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Born in Beirut in 1925, painter, writer and poet Etel Adnan lost her life in France's capital city of Paris yesterday (November 14).
The daughter of a Muslim-Arab father from Damascus and an Orthodox-Greek mother from İzmir, which caused them both to be excluded from their communities, Adnan's works have the traces of her roots.
As noted in Etel Adnan's biography on her official website, she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris.
In January 1955, she went to the US to pursue postgraduate studies in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael, California.
Based on her feelings of connection to, and solidarity with the Algerian war of independence, she began to resist the political implications of writing in French and shifted the focus of her creative expression to visual art. She became a painter. But it was with her participation in the poets' movement against the war in Vietnam that she began to write poems and became, in her words, "an American poet".
Etel Adnan in California, 1983-84
In 1972, she moved back to Beirut, or "from one exile to the other", in her own words, and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers, Al Safa and L'Orient le Jour. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976.
Her early works of painting include simple abstract compositions and abstract carpets she designed with the inspiration she found in Eastern carpets. In her leporellos, she combined drawings, poetry, and prose, demonstrating the parallels between her interest in and practice of literature on the one hand and her visual expression on the other.
She was productive in many different media; the forms in her works and the simplicity of her artistic expression cross linguistic, cultural, and geographical borders to communicate with the audience.
Artist Etel Adnan opened up a deep space of discovery and interpretation for the audience with her seasons, landscapes, signs, imaginary planets and satellites in the sky, and impressive energy.
'We saw ourselves as an Ottoman family'
In Etel Adnan's own words...
"Turkey was always in the background of my daily life. I used to speak in Turkish and French in my childhood; then, due to my school, French had the upper hand. But whenever I went to Damascus to visit my family, Turkish would come back in my conversations with my father.
"We mostly saw ourselves as an Ottoman family; in fact, my father graduated as a general staff officer from the Military School and was a classmate of [founder of Republic of Turkey] Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The only time when I saw my father crying was when Atatürk died.
"Shortly before the 1st World War broke out, my father was assigned as the İzmir Garrison Commander. It was there he met and married my mother, a young Greek born and raised in İzmir. It was an extraordinary marriage as my father was a Muslin and my mother was a Christian.
"I had been in İstanbul in my youth, but I have never been to İzmir. İzmir was like a lost paradise at home. We would cry when we mentioned the city. When I saw huge clouds on the horizon as a child, I would ask, 'Is this İzmir?' And whenever I went to the beach in Beirut to swim, I would say, 'I am going to İzmir.' I remember my mother saying that no fish was as tasty as the ones in her home city." (AÖ/SD)
