Adrift on Driftwood

Etel Adnan

"A cosmology of terror:

History’s recurrent theme

of tortured bodies dumped as garbage…

We believe in
the uniqueness of these times

as in the originality of this sky.

The tribe needs to."

-- Etel Adnan.

My niece Heidi is an art curator and she recently sent me a note telling me about an upcoming show she's organizing featuring the work of this artist. Her note provided a link to a site where I could donate to the cause of helping to fund a trip to Paris--where the artist resides, and for health reasons is obligated to remain. After making a small donation for the cause, I was intrigued by Heidi's mention of the fact that Adnan is a writer of prose and poetry too. What an understatement! First I checked out the paintings (which are wonderful and I've included some below) but when I read some of the writing I found myself sock-less after just taking a few first steps. (The Poem that opens this post scored the first knockout.)

see more at:
http://www.eteladnan.com/seaandfog.html

From Wikipedia I learned that:

Etel Adnan (b. 24 February 1925 in Beirut) is a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist.

In 2003 MELUS, the journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, called Adnan "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today."

Daughter of a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, she grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a primarily Arabic-speaking society. Yet she was educated at French convent schools, and French became the language in which her early work was first written. She has also studied English from her youth, and most of her later work has been first written in this language.

Caught between languages, in her youth Adnan first found her voice through painting rather than writing. In 1996 she recalled, "Abstract art was the equivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words, but colors and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

XLIV from The Arab Apocalypse

BY ETEL ADNAN

Where do you want ghosts to reside?

In our wakeful hours there are flowers which produce nightmares

We burned continents of silence   the future of nations

the breathing of the fighters got thicker   became like oxen’s

there is in that breath sparkles of scorched flesh and the fainting of stars

we crucify Gilgamesh on a TANK Viking II reaches Mars

Imam Ali dances over a nuclear blast

cursed are the clouds which repel water

cursed are the Arabs who fell tall and haggard eucalyptus trees

Drifter's note: Gilgamesh  often given the epithet of the King, also known as Bilgames in the earliest Sumerian texts)-- was the fifth king of Uruk, modern day Iraq (Early Dynastic II, first dynasty of Uruk), placing his reign ca. 2500 BC. In Mesopotamian mythology, Gilgamesh is a demigod of superhuman strength who built the city walls of Uruk to defend his people from external threats, and travelled to meet the sage Utnapishtim, who had survived the Great Deluge. He is usually described as two-thirds god and one third man.

From Sea and Fog :

MY HOUSE
Open doors, open seas, once in a while an open heart: dwellings. Do I sleep in a cube of white flames or between walls of running water?
One’s unavoidable house is the body. Sometimes, this primeval house is some other person’s body, loved, or despised.

THE CHURCH
When I see a church on every street I wonder how it will be possible to think freely here. But alas, in this little hill town, we do think. (With dismal results.)

A PERSON
We’re never left alone because of the way memory functions. The will calls memories into focus, but they acquire independence, moving forward or backward, they consume us, they hide or refuse to serve our frustrated minds. When they turn into witches, they eat directly into the brain, leave us breathless, then bloodless, on the floor. What’s left of the person is carried -- often accompanied by long processions of people -- to a couple of square meters, where it will soon start to feed the clay of the soil with its non-usable organs.

POLITICS

When gods thought of themselves as being humans too, the latter fancied that they had become gods. Ever since, there has not been peace either in heaven or on earth.

more at:

http://www.blithe.com/bhq8.1/8.1.04.html

AND NOW FOR THE PAINTINGS. And I don't know much about them, and I don't know much about art, but they all knock me out. Interesting to me that much of her writing is multi-layered with dark and ominous tones, whereas the paintings I've found online are so bright, simple and full of light.