When the Syrian poet Nadir al-Azma wrote that I was the greatest woman Arab poet since al-Khansa’ of pre-Islamic times, I was delighted and profoundly moved. Not only was this a great compliment, but it also allayed one of my greatest fears, that because I wrote in a foreign language, my work would not be considered part of Arab literature. I have always regretted not writing in Arabic, and therefore running the risk of not actually being accepted as an Arab writer. You may be wondering why I don’t write in Arabic? Well, it is such a beautiful language, it almost breaks my heart not to write in Arabic. But the main reason is the colonial school system that was imposed on Lebanon during my childhood. We didn’t speak Arabic at home either, because my mother was Greek. After that I was always traveling, working first in one country and then another, so that I never learned Arabic well enough to be a poet in that language. But perhaps it is also true to say that I don’t want to give up my “long-distance” love affair with the Arabic language. Who can say?

(from “Interview with Etel Adnan” by Hilary Kilpatrick, in Mineke Schipper ed., Unheard Words: Women and Literature in Africa, the Arab World, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. Allison & Busby, 1985)

I. Everyone lives in Time¹

I was a 19-year-old English major at the American University of Beirut when I first discovered Etel Adnan’s work. Though I was studying English literature, I insisted on grounding every question and inquiry in Arabic—the world I had brought with me from home. I spent most of my time in the Arabic Language and Literature department, where I also minored. Nevertheless, in every space and circle on campus, I remained on alert, acutely aware of the grand irony in which we—students and faculty, especially those invested in language and literature—were implicated. The labels, department titles, major descriptions, and specialty delineations all felt, at times, tongue-in-cheek. We were all constantly engaged in maintaining the pretense of our positionalities, sustaining the fictions of ourselves within the world enclosed by that campus. And I inhabited two of the most irony-fraught spaces.

In the English department, we were mostly Lebanese students and faculty, with the occasional American professor—often a young, fresh graduate who had come to Beirut to live out an “experience,” a world adventure within the safe parameters of an American campus in the conflict-ridden, paradoxical Middle East—before returning to the U.S. to truly begin their careers. As English majors, we mostly spoke, thought, and wrote in English about writers and texts from an elsewhere we convinced ourselves we belonged to, even inhabited. The fiction was easy to maintain within Fisk Hall, where our department was housed, overlooking the Green Oval and Nicely Hall. It was a beautiful elsewhere—one in which we could be ourselves, but differently. And we all looked the part and sounded it.

In the Arabic department, I was part of a smaller cohort, but we were similarly invested in a necessary fiction. Here, we were deliberately and insistently “of Arabic,” even though we all knew to resort to English in all matters of efficiency, practicality, and real institutional consequence. In some ways, the fiction was more high maintenance here, the dissonance louder. We prided ourselves on the history of the department—we’d drop names like Ihsan Abbas, Khalil Hawi, and Costantin Zureiq in casual conversations, as if to remind ourselves of where we were on the globe. To varying degrees, we all sensed a shift, a different inflection, an altered resonance that figures like Abu Tammam, Imru’ al-Qays, Ibn Jinni, al-Jahiz, even Nizar Qabbani, Adunis, and Mahmoud Darwish acquired once we crossed AUB’s main gate to study them.

Beyond campus, in the city’s old cafés and bookstores, they simply existed—they were of the place, they belonged to everyone. You could choose to engage with them or not, but either way, they were there. Ignore them, and they ignored you too, but both of you still existed. Inside the university, however, past the main gate’s proclamation that we were “to have life and have it more abundantly,” existence itself—having life—became a project, an endeavor reserved for those admitted to the institution, the ID-carrying select few. Suddenly, a power dynamic emerged. Imru’ al-Qays and Darwish became “native,” “indigenous.” They blurred, needing to be rediscovered, pulled from some darkness. You could choose to engage with them, and they would make a “great topic,” or you could ignore them—and they would cease to exist.

