03.06.2026 / þ thorns þ

Episode 21: Naz Cuguoğlu and Steve Dickinson

þ thorns þ

In this episode Naz Cuguoğlu and Steve Dickinson come together around Etel Adnan's work. They speak of pausing, of breathing with the times we live in, and of calling Etel in, holding space for her work through friendship, care, and attention. The depth of their love for Etel and her work resonates throughout the conversation, carrying something that moves beyond language.

https://hyperallergic.com/art-worlds-tainted-love-for-discovering-artists-etel-adnan/

This episode is a conversation between Naz Cuguoğlu and Steve Dickinson. Steve directed the Poetry Centre and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University from to and is a writer whose work engages deeply with poetry, criticism, and conversation. Naz is a curator of contemporary arts currently working at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, whose practice unfolds across exhibitions, research, and collaborative formats.

In this episode, Steve and Naz come together around Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse, whose work sits at the heart of this conversation, reflecting on poetry, sound, translation, and the presence of the hidden. They speak of pausing, of breathing with the times we live in, and of calling Etel in, holding space for her work through friendship, care, and attention. The depth of their love for Etel and her work resonates throughout the conversation, carrying something that moves beyond language.

Find out more about Naz and Steve on our People page.

To the Glossary Naz donates Untranslateable and Gönül . Steve donates the hidden .

This episode, is part of a series of þ thorns þ called Choreographing the Apocalypse. It is curated by Mine Kaplangı and is part of their ongoing research into queer and trans imaginaries of the apocalypses. Through the series they’re inviting artists, thinkers, and somatic practitioners to explore apocalyptic thinking through speculative, world building and radically intimate frameworks. The project is inspired by Oxana Timofeeva’s idea that apocalypse is not a singular event, but a cyclical and continuous condition.

This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant. The series is curated by Mine Kaplangı with additional concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.

Transcript:

MARTIN

Hello and welcome to þ thorns , a podcast where we bring you conversations in relation to concepts of the choreographic. þ thorns þ is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler's Wells. I'm Martin Hargreaves, Head of the Choreographic School. I've invited Mine Kaplangı to curate a series of the podcast, and I'll hand over now to Mine to explain more.

MINE

My name is Mine Kaplangı. I'm a Folkstone-based curator and art mediator from Istanbul. We have titled this series Choreographing the Apocalypse, and it forms part of my ongoing research into queer and trans imaginaries of the apocalypse. Through the series, I invite artists, thinkers, and somatic practitioners to explore apocalyptic thinking through speculative world-building and radically intimate frameworks.

This is a very special episode for me. Naz is a dear friend and a collaborator of over years. We co-founded Collective Çukurcuma, a curatorial collective together, and she introduced me to many incredible voices in literature, poetry, and art, including Etel Adnan. In this episode, Steve and Naz come together around Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse, whose work sits at the heart of this conversation, reflecting on poetry, sound, translation, and the presence of the hidden. They speak of pausing, of breathing with the times we live in, and of calling Etel in, holding space for her work through friendship, care, and attention. The depth of their love for Etel and her work resonates throughout the conversation, carrying something that moves beyond language.

This conversation was recorded in San Francisco. The transition sounds you'll hear include recordings of Etel Adnan reading from The Arab Apocalypse alongside musical responses. Additional ambient sounds were recorded at a place central to Etel's personal cosmology. Some of the music featured in this episode is drawn from Land 1, 2, 3, a series of compilations released by the Tune Fork Studios to support people displaced by the recent attacks in Lebanon. You can find links to these compilations on our website, which is where you will also find the transcript of this episode and any relevant links to the resources mentioned. I'm so grateful to both Steve and Naz for this conversation.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Music pieces from Land 03 (أرض ٠٣) A compilation for the displaced in Lebanon.

NAZ

I feel like we should start with how we met Etel.

