About Etel Adnan
“She is undeniably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab-American writer working today.”
Etel Adnan (Beirut, February 24, 1925 – Paris, November 14, 2021)12 was a French-Lebanese visual artist, painter, poet, writer, author and cartoonist who became an American citizen. She wrote in French, English and Arabic.
In 2003, the journal of the Society for the Study of Multiethnic American Literature called Adnan “undeniably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab-American writer working today.”
According to the poet, «Like any serious writer, her audience cannot be reduced to her Arab peers or to an Arab-American audience. Books have their own life and no one can guarantee their destiny. The only thing we can confirm is the existence of a growing corpus of Arab-American literature and the efforts of people who try to know it and make it known..»
XXXIX
When the living rot on the bodies of the dead
When the combatants’ teeth became knives
When words lose their meaning and become arsenic
When the aggressors’ nails became claws
When old friends hurry to join the carnage
When the victors’ eyes become live shells
When clergymen pick up the hammer and crucify
When officials open the door to the enemy
When the mountain peoples’ feet weigh like elephants
When roses gorw only in cementeries
When they eat the Palestinian’s liver before he’s even dead\
When the sun itself has no other purpose than being a shroud
the human tide moves on . . . . .
XL
the sun is a camera which operates only in black and white
white white white is the color of Terror
from their eyes nothing remains but egg-white and trees! blackness in the underground blackromm always blanck is experience
the sun is counting the earth’s rotations automobile wheel
and on the Palestinian’s head rolls a truck
a concrete roof collapsed on 500 bodies
and the sun took the picture for the C.I.A.’s archives
sun camera majestic lens Prince of the gaze
white white white is the result of the sun’s clicking
when teeth become as white as eyes
the sun executioner focal point of death goes into action
blood has no color in the torture-chambers
infrared rays make writings on the calcinated bodies of the Arabs
Translated by Sebastián Gómez Matus