I was a 19-year-old when I first discovered Etel Adnan’s work, and by then, I had learned to exist in and maintain fictions about myself, the institution, the city, the country, the world; to refract history and geography in ways necessary to support a plan for the future, outward and away. I discovered Etel Adnan’s work in a section of a class on Arab-American literature, yet another fiction only the privileged members of that charmed campus knew about. Little did I know that decades later I would become that fiction myself. Living and working in the US. I find myself in friction with this label almost every day now, and in more unsettling ways as a translator of Arabic poetry into English and a professor of Arabic literature in an American university. The label “Lebanese” was dangerously open to interpretations and, for me, as a young woman growing up in wartime and post-war Beirut, it was something to identify oneself against or in spite of. To identify as Lebanese was not a simple subscription but an embracing of intricate shades of oneself, all requiring constant thought, introspection, perspective, and suspicion. In comparison, becoming Arab-American is more straightforwardly a trap—one simply falls into it or is relegated to it without agency or participation—unlike the complex trap of being Lebanese, which some of us have the illusion of actively shaping. As a fated Arab-American, I console myself with Etel’s statement: “I became an American poet by writing against the Vietnam War.”² Etel became an American poet through her resistance and protest America’s evils—a relationship that many of us are now actively experiencing as witnesses to an American-enabled genocide against Palestine and its children. And resistance and protest are both meaningful relationships which in some ways demand more investment and grief than love or belonging.

Before the trap of American identity politics, I had lived in Beirut all my life. By nineteen, Beirut and I had made some progress, reconciling with our bodies and ourselves in the post-time. It was not clear, at least not to me, what it was that we had left behind in that post-time, but I knew something was behind us and we were now unlike ourselves as we had always known them. I was beginning to discover Beirut as a city on my own terms. I, like her, had come out of war, and could only see her through the blindnesses of small histories. I could still see in my mind and on the ground, the violent demarcations, the lines that separated the city into cities, and us into us and them. And by then, I was aware of the existing and growing tradition of the Lebanese war novel, and I was already suspicious. No matter how much novelists tried to include and transcend and step back and remain unimplicated, most novels seemed to describe a war smaller than the one I lived, easier to explain and sort out.

Before I read Sitt Marie Rose, I didn’t imagine that a novel about Beirut could be written this way; accounting for history without being implicated in it; having a voice and voices at the same time; telling the story of the petty, the small, and the criminal, as well as the just and the pure and the true without compromising either. Etel Adnan showed me how to survive the narratives of war, the war of narratives. As I was trying to find my Beirut, after we had both come out of the bomb shelter and had to recognize each other in the daylight, Etel Adnan shared with me a discovery, a secret. It is possible to survive history and still live in time, all of time. While the memorable moments in the book are many, one has stood out to me, as if giving me directions as I walked from our house in Hamra to campus on Bliss Street. In a scene, Marie-Rose waits for her Palestinian lover in a café in Hamra, and as she waits, she comes to a realization:

Suddenly she felt a need to confide in him the discovery of the day, an idea of the kind she hadn’t had for very long. On her walk from her house to this cafe where she was waiting for the box office of the Saroulla Cinema to open for the nine o’clock show, a huge idea had filled her brain: each passing person, she said, is full of his own term of time. Everyone lives Time. If then one added every second lived by each of the people, lived by each of us, by all the people of the world, at this precise moment, it would make all the eternity of Time. She told herself that she had just discovered a new dimension. She has just been thinking these things sipping her lemonade through her straw as he came up and sat down before her.³

Everyone lives in time, Etel writes—in the eternity of time. And so, I didn’t have to subscribe to beginnings and endings, to breaks and resets, to befores and afters. Beirut didn’t either. She could gather all her seconds and minutes of life and make an eternity of her own. It is this contending with time—molding a narrative out of it rather than within it—that makes Sitt Marie Rose unlike any other war novel, at least in my experience as a reader and a survivor of war. And perhaps writing with integrity about the incestuous, tribal, brotherly slaughter of the Lebanese Civil War would not have been possible had Sitt Marie Rose not also been a story about Palestine.

