Etel Adnan Reader Encourages Necessary Resilience

At The Rumpus, Patrick James Dunagan reviews the two-volume Etel Adnan's To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books 2014; edited by Thom Donovan and Brandon Shimoda). As the press has it: "This landmark two-volume edition follows Adnan’s work from the infernal elegies of the 1960s to the ethereal meditations of her later poems, to form a portrait of an extraordinarily impassioned and prescient life." And Dunagan: "This collection contains nearly if not all of her essential work to date, it is without doubt a groundbreaking roll call stridently feminist and anti-war to its core."

He also remarks on the work's constant newness: "Born in 1925, she’s approaching her ninetieth year yet her writing continually experiences rebirth by way of ever new juxtaposition of idea and image. She relentlessly pursues a truth that isn’t over delineated by any set expectation or otherwise predetermined endpoint. It is instead set by the perception of the immediate act of writing itself." How this comes across:

Adnan is continually questioning the ineffable qualities of the relationship between tactile sense and intellectual understanding, between thought and feeling, experience and the reflection upon that experience. Her writing is self-generative more often than not leading her to compose works which of their own necessity are book-length in nature. There is no containing what needs to be expressed in fewer lines, or less pages, the writing simply requires considerable length to significantly enough sound out all the ground it must cover.

Dunagan also notes the book's inclusion of five articles from her time working as journalist in Lebanon for the paper Al Safa, which "[provide] opportunity to witness her approaching these matters just as effectively from outside the poetic lens."

For instance, “In Honor of the Algerian Revolution November 1, 1972” provides example of her bitingly accurate use of dark-tinged humor: “One could say that revolutions end up in either cocktails or betrayals: after all, the Nixon-Mao Zedong handshake is the Hitler-Stalin one—with a few, rather minimal, differences.” As well as her resolute desire for a different future from an ever present, painfully tragic endured reality:

The revolution is the idea of an Arabian awakening: the idea that Arabs can neither fight, nor self-organize, is no longer valid. One million Algerians died so that one hundred million Arabs would feel less ashamed of having missed the train of History, and so that they might dare to hope catch up to it even, and jump on board.

Adnan is driven by writing’s revolutionary potential to realize actualities on the page which reverberate well beyond the appearance of any singularly isolated text. Reading her work is an education in consciousness-raising which never berates or chides. It simply encourages necessary resilience.

The reader also includes essays from Cole Swensen and Ammiel Alcalay, and an introduction from the editors. We're so excited for this one! Read the full review at The Rumpus.