Etel Adnan, poet, novelist and painter, 1925-2021

Etel Adnan — a poet, a painter and a writer — came into the world as a global war brewed and left it as her native country of Lebanon sinks yet again into chaos. Yet she was never one for despair.

“To develop hope in the uniquely violent . . . can bring about a profound peace, an inner peace. And why not? So, you don’t give up hope, but you add new perspectives,” she told the poet Charles Bernstein in an interview earlier this year.

Adnan, who has died aged 96, was an artist of constant reinvention — from teaching philosophy in her thirties, to writing one of the definitive novels of Lebanon’s civil war in her fifties, to gaining international acclaim with her abstract paintings in her eighties.

Etel N Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925, the daughter of a Greek Orthodox Christian mother from Smyrna, now the Turkish city of Izmir, and a Turkish Muslim father. Her young mother, Rose Lacorte, was born in extreme poverty, but met the wealthy, Damascus-born Ottoman officer Assaf Kadri when he served as governor of Smyrna during the first world war. The couple fled to Lebanon as the city burnt and the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

Adnan grew up speaking both Greek and Turkish, while completing her studies in French at a Catholic school that punished pupils for any exchanges in Lebanon’s native Arabic. The experience set the stage for a lifetime of fluidity across languages and identities.

She travelled to Paris aged 24 to study philosophy at the Sorbonne and then to the US where she enrolled for graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and later Harvard Univeristy.

Her dexterity with both languages and art became a creative tool. Teaching philosophy at San Rafael’s Dominican University in California from 1958 to 1972, she met American artist Ann O’Hanlon, who ran the art department and encouraged her to paint. She renounced writing in French in protest as Algeria’s war of independence raged. Aged 34, she announced that she would start “painting in Arabic”, incorporating elements of Arabic calligraphy in her abstract paintings.

Another act of protest brought her back to writing. In response to the Vietnam war, Adnan wrote poetry, but this time, she chose to write in English. Adnan said she enjoyed the freedom of writing in American English. “In French, if you take liberty with the language, people correct you,” she said. She identified an “innocence” and “energy” to American English: “You’re not on the defensive, you go ahead and continue.”

Adnan moved back to her native Lebanon, becoming cultural editor of the French-language newspaper Al-Safa, and leaving again for Paris as the civil war broke out in 1975. From Paris, she wrote Sitt Marie Rose, which was published in 1977 and is considered a seminal novel of the Lebanese civil war experience. That book, based on a true story, revolves around a kidnapping and examines how civilians grapple with living through war, exploring conflict through the prism of gender.

Adnan extrapolated the brutal lessons of the civil war to her understanding of other conflicts, with universal yet intimate insights into the feelings of the disempowered. In her 1990 poem “It was Beirut all over again”, she linked the war and the brutal massacre of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila to the war in El Salvador.

“And it is Beirut all over again/because people are running/to keep their belly and their brain/in line,/carrying their honour as their sole/piece of luggage/and counting the dead/among themselves/the way we count pennies/in the cities of Power”.

Later in life, Adnan openly identified as a lesbian. She had met her life-long partner, the Syrian artist Simone Fattal, in Beirut. They lived in exile from the war together in Sausalito, California, in the 1980s, where they collaborated and supported each other’s artistic endeavours.

Yet it was in 2012 that Adnan started to gain wider recognition for her art, which was included in the contemporary exhibit Documenta 13, in Kassel, Germany. Fattal, who survives her partner, described Adnan’s paintings as playing “the role old icons used to play for people who believe. They exude energy and give energy. They shield you like talismans. They help you live your everyday life.”

Adnan worked until her final days, publishing two collections of contemplative poetry that grappled with her own death. Yet even in her quieter, more philosophical writings at the end, she never lost her belief in hope for the downtrodden that electrified her earlier works.

“let’s not bother to fear those/ who insult our insubordination,” she wrote in a poem from her 2019 collection, Time. “The conquered will always have/the last word.”