II. Poetry Begins at STOP

Because beginnings are difficult and meaningful. Because they are thresholds between worlds, once the right one is found; it becomes a mark, a sign, a contract. A beginning is “not just an action,” Edward Said tells us, “a beginning is more than anything a consciousness.”⁴ And Arabic poetry, as a form of thought, as memory, as imagination, as a mode of existence has found its beginning at STOP. The stance upon the ruined abode (al-wuqūf ʿalā al-at̩lāl) which is the archetypal beginning of the Arabic poem where the Arabic poetic consciousness forms. It is where the aaṣīda becomes conscious of itself as a world. Arabic poetry begins at STOP, because the poet of Arabic cannot find voice or a gateway into the poem without demanding that time stop, and in that stopping time itself becomes a place, a moment to inhabit as the poet reorients time, resets it, and launched it again in a world of his own making. The convention of standing upon ruins and the many variations on it is the most common opening of Arabic poems from pre-Islamic times to this day. The Arabic language finds its poetic spark in the site of loss, in the ruins of place that become a portal in time.

The qaṣīda is a monumental structure, an outstanding identification or mark of what it is to be Arab. It presents to us the original landscape, geographical, psychological, linguistic, and emotional among other things. It has served as the primary field of reference for all Arabic poetry. It is the enduring edifice with which Arab poets even today have to negotiate a relationship or a truce before they move forward. However, it is intriguing that this monumental structure is always erected upon ruins. This journey through the Arabic linguistic and symbolic landscape is always launched from the site of abandonment and desolation. In the site of ruin are rooted some of the most quintessentially Arabic lines poetry, and of course I am thinking here of Imru’ al-Qays:

قِفَا نَبكِ من ذِكرى حَبيبٍ ومنزلِ
بسقط اللوى بينَ الدخولِ فحوملِ
فَتُوْضِحَ فَالمِقْراةِ لمْ يَعْفُ رَسْمُها
⁵لِمَا نَسَجَتْهَا مِنْ جَنُوبٍ وشَمْألِ

STOP and let us weep for the memory of a beloved
at Siqṭ al-Liw. between al-Dakhūl and Ḥawmal
Then Tuḍiḥ, al-Miqrāt, whose trace are erased
by the two winds weaving from south and north

These are the opening lines of Imruʾ al-Qays’s muʿallaqa begin with the quintessentially Arabic phrase “Stop and let us weep.” Despite its sometimes incompatibility with the eventual purpose of theme of the poem (be it praise or invective or elegy), this opening is not only an indispensable part of the qaṣīda but also came to be the mark of the genre, the key to the world of Arabic poetry. And there are countless examples of STOP in Arabic poetry.

Zuhayr b. Abi Sulma stops and asks his companion to note how little has changed but is then struck by the fact that No! the winds and rains are slowly chipping away, weaving and unweaving, writing and unwriting the site of desolation:

قِف بِالدِيارِ الَّتي لَم يَعفُها القِدَمُ
⁶بَلى وَغَيَّرَها الأَرواحُ وَالدِيَمُ

STOP by the dwellings that time has not effaced,
but indeed the winds and rains have changed them so.

ʿAntara too stops at ruin, and he, like many before him and after him, reveals to us the secret of this stance. Stop and let your tears flow. Tears being code for words. Weeping being the grand metaphor for the poem that follows:

قِفْ بالمنازل إنْ شجتْك ربوعُها
⁷فلعلَّ عينَك يستهلُ دموعها

STOP at these ruins if their sight moves your heart,
perhaps your eyes will shed tears.

He stops again:

قِفا يا خَليلَيَّ الغَداةَ وَسَلِّما
وَعوجا فَإِن لَم تَفعَلا اليَومَ تَندَما.
عَلى طَلَلٍ لَو أَنَّهُ كانَ قَبلَهُ
⁸تَكَلَّمَ رَسمٌ دارِسٌ لَتَكَلَّما

STOP, my friends, this morning, and greet the ruins.
Stand here for a moment. You will regret it, if you don’t.
Stand upon this ruin—had other traces before it spoken,
it would have surely spoken too.

And again:

قِفْ بِالدِيارِ وَصِح إِلى بَيداها
⁹فَعَسى الدِيارُ تُجيبُ مَن ناداها

STOP at the traces of home and call out to the open plains,
Perhaps these ruins will answer the one who calls.

To be an Arab poet, a poet of Arabic, ʿAntara tells us, one should be forever compelled to stand upon the unfathomable ruin and call out to the wasteland, as futile as it may seem.
And Etel agrees. She knew that all too well. For the “the heart’s desertion” is “Memory’s fingerprint.” We can only find meaning there on that plane where desolation and memory intersect.

