In addition to her literary output, Adnan made visual works in a variety of media, such as oil paintings, films and tapestries, which have been exhibited at galleries across the world.
Assaf Kadri's mother was Albanian.[4] Adnan's grandfather was a Turkishsoldier.[5][6] Her father came from a wealthy family.[7] He was a top officer and former classmate of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at the military academy.[6] In contrast, Adnan's mother was raised in extreme poverty; her parents met in Smyrna during World War I while her father was serving as an officer in Smyrna. Prior to marrying Adnan's mother, her father was already married with three children.[6] After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Adnan's parents migrated to Beirut. Adnan stated that her mother was 16 years old when she met her father, at a time when "the Greeks in Turkey were in concentration camps."[8][9]
Though she grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a primarily Arabic-speaking society, she was educated at French convent schools and French became the language in which her early work was first written.[10] She also studied English in her youth, and most of her later work was first written in this language.[citation needed]
Adnan returned from the US to Lebanon and worked as a journalist and cultural editor for Al Safa newspaper, a French-language newspaper in Beirut. In addition, she also helped build the cultural section of the newspaper, occasionally contributing cartoons and illustrations. Her tenure at Al Safa was most notable for her front-page editorials, commenting on the important political issues of the day.[12]
In her later years, Adnan began to openly identify as lesbian.[13] She met her partner Simone Fattal in 1972 and the couple lived together until Adnan's death. The two of them worked together on The Post-Apollo Press which was founded by Fattal in 1982, and where Adnan was a vital contributor as an author and translator.
A documentary about Adnan's life by American filmmaker Marie Valentine Regan in collaboration with the artist, began production in 2023 about "the last five years of her life".[17]
Visual art
Adnan also worked as a painter, her earliest abstract works were created using a palette knife to apply oil paint onto the canvas – often directly from the tube – in firm swipes across the picture's surface. The focus of the compositions often being a red square, she was interested in the "immediate beauty of colour".[18][19] In 2012, a series of the artist's brightly colored abstract paintings were exhibited as a part of documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany.[20]
In the 1960s, she began integrating Arabic calligraphy into her artworks and her books, such as Livres d'Artistes [Artist's Books].[21] She recalls sitting for hours copying words from an Arabic grammar without trying to understand the meaning of the words. Her art was very much influenced by early hurufiyya artists, including Iraqi artist Jawad Salim, Palestinian writer and artist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Iraqi painter Shakir Hassan al Said, who rejected Western aesthetics and embraced a new art form which was both modern and yet referenced traditional culture, media and techniques.[22]
Inspired by Japanese leporellos, Adnan also painted landscapes on foldable screens that can be "extended in space like free-standing drawings".[18]
In 2014, a collection of the artist's paintings and tapestries were exhibited as a part of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.[14]
Adnan's retrospective at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, titled Etel Adnan In All Her Dimensions and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, featured eleven dimensions of Adnan's practice. It included her early works, her literature, her carpets, and others. The show was launched in March 2014, accompanied by a 580-page catalog of her work published jointly by Mathaf and Skira. The catalog was designed by artist Ala Younis in Arabic and English, and included text contributions by Simone Fattal, Daniel Birnbaum, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, as well as six interviews with Hans-Ulrich Obrist.[citation needed]
In 2018, MASS MoCA hosted a retrospective of the artist, titled A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun, including a selection of paintings in oil and ink, as well as a reading room of her written works.[25] The exhibition explored how the experience of reading poetry differs from the experience of looking at a painting.[26]
Published in 2018, Etel Adnan, a biography of the artist written by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, inquires into the artist's work as a shaman and activist.[27][28] In 2020, the Griffin Poetry Prize is awarded to her book Time.[29]
To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader, edited by Thom Donovan, Brandon Shimoda, Ammiel Alcalay, and Cole Swensen, Nightboat Books (2014)
Sea and Fog, Nightboat Books (2012)
Master of the Eclipse (2009)
Seasons (2008)
In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005)
In/somnia (2002)
There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other (1997)
To Write in a Foreign Language (1996)
Of Cities and Women, Letters to Fawwaz (1993)
Paris, When It's Naked (1993)
The Spring Flowers Own and the Manifestations of the Voyage (1990)
The Arab Apocalypse (1989)
Journey to Mount Tamalpais: An Essay (1985)
The Indian Never Had a Horse and Other Poems (1985)
2012 Works 1956–2012, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Germany[42]
2012 DOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany
2010 Paintings and Drawings, Sfeir-Semler Karantina, Beirut, Lebanon[43]
Etel Adnan's works can be found in many collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Mathaf, Doha, Qatar, Royal Jordanian Museum, Tunis Modern Art Museum, Sursock Museum, Beirut, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, British Museum, London, M+, and Hong Kong.[citation needed]
Awards and recognition
1977: Awarded the France-Pays Arabes award for her novel Sitt Marie Rose.[10]
2015: The Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, begun in 2015, is awarded annually by the University of Arkansas Press for "a first or second book of poetry, in English, by a writer of Arab heritage."[48]
2020: The poetry collection Time, selections of Adnan's work translated from French by Sarah Riggs, wins the Griffin Poetry Prize.[49]
^Amyuni, M.T., "The Secret of Being a Woman' on Etel Adnan's Quest," Al Jadid [A Review & Record of Arab Culture and the Arts], Vol. 4, No. 25, 1998, Online:
^ abcAn Artisan of Beauty and Truth:Etel Adnan in conversation with David Hornsby and Jane Clark, Beshara Magazine, 2019, Etel: Well, my father was a Turk and a Muslim, and my mother was a Greek and a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, at a time when intermarriages were not common at all. He was a top officer and a classmate of Atatürk; they were at the military academy together. My father was already married with three children when he met my mother; he lived in Damascus and had his first family there. My mother was twenty years younger, and I was the only child of their marriage.
