Shifting the Silence

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. She died November 14, 2021.

"'When you have no way to go anywhere, what do you do?' writes the 95-year-old polymath Etel Adnan in her new book, 'Shifting the Silence,' which contemplates death and aging. 'Of course, nothing. But that’s no answer.' The book’s publication this fall coincides with her new show, 'Seasons.'"—Dawn Chan, The New York Times"The artist’s brightly tranquil new show at Galerie Lelong coincides with the publication of Adnan’s 'Shifting the Silence,' a quietly shattering meditation on death, which interweaves memoir with observations both geopolitical and galactic. (The book’s subjects include the war in Syria, the California wildfires, and missions to Mars.) Adnan’s visual lexicon bears a rich, if elliptical, relationship to her writing; her new, pandemic-inspired painting subject is planets. A suite of vertical compositions in a candy-colored palette represents them as spheres hanging low in the sky, extraterrestrial complements to her abstract landscapes."—Johanna Fateman, The New Yorker"Scale is the enemy of the good in Adnan’s world. As she describes a night at home in her final book, a short prose volume from 2020 called Shifting the Silence, 'a simple dinner in a simply friendly atmosphère, moments stolen, mysterious, given the weight of the air that we’re breathing.'"—Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns"Shifting the Silence is less stream of consciousness and more a vast sea of poems and vignettes, best consumed in pieces. Adnan writes in the characteristically prophetic voice that infused her visual art."—Lakshmi Rivera Ami, Hyperallergic"Life is revisited again and again in these pages; old friends are named, places from Mount Shasta to Paris are explored, and final hopes are offered ('I dream of a room with no furniture, of a past with very few friends, of a country with no weapons'). Each paragraph in these prose poems pushes against the idea that there is 'no resolution to somebody’s final absence'. . . . This memorable collection continues Adnan’s legacy as a poet of the personal, political, and cosmic."—Publishers Weekly"'When you have no way to go anywhere, what do you do? Of course, nothing.' Adnan’s prose-poetic rumination on death would strike a chord at any time, but it feels especially apt in this moment of protracted grief. Peppered with questions—'There are so many islands I dreamed of visiting, where have they gone?'—Adnan’s lamentations are recursive and soothing. To live is to die, and the poets can ease the passage."—Nick Ripatrazon, The Millions"Etel Adnan dispenses down-to-earth wisdom in her poetic work Shifting the Silence, bringing readers along as she recounts her global travels and lessons learned. We are lucky to glimpse her 95 years of life condensed into these pages, and thumb through her thoughts on the passage of life. Hailed as a meditation or rumination on the inevitability of dying, this work has a blunt calmness that makes  conversation about death seem like a light-hearted talk over tea rather than a morbid whispering."—Bethany Mary, Vagabond City"Days end, and planetary orbits will eventually decay. Adnan embraces the chaos and abstraction of life before death, an acceptance of the limits of her consciousness—what has been, what will be again in a different shape, and will never be."—Miriam W Karraker, DIAGRAM"This meditation on aging, life, grief, learning, and lockdown startles at every page. Moving between Syria and California, Greece and Mars, the 95-year-old Lebanese writer and painter roams over the whole canvas of her life."—M. Lynx Qualey, Al-Fanar Media"Adnan takes us from our horizons to hers—which, through that 'you,' become ours—and we are an active witness. The sun blends as the horizon blurs eyes send water down the screen of the sky to smudge that descent. Crying is a horizon. The sun ducks and we stare at it to burn a blur through. The blur is movement, not a void. To be shocked into silence isn’t to be stopped."—Molly Schaeffer, The Poetry Project Newsletter"As readers we tend towards needing to lose ourselves amid the busy scramble of our day-to-day lives. At times we seek to escape our own expectations and wish quite naturally to keep ourselves preoccupied by something other than our own concerns. Adnan identifies this as a quite natural tendency to which we all succumb: 'We have ways to distract ourselves from our destinies. I don’t know how, we just play it by instinct. We manage to take our attention away, into outer space, into a history book, into our own imaginations, or just a post-card, but we do, we go.' (Adnan 66) So urgent is this need to 'go' and not confront the present and/or future moment of 'our destinies' that we urge ourselves in the direction of distraction rather than grounding ourselves in moments of understanding self."—Patrick James Dunagan, Periodicities"This is a book of nearing endings, but it is not an end, or the end; not in the least. And one can only hope that there might be further miles for her yet to travel."—rob mclennanPraise for Etel Adnan"'In perception, redemption,' Adnan declares in this assemblage of mystical, metaphysical ideas and aphorisms, often in conversation with the dead. 'We have to say yes to that fate,' she writes of mortality, 'and it’s hard, the hardest.'"—Matt Flegenheimer, The New York Times"Rather than pin down or bemoan our lack of perceptual surety, Adnan builds a nebula for readers to drift about. Her pages are a place for us to submerge, to question ourselves and each other even as we want to reach out and affirm that yes, we saw some nice fish down there—the colors really set off the light."—K.B. Thors, Lambda Literary"Given the uncanny breadth of her art, Adnan is a modern-day inheritor of 20th-century avant-garde movements like Dada and surrealism in which people moved fluidly between writing and art making in one recklessly inventive swoop."—Negar Azimi, The Wall Street Journal