Journalist, poet, and painter… Get to know Etel Adnan, whom Joe celebrates

12:09 PM

Monday, April 15, 2024

Books – Muhammad Shaker:
Today, Monday, Google search engines celebrated the poet and writer, Etel Adnan, who was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She was described by the academic magazine MELUS in 2003 as the most famous Arab-American writer and currently lives in Paris.

Adnan was born in 1925 in Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek Christian from Smyrna, and her father was a Syrian Muslim non-commissioned officer. So she grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a society that primarily spoke Arabic.

She was educated in French schools for nuns, and French was the language in which she wrote her first works. She also learned English in her youth, and it was the language in which she later wrote her works.

At the age of twenty-four, Adnan traveled to Paris, where she received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne, then headed to the United States to resume her studies there at the University of California (Berkeley) and Harvard University.

From 1952 to 1978, she taught philosophy of art at Dominican University in California, San Rafael, and also lectured at several universities across the United States.

Adnan returned to Lebanon to work as a journalist and cultural editor in Al-Safa newspaper, a French-language newspaper in Beirut. She also contributed to building the newspaper’s cultural section and added drawings and illustrations.

Her period of work in the newspaper was characterized by editorials in which she commented on the most important political issues.

Since Etel Adnan is talented in drawing, she has exhibited her work in several international exhibitions. In 2012, she displayed a series of her brightly colored paintings at the Documenta exhibition in Germany, and in 2014, she displayed a group of her paintings and works at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Among its works:
“The Arab Day of Judgment”: a long poem published in 1998, published in English and then translated.
“October 27”: I wrote it in French after the American invasion of Iraq.
The novel “Lady Marie Rose,” which talks about the Lebanese civil war.
The book “Journey to Montalpais”: Translated by Amal Debo.
“To Fawaz”: A collection of letters.
“The Book of the Sea.”
“Paris when you get naked”
“Linside Poems.”
“A sky without a sky.”