Registration required:
2 sessions / $125
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Etel Adnan’s life spanned almost a century (1925–2021). During this time, true to her belief in the mutability of human beings, she never stayed still. Guided by a steady sense of radical solidarity as much as by ever-renewed wonder at the beauty of the world, she lived on three continents and in multiple languages, working as a writer, a painter, a journalist, a professor, a filmmaker, among other pursuits. Each one of her books seemed to forge a new genre, as though to best bear witness to the world’s turmoil: “I know that seeking political and philosophical notions in the street is like trying to construct a barrier to hold back the ocean, but I won't look elsewhere.”
In this two-session seminar, we will attempt to get a sense of what drove Etel Adnan’s work across the innumerable forms it took over the decades. We will read a variety of her texts as we follow two conductive threads: war and nature. In the first session, we will think about what violence does to language by tracing the pervasive presence of war in Adnan’s life and her creative responses to it. In the second session, we will look at Adnan’s relationship with Mount Tamalpais as a way of examining her refusal of the common separations between realms of existence, in favor of a perpetual conversation with all living things: “O my tree, my own, // shall we transcend species / and gender / to exchange, oh once! / pleasure and knowledge?!”
Class modality: Online synchronous (real-time attendance required)
Required textbook purchases: No
Recorded: No
Writing: No
Workshopping & feedback: No
Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was raised in Beirut, Lebanon, and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. In January 1955 she went to the United States to pursue post-graduate studies in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley and Harvard. It was with her participation in the poets’ movement against the war in Vietnam that she began to write poems and became, in her words, “an American poet”. In 1972, she moved back to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976. In 1977, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris and won the “France-Pays Arabes” award. This novel has been translated into more than 10 languages, and was to have an immense influence, becoming a classic of war literature. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris.
Omar Berrada is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He authored the poetry collection Clonal Hum (Obultra, 2020), and edited or co-edited several books, including The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (Kulte, 2016); La Septième Porte, a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (Kulte, 2020); and Another Room to Live In (Litmus, 2024), a trilingual (non-)anthology of Arab poetry. His writing was included in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including The University of California Book of North African Literature (UC Press, 2012) and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry (Texas UP, 2020). Berrada, who was a friend of Etel Adnan’s over a period of 20 years, has spoken and written extensively about her work, including essays for Mizna, Frieze, and Bidoun, and an afterword to the 2nd edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (Litmus, 2021).
A limited number of need-based scholarships are available to cover the enrollment costs of Poetry Society classes. To receive and fill out a scholarship survey, email parker@poetrysociety.org.