STEVE

So, we're speaking of Etel Adnan, who is a poet, painter, novelist, philosopher, teacher of philosophy. My recollection is that it was the late 1980s. I was working for the, what became the only nonprofit distributor of literary books in the US, a place in Berkeley called Small Press Distribution. And due to Etel Adnan's partner, Simone Fattal, who is an astounding sculptor and painter artist, but also the founder of a small press called The Post-Apollo Press. And The Post-Apollo Press was started by Simone after moving from Beirut to the San Francisco Bay Area, and they lived in Sausalito. And it was started to publish Etel Adnan's work. First, a small book of poems, and eventually her astounding novel, Sitt Marie Rose, which is set during the early days of the Civil War in Beirut. I would have met Simone first because we were distributing her books, and then gradually would have just met Etel very casually coming into what was our bookshop, the front office of our Small Press Distribution. And then during that time, we would start to cross paths and eventually having dinners with them, going to music with them, spending time in Paris and London with them, unbelievably. And that's that, the outline of that meeting.

NAZ

Yeah, it's so beautiful. I feel like you have this such a, like, personal and intimate connection to Etel, whereas I met her more, like, in her thoughts almost or, like, through her writing. And I never got to meet her in person. I met her when I first arrived in San Francisco. Like, I got a scholarship from CCA's Curatorial Practice program, so I was in grad school. And I went to the library at the Oakland campus, and the first book I saw was a book by Etel, which was Night. And I started reading it, and just on that grass area in front of the school. And I feel like it has been one of the most important encounters of my life. In a way, like how she encountered Mount Tam, I encountered Etel.

STEVE Mm-hmm.

NAZ

Because after that moment, it has been always this, like, trying to figure out how do I belong here, right?

STEVE

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

NAZ

And she being this immigrant, she being from Lebanon and speaking French. And she's this kind of multidimensional personality, which we are gonna talk about. But she also spent so much time in California, and I feel like I just followed her path, like, so much through these years. And I have been here for eight years. And it has been so magical for me to meet her.

STEVE

Yeah.

NAZ

Really.

STEVE

So, it's eight years that we met. Yes.

NAZ

Exactly, and we should talk about how we met.

STEVE

Yeah, exactly. But first I want to say Mount Tam, Mount Tamalpais is, for anyone that's been to the Bay Area or those who haven't been to the Bay Area, the striking sort of geographical construction associated with the city is the Golden Gate Bridge. But if you cross from San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge, and you're in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, a mountain that stands between San Francisco Bay and the ocean.

NAZ

And such a presence, right? Like-

STEVE

Yes ...

NAZ

and I went there after I read about Etel. I went to Mount Tam to be closer to her in a way. And she defines Mount Tam as the orbit of her life. And a love and death situation. Which is such a big presence. And you can really read it in her writing and in her paintings. She just keeps painting it and painting it, and that's how she belongs here, I think, in this place.

STEVE

Right. For her, it took on more than a talismanic presence or a symbolic presence. And, and also it's a reminder of the hills of Beirut, because Beirut, like San Francisco, has hills that descend down to the water. Etel famously wrote the book called Journey to Mount Tamalpais, which is a philosophical work of a writer and an artist, and has to do with her, almost a compulsion to come back and return as one does, as a wave does within the ocean to this presence that is insisting on itself, even though one can't take it in, in any full way. You can walk on the mountain, yes. You can view it from a distance. You could live on its flanks, but the mountain exceeds what you can perceive.

NAZ

Exactly, yeah. And I feel like for me, that has been Golden Gate Park, which we both lived very close to. And I understand that, like, her feeling towards this mountain in a way, because I was also missing Istanbul so much when I first moved here. And you just look around and you are looking for something to hold onto almost, and nature is the beautiful place that you can. Like, it's such a presence, and I always said that the Golden Gate Park for me was the best friend I ever had. And you can see that in her practice, too. I actually wanna read from her book a little bit, if that's okay?

STEVE

Sure. And this is Journey to Mount Tamalpais?

NAZ

Yeah. Okay, this part "Like a chorus, the warm breeze had come all the way from Athens and Baghdad to the bay by the Pacific route, its longest journey. It's energy of these winds that I used when I came to these shores obsessed, followed by my homemade Furies, Erinyes, and such potent creatures, and I fell in love with the immense blue eyes of the Pacific. I saw its red algae, its blood-coloured cliffs, its pulsating breath. The ocean led me to the mountain." So beautiful.

