found painting later; In 2012 she was even invited to the Documenta in Kassel. One of the recurring motifs in her pictures is Mount Tamalpais, less a mountain than a large hill north of San Francisco. This is where Adnan lived for a while, teaching philosophy, and here, in America, she had also started writing in the late 1950s. Which means: Here she found her language. Her first works were not to be written in the Arabic of her native Beirut, nor in the French in which she was taught by nuns in the Christian school, but in the English of her new environment.
Because of that she did not become an American writer. The wandering, essayistic spirit of French literature was always closer to her than the novel world of the American suburbs or the urban poetry of the beat poets. Even though she lived in California and later in Paris: Emotionally she remained closely connected to her country of origin, and thematically the events in the Near and Middle East always play an important role in her works, for example in her only novel, “Sitt Marie-Rose” .
The work, barely a hundred pages, first appeared in 1977, two years after the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. It tells the true story of a Christian woman who campaigned for the rights of Arab women and was therefore ultimately murdered. Above all, however, it tells the story of a group of young, well-heeled people in lively pre-war Beirut who want to make films that drive car races in the Syrian desert, but are then torn apart by the war and stray as far as possible from the ideas and visions. that they have just driven.
What it means to not be able to be with those you love
Adnan had returned to Beirut in 1972 to work as an art editor for a daily newspaper. Just three years later, however, civil war broke out in Lebanon and she had to leave the country again. In 1980 her long poem “Arabian Apocalypse” was published, an impressive song that has lost none of its relevance today: “A war sun in Beirut April thunderstorms on the ships a cool breeze / yellow sun on a stake an eye in the gun barrel a dead man from Palestine / a mauve-colored sun in my girlfriend’s trouser pocket forays through Paris / a bird in a Palestinian’s toe a fly at the butcher’s / sulphurous Beirut acid “.
One reason why, despite all the cruelty of the present, reading Adnan’s books does not leave one in sadness and despair: Her literature is always carried by love, by love for her city, Beirut, and by the love for the people she knows there.
What it means not to be with those you love is also about “In the heart of the heart of another country” (2005). Originating in the USA during the Second Iraq War, these autobiographical miniatures are permeated by a fundamental experience of alienation: What kind of body is it that drives, reads, writes and eats and is not exposed to any threat for a second, while the mind is whole and is even filled with that feeling of threat, as it is felt by thousands upon thousands at the same time, just on the other side of the globe?
Adnan’s very young poetry shines with hope
She did not prepare writing for painting, Adnan once said, but from painting she learned a lot for writing. The painter’s gaze is perhaps felt most strongly in her book “Paris, when it’s naked” (1993), a crystalline, nocturnal, clairvoyant, almost disembodied Paris essay, which has the completely misleading, romanticizing title “Paris, Paris ” wearing.
Paris, Beirut, California – the last time Etel Adnan published a volume in German that extends into space: “We became cosmic” combines Adnan’s series of images, “Funeral march for the first cosmonaut”, with a poem of the same name. As dark as it may be out there, so bright, so hopefully the poetry of Etel Adnan, which is not only very young by cosmic standards, shines: “The body of the universe is white as the early morning / don’t be afraid …”