^Slattery, Dorothy (22 December 1959). "Nostalgia Markes Yule Season For Students". Daily Independent Journal. San Rafael, California. p. 19. Retrieved 11 December 2021 – via Newspapers.com.
^Myers, Julian; Rabben, Heidi, eds. (December 2013). The Ninth Page: Etel Adnan's Journalism 1972-74. San Francisco: CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. pp. 6–8. ISBN978-0-9849609-3-4.
^Lisa Suhair Majaj and Amal Amireh, Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist. McFarland & Company, 2001. ISBN0786410728.
Amireh, Amal; "Bearing Witness: The Politics of Form in Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose." Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 2005 Fall; 14 (3): 251–63. (journal article)
Amyuni, Mona Takieddine. "Etel Adnan & Hoda Barakat: De-Centered Perspectives, Subversive Voices." IN: Poetry's Voice-Society's Norms: Forms of Interaction between Middle Eastern Writers and Their Societies. Ed. Andreas Pflitsch and Barbara Winckler. Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert; 2006. pp. 211–21
Cassidy, Madeline. "'Love Is a Supreme Violence': The Deconstruction of Gendered Space in Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose." IN: Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as Transgression. Ed. Deirdre Lashgari. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia; 1995. pp. 282–90
Champagne, John G. "Among Good Christian Peoples: Teaching Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose." College Literature, 2000 Fall; 27 (3): 47–70.
Fernea, Elizabeth. "The Case of Sitt Marie Rose: An Ethnographic Novel from the Modern Middle East." IN: Literature and Anthropology. Ed. Philip Dennis and Wendell Aycock. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP; 1989. pp. 153–164
Foster, Thomas. "Circles of Oppression, Circles of Repression: Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1995 Jan; 110 (1): 59–74.
Ghandour, Sabah. "Gender, Postcolonial Subject, and the Lebanese Civil War in Sitt Marie Rose." IN: The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact on Contemporary Literature. Ed. John C. Hawley. New York, NY: Peter Lang; 1998. pp. 155–65
Hajjar, Jacqueline A. "Death, Gangrene of the Soul, in Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan." Revue Celfan/Celfan Review, 1988 May; 7 (3): 27–33.
Hartman, Michelle. "'This Sweet/Sweet Music': Jazz, Sam Cooke, and Reading Arab American Literary Identities." MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2006 Winter; 31 (4): 145–65.
Karnoub, Elisabeth. "'Une Humanité qui ne cesse de crucifier le Christ': Réécriture du sacrifice christique dans Sitt Marie Rose de Etel Adnan." IN: Victims and Victimization in French and Francophone Literature. Ed. Buford Norman. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi; 2005. pp. 59–71
Kilpatrick, Hilary. "Interview with Etel Adnan (Lebanon)." IN: Unheard Words: Women and Literature in Africa, the Arab World, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. Ed. Mineke Schipper. Trans. Barbara Potter Fasting. London: Allison & Busby; 1985. pp. 114–120
Layoun, Mary N. "Translation, Cultural Transgression and Tribute, and Leaden Feet." IN: Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P; 1995. pp. 267–89
Majaj, Lisa Suhair. "Voice, Representation and Resistance: Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose." Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women's Novels. Ed. Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2002. 200–230.
Majaj, Lisa Suhair and Amal Amireh. Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2002.
Marie, Elisabeth Anne. Sacrifice, sacrifiée, sacrificatrice: L'étrange triptyque: Sacrifices au féminin dans trois romans francophones libanais. Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 2003 May; 63 (11): 3961. U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2002.
Mejcher-Atassi, Sonja. "Breaking the Silence: Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose and The Arab Apocalypse." IN: Poetry's Voice-Society's Norms: Forms of Interaction between Middle Eastern Writers and Their Societies. Ed. Andreas Pflitsch and Barbara Winckler. Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert; 2006. pp. 201–10
Willis, Mary-Angela. "Francophone Literature of the Middle East by Women: Breaking the Walls of Silence." IN: Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures: Critical Essays. Ed. Kamal Salhi. Lanham, MD: Lexington; 2003. pp. 64–74
Willis, Mary-Angela. La Guerre démasquée à travers la voix féminine dans Sitt Marie Rose d'Etel Adnan et Coquelicot du massacre d'Evelyne Accad. Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 2002 Mar; 62 (9): 3061. U of Alabama, 2001.
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