Lebanese painter and poet Etel Adnan, from a mix of cultures that marked her work, died in Paris at the age of 96, his companion Simone Fattal announced to AFP on Sunday 14 November. “She died in her Parisian home at the age of 96”, said the Lebanese-American painter, sculptor and ceramist.
Strong links with France
Etel Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut to a Syrian Muslim father and a Greek Christian mother and studied in French schools, before going to La Sorbonne to study philosophy.
In 1955, she left for the United States and subsequently taught the philosophy of art in California until 1972. Marked by the Algerian war, she turned away from the French language to write poems in English and turned to throw in the painting.
She returned to Lebanon in the early 1970s where she worked as a journalist and remained there until 1976, before returning to California, with many stays in Paris.
In 1977, she published a novel, Sit Marie-Rose, on the Lebanese civil war. It is translated into ten languages and receives the France-Arab Countries Prize.
If Etel Adnan wrote above all in English, another major work, his collection of poems The Arab Apocalypse, was written in French. She has also written for opera.
An exhibition underway in Metz
Former Minister of Culture Jack Lang, head of the Arab World Institute in Paris, hailed on social networks the memory of a “Poetic and colorful soul”.
The Center Pompidou welcomed the “Fascinating work, between writing, drawing and poetry” Etel Adnan, who had the idea of the current exhibition since the beginning of November in Metz (eastern France). The poet’s leporellos are exhibited there, these accordion-books which unfold and can be nearly 10 meters long. She copied poems from contemporary Iraqi authors, including Abd el-Wahhab al-Bayyati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, with whom she was friends.
On these leporellos, Etel Adnan explained “Draw Arabic” more than writing it, a language she heard as a child, then relearned late and that she said she had never fully mastered.
“I have a passion for the Arab world; we are the region of the three monotheistic religions. However, religion is not just a theology it is also a culture, we have an incredible heritage ”, she explained in an interview with AFP in July.
Known for decades for her literary work, she was later recognized for her painting. “I am told that my painting has poetry”, she confided.
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