On Etel Adnan
The first time I heard of Etel Adnan was while I was still at school when she won a short story competition organized by the weekly Africasie. I do not remember Etel’s story but I have been since an addict of Etel’s art and friendship and that of her companion the artist and publisher Simone Fattal.
Whenever I like a text by Etel, I translate it. Translation is frequently compared to treason. I have practiced the translation of Etel’s work as an act of love and a desire to possess. Every translator exhibits a repressed desire to take the place of the author because he/she has composed the author’s text in his/her own language. I am no exception.
How to speak about Etel in three minutes? And she is the master of compression and condensation? Mayakowski speaks about the poet as one who processes thousands of tons of words in order to produce one poetic word. “But”, says he, “compare the glitter produced by this one word to the slow burning of the raw words”. Etel condenses words in a natural, I would even say ‘physical’, way without the need for mining or industrial processing. This is one example of her word-glitters as she resumes the American jazz wizard Duke Ellington “he transforms noise into velvet”.
Etel employs the same process of distillation and condensation in her paintings. Look at her small landscape paintings. They are not merely miniatures. They are a visual paraphrase of the Arab Sufi, An-Nuffari’s, formula: the more the expression narrows, the more the vision expands.
Who would have imagined that this child’s face carries that much alertness, cunning, depth, perseverance and courage?
She has always been an engaged feminist writer. Her unpretentious feminism combines sensitivity and strength. She does not dabble in formulas such as ‘in the beginning was the female’ nor is she seduced by anti-male rhetoric. Instead she destabilizes the biblical story: it is the woman in him that man lost since Adam. Woman is the deficit in man. His paradise lost. And he is condemned to struggle for ages in order to regain what he lost. As if Etel here echoes Louis Aragon’s formula ‘woman is the future of man’. But Etel is not content even with that. She focuses on what is strongest in man in order to feminize him. As man surrenders to pleasure, he is feminized. And pleasure in Arabic – al-Lazhzhah – is definitely feminine gender.
And Etel is an engaged writer with no need for justification. She is the living proof that upholding the values of freedom, justice and equality does not impoverish literature but enriches it. More: such an engagement is liable to produce great transformations in style and esthetics. There is no rhetoric, or enthusiasm or triumphalism here. For experience is richer and more painful. Etel is the daughter of a generation that has been shaken by the Arab defeat of June 1967, elated by the victory of Vietnam, put imagination in power with the student rebels of May 1968, glorified in Che Guevara the harbinger of the ‘New Man’ – a generation that shed the blood of the Palestinian wound before hailing the advent of the fida’yeen. Some members of this same generation survived to witness the Israeli occupation of Beirut and the American invasion of Iraq, an invasion so forcefully related in Etel’s amazing ‘In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country’ where dialogue alternates with repetition and stylistic innovation to construct the daily life of a woman living in the ‘belly of the beast’ as bombs rain over Baghdad.
Etel is most probably the first Arab poet who saw in the tragedy of the Red Indian the story of the uprooted diasporic Palestinians regrouped in ‘reservations’ called ‘refugee camps’. She is also the initiator of the novel form on the Lebanese civil war in her ‘Sitt Mary Rose’. But it is Beirut under Israeli occupation, civil war Beirut but also the Beirut of the Resistance that ‘hurt Etel into poetry’. In her masterpiece ‘The Arab Apocalypse’, she uses the conflict between sun and moon to express the memory of colonial wars and the Lebanese civil wars. “The sun is a pool of blood” she writes: “ I have seen mad Beirut writing in blood: death to the moon”. ‘The Arab Apocalypse’ is a unique work in the Arab literary production of catastrophes and wars. In it the poet challenges language with war and war with language. Language, deconstructed to conflagrate like a bomb, is vaporized like a blown door or volatilized like body parts. To add offense to injury, as it were, words are mixed with symbols, signs and amulets in a web of hieroglyphics that say the failure of language vis-à-vis the apocalypse.
This woman who “prefers waves to the sea” has addressed a message to the poets: “change the world or go home!” a message of defiance that equally applies to all who produce in literature, art or thought.
Etel, you who only exists for love, you know how much I love you.
This is another occasion to get to meet the many who love you and appreciate your talent, your noble self and your courage.
I wish you everlasting love.
Fawwaz Traboulsi
Beirut Theatre, Beirut, May 13, 2010.