…the heart’s desertion
Memory’s fingerprint¹⁰

And the conversation I hear her having in Arabic, is not only limited to al-Khansā’ whom we have pigeonholed as the token Arab woman poet. This is an injustice to al- Khansā’ and to all the women poets she is often grouped with. Al-Khansā’ was a master of the elegy. She was in conversation with the foremost poets of the genre, and she outdid them. For, she knew that the lament of those who have been unjustly taken demands justice, otherwise, the poem of lament would have to take over the world, would have to last forever.¹¹ And so, al-Khansā’ was not the woman who made it in a world of men, but she was the poet who lamented in Time, whose grief overwhelmed form and stretched it to its outer limits. Etel is in conversation with al-Khansā’ and other poets of Arabic on that level, with Arab poets who mastered the conversation with time، a conversation that happens across generations, languages, continents and other more abstract levels of being.

Consider ʿAntara who posed the most pressing question a poet can ask: Is there anything left to say?

هل غادر الشعراء من متردم
¹²أم هل عرفت الدار بعد توهم

Have the poets left a stone unturned
or recognized the abode after it had been blurred?

He then turns around and finds his poem in the site of ruin, in stones that keep coming back in memory.

Etel stands where ʿAntara stood and asks:

What’s Memory doing among these stones that keep
Coming back,
she older than Creation – and anxious to say it?¹³

The two poets are of the same tradition that insists on questioning time in the moment of desolation. Etel described this lineage well:

The ruins are relics.
The lineage being of little importance, we’re all related to them.¹⁴

Etel’s STOP punctuates the Apocalypse, an unfolding Arab history, resets it and relaunches it, continuously returns it to that moment, which sounds and feels quintessentially Arabic to me, when the poet confronts all of time, the eternity of time in a single line, with metaphor, with the power of naming things and the ability to discover that new dimension of existence, a place that can hold all time, the site of ruin.

Poetry begins at STOP and Etel knows that well:

O disaster STOP O sun STOP O bliss stop STOP a broken engine
an eye rounded and yellowed by the prison STOP¹⁵

Beirut-sulphuric-acid STOP the Quarantina is torching its inmates stop Beirut¹⁶

Etel had a relationship to Arabic and its poets of her time as we note in her conversation with, evocations of, and dedications to Badr Shakir Sayyab, Abd al-Wahab Bayyati, and Buland Haydari, and Talal Haydar and others. To me her eloquent and critically insightful visual translation of al-Sayyab’s “Unshūdat al-Mat̩ar” stands out as a token of her “long-distance” love affair with Arabic. Her often-cited statement, “I paint in Arabic,” is not only a beautiful linguistic solution to the exiles predicament but is a profound acknowledgement of an undercurrent, an informing ethos, an Arabic energy to which she belongs. Etel Adan demonstrates how one can belong to a tradition, can adopt its most fundamental stance, and commit to it, even if writing at the distance of many languages, countries, and identities labels away.

She’s mistaken to think that other Arab poets were closer to the truth than she was because they were more “of this place” than she was.¹⁷ For the place to which the Arab poet/the poet of Arabic belongs is that moment that is the prehistory where we ran, a time become a place, a landscape for the journey (the “running”) that is the Arabic poem. And Etel knew this well. At least, I could see that in her poems. In Time, she says:

I am hungry for the ruins
where I was running
in prehistory.

I will travel
motionless.¹⁸

III. Lament and her Sister, Justice

At this moment in time, to belong to the Arabic language and its creative memory, with its long tradition of poets who sang of loss, revenge, and justice, is also to be of Palestine. Etel knew this well. Even now, she teaches us how to be loyal to that cause—not through the posturing or the peddling of identity politics which we see all too often, but with a Kanafanian courage, certainty, and conviction. And, Ghassan Kanafani is our no-nonsense visionary. He continually astonishes us with what we already know, wielding a courage as irrefutable and necessary as daylight. He cuts through the noise of identity polemics with three simple profound words in Arabic: “الإنسان هو قضية” (“A human being is a cause”). And what more powerful survival of history and hypocrisy than committing oneself to a just cause? Over the past century, to be a human being—not just an Arab or a Palestinian or a Lebanese, but a human being—has meant being of Palestine, committing oneself to the compass of Palestine.

