A lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world, the beauty of art.

In these interviews conducted by journalist Laure Adler, poet and painter Etel Adnan recounts the foundational experiences of her artistic approach shortly before her death in Autumn of 2021. From her youth in Lebanon, through her years in New York and California, and her late-in-life discovery at Documenta in 2013, this intimate conversation revisits and questions the sometimes difficult destiny of women.

The fourth volume in PAJ's Performance Ideas series, The Sun on the Tongue unfolds in an expanding universe of philosophical reflections on love, art, war, nature, and human existence. Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned Arab American writer and visual artist, crosses genres and continents and centuries in her literary texts, plays, poems, and art.

Her plays At A Certain Hour of the Night, Crime of Honor and Tolerance are featured here, along with essays on Pina Bausch and Paul Klee, and an interview on her life and work. Her texts have been performed or adapted for theatre, opera, and radio in the U.S. and Europe. Robert Wilson invited her to write the French section of his multi-country opera, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, in 1984.

In/somnia explores fissures within words as places where thought enters. Sleepless sleepers, we dream among ever more complex and hallucinatory realitites: `in/tense/in/season'—Rosmarie Waldrop.

These interrelated meditations explore the nature of the individual spirit and the individual spiritedness of the natural world. As skilled a philosopher as she is a poet, in Sea & Fog, Adnan weaves multiple sonic, theoretical, and syntactic pleasures at once.

Sea and Fog won the 2013 Lambda Book Prize in Poetry and the 2013 California Book Award in Poetry.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958-1972. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959-1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, "an American poet." In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers--first for Al Safa, then for L'Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986) The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. In 2014, she was awarded one of France's highest cultural honors: l'Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Many of her poems have been put to music by Tania Leon, Henry Treadgill, Gavin Bryars, Zad Moultaka, Annea Lockwood, and Bun Ching Lam. Her paintings have been widely exhibited, including Documenta 13, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The New Museum, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. In 2014, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of her work.

Etel Adnan's novel Paris, When It's Naked amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia.

This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knew the French Capital as wholly as she did Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of Sitt Marie-Rose, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. This work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality. An indespensable book by an indispensable writer. (Words by Morgan Gibson)

“The Spring Flowers Own” and “The Manifestations of the Voyage” continue and complete the Cycle of the Linden Tree, which started with two poems previously published in The Indian Never Had a Horse & Other Poems: “One Linden Tree, Then Another Linden Tree,” and “An Alley of Linden Trees, and Lightning.”

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925, the daughter of a Greek Christian from Smyrna and a high-ranking Ottoman officer from Damascus. She passed away in November 2021. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include SITT MARIE ROSE (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); THE ARAB APOCALYPSE (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); SEA AND FOG (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; and PREMONITION (Kelsey Street Press, 2014). Nightboat Books published the 2-volume set, TO LOOK AT THE SEA IS TO BECOME WHAT ONE IS: AN ETEL ADNAN READER, in 2014. In 2011, Adnan received Small Press Traffic's Lifetime Achievement Award. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as stubbornly radiant abstractions, have been widely exhibited, most recently at Documenta 13 and in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL WarS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985.

A heart-rending meditation on aging, grief, and the universal experience of facing death.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958-1972. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959-1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, "an American poet." In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers--first for Al Safa, then for L'Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. In 2014, she was awarded one of France's highest cultural honors: l'Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Many of her poems have been put to music by Tania Leon, Henry Treadgill, Gavin Bryars, Zad Moultaka, Annea Lockwood, and Bun Ching Lam. Her paintings have been widely exhibited, including Documenta 13, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The New Museum, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. In 2014, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of her work.

Born in 1925 in Beirut, ETEL ADNAN has written more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and essays. A two-volume collection, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader, was published in 2014. She is a recipient of a PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award, the California Book Award, a Lambda Book Award, and a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She lives in Paris and Sausalito, California.

"Trained in philosophy, Beirut-born author/activist Adnan blends a meditation on the meaning of memory with memories themselves, dredged up from a long life. And surely night, her setting here, is the time for such dredging. Adnan rigorously asserts that "reason and memory move together." But she argues that "a remembered event is a return to a mystery," and her writing is eye-openingly lush, gorgeous, even surreal ("waves of roses are blanketing memory"), showing us the mind at work on its unstructured, uncertain edges. The epigrammatic ending, "Conversations with my soul" ("Why are we lonelier when/ together"), will feed even those who don't typically read poetry. VERDICT A good way for sophisticated readers to recall why they first loved verse." — Library Journal

On October 27, 2003, Etel Adnan received a postcard from poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies. Originally in French, the poems it sparked collapse time, then expand it. War and love intertwine with coffee and bombs, memory and the present, evoking life in non- linear time.

Time continues Etel Adnan's recent series of short meditative works on single themes: Sea & Fog, Night, Surge and now Time, expanding her already rich philosophical and poetic lexicon. This book is a collection of six short works originally written in French.

(June 2019)