History will – forever, hereon after, in this moment, from now on and forevermore, launch itself from Gaza, our oracle ruin. And so, in these days that we mark with genocide, I close with Etel’s poem “Jenin.” And Jenin, the site, the experience, the horror and the horror repeated, is one of our many Palestinian oracle ruins. Etel’s “Jenin” begins with the quintessentially Arabic stance upon ruin and desolation:

And that night, when it stopped raining tigers
and room-dividers,
while those who came to commit armed-robbery
went away with a pittance,
after the closure of the bitter cafés, and
the time for bordellos to start
receiving their clients, when wicks had burned out
in their lamps
and the priests had returned to their
customary pedophilia,
when the rain got scared because
bombs were running faster than the
speed of light,
a thick smoke, made of bones burned
over a soft fire
and transformed into ‘Calcium-Palestine’,
descended…¹⁹

The winds that weave, south and north, and efface the ruin now come in the form of armed-robbery, violation, exploitation and depravity. The sky rains bombs and horror. Nature is innocent of the apocalyptic smoke that descends, saturated with burned bones, Calcium-Palestine. The atoms of Palestinian bodies wrought and wasted, marred and desecrated, are what we breathe in, what we become in the time to come.

“Jenin,” the poem ends with a promise of return—a Palestinian future that will dawn against all odds, despite and through eradication:

But they came – the bastards, to eradicate,
with bombs,
to tell very simply that we didn’t exist.
They started with the olive trees,
then with the orchards,
then, with the buildings,
and when all had disappeared,
they threw, one on top of the other,
the children, the old and the newly-weds,
in a mass grave,
all that to tell the world of the half-dead
that we didn’t exist,
that we have never existed,
and therefore that they were right…
to exterminate us all.²⁰

A poem in itself is survival, and a poem written post-extermination is a victory. It is a return of the voice, a resistance of silence, a victory in the longest of terms, a victory in Time.

1.  I presented an earlier version of this piece at Etel Adnan: In the Rhythms of the World, A Symposium organized by Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal on the centenary of Etel’s birth between February 27 and March 1, 2025. ↩︎
2. Etel Adnan, “Children of the Sun,” interviewed by Lynne Tillman, Bidoun, Issue 18, Summer 2009, https://www.bidoun.org/issues/18-interviews#etel-adnan↩︎
3. Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose (Sausalito: Post-Apollo Press, 1982), 70. ↩︎
4. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xv. ↩︎
5. Ḥusayn b. Aḥmad al-Zawzanī, Sharḥ al-Muʿallaqāt al-Sabʿ (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, n.d.), 7. ↩︎
6. Zuhay b. Abī Sulma, Dīwān, ed. ʿAlī Hasan Fāʿūr (Beirut: Dar al-Kitub al-ʿilmiyya, 1988), 113 ↩︎
7. Al-Tabrīzī, al-Khaṭīb Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh. Sharḥ Dīwān ʿAntara b. Shaddād. ed. Majīd T̩rād (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1992), 92 ↩︎
8. Dīwān, 139. ↩︎
9. Ibid., 210. ↩︎
10. Etel Adnan, Time, trans. Sarah Riggs (New York: Night Boat, 2019), 106. ↩︎
11.  For more on al-Khansā’ and form, see chapter 2 of Rawad Wehbe. “Structures of Feeling at the Threshold of Islam: The Mukhad̩ram in Arabic Poetry.” PhD diss. (University of Pennsylvania, 2024). ↩︎
12. Dīwān, 147. ↩︎
13. Adnan, Time, 113. ↩︎
14. Ibid., 133. ↩︎
15. Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse (Sausalito: Post-Apollo Press, 1989), VI. ↩︎
16. The Arab Apocalypse, VII. ↩︎
17. Adnan, Time, 134. ↩︎
18. Ibid., 123. ↩︎
19. Etel Adnan, “Jenin” in To look at the Sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader, eds. Thom Donovan and Brandon Shimoda, vol. 2 (New York: Nightboat Books, 2014), 233. ↩︎
20. Etel Adnan, “Jenin,” 238. ↩︎