STEVE

It's beautiful, and I could get into more of this later, but one of the passages that I was drawn to before coming here from Etel's writings is from later book, Seasons. What you just described, there's a line there that says, "Nature's daily presentation of diversity distracts ones from the non-essential." And just this sense of it's always hard to know how nature is being defined because in the West, there's this kind of opposition between the human and the nature. And rather than conceiving that we ourselves are a part of nature, and that it, it's present to us in this studio room as we look at one another across the microphones, just as it is in the cultivated park of Golden Gate Park that was set up on sand dunes, right?

NAZ

Yeah.

STEVE

And all those plants were imported from all over the world to grow with soil in this artificial park, or the Mount Tamalpais or the San Francisco Bay or the Pacific Ocean that is nearby gets marked as nature. But I think nature is a much larger thing, and it, it's not to be held in opposition to the human, which is, it seems one of the mistakes of the so-called West is to constantly put us, without even thinking, in that position. That we are doing this to nature or nature is abandoning us and so forth, and always in this oppositional mode rather than in any mode that, that, that moves toward the cooperative or a collaborative.

NAZ

Mm, yes. I think you said it so beautifully. And I actually came across this article that she wrote from 86' to 88'. It's called Growing Up to Be a Woman Writer in Lebanon. It's so good.

STEVE

It's a really revelatory piece.

NAZ

Yeah, to write in a foreign language. And I saw this at Bancroft Library when I was writing my thesis about Etel, by the way, so I wrote my thesis about Etel. And it's just this beautiful text. But she talks about a lot of things, but it's very personal and very biographical, and she talks about how she travels to Bodega Bay. She goes to Marshall, to-- It's just California is so beautiful, is what she's talking about. And I can see that. Like, and I have been to Beirut, and I'm from Istanbul, but when you live in the city, your sense of perception is so different. And once she moves here, she is just amazed by... And I was amazed, too! Like, I remember first time I saw the sunset here, in the Bay Area. It's, like, magical. It's like this whole drama, like theatrical, that's happening in front of your eyes. And I think like how she starts thinking about space and place and the galaxies and the stars and the nature, it starts here. And it really transforms into her language almost. And she also talks about this too, like how she becomes a poet once she moves here, which is interesting, I think.

STEVE

Yeah, and Etel Adnan becoming a poet, I mean, her story is very complicated. She schooled, as you learn in this growing up to be a woman writer in Beirut, that essay, or in Lebanon. She went to French schools, colonial schools, used French almost, you know, entirely through her education. Her mother was Greek and spoke Greek. Her father was Syrian, but he was in the Ottoman Army before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The parents moved from Smyrna, at the foundation of modern Turkey, and found themselves in Beirut. So Etel, she said the Arabic that she knew was from the streets and from friends. And so, coming to the United States, she said, "I didn't even think about not knowing English." And she gets here, and she's in various places. She's at Harvard for a period of time. She's in Berkeley, going to UC Berkeley, and then eventually she's teaching at a small private school, Dominican College run by the Dominican Order, which is over in Marin County across the Bay near Mount Tamalpais. And she talks about how she comes to being a painter there when she's teaching a class on the philosophy of art. She had gone into the college and said, "You're in America, and you have philosophy courses, but there isn't a single American philosopher that's being thought about or taught about." And so, she talks her way into teaching philosophy, and this teacher of art there says to her, "Well, you're teaching the philosophy of art. Do you do any drawing or painting?" And she says, "No, my mother said I was very bad at painting." And the response was, "And you believed her?"

NAZ

Mm-hmm.

STEVE

Or “Did you believe her?" And at that point, Etel kind of shook off that lifelong, to that point, aversion to making art, and started painting in a very distinctive manner. And it seems like it came to her relative- like she knew what she wanted to do- when she came to painting.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Field Recordings by Naz and Steve, Treespace.

NAZ

Her relationship to language is very interesting. And actually, for my glossary term, I talked about a lot of terms because she has beautiful language. Like, there are so many options, and I landed on Untranslatable, which she says in this article that we just mentioned, Growing Up to Be a Woman Writer in Lebanon. The untranslatable really speaks to me in terms of her practice. Like, one thing she says in this article is that when she moved to the Bay Area and she started studying at UC Berkeley and she changed universities from Sorbonne to Berkeley, she realises that it's a subversion of one's thinking, which I found to be very interesting because I felt it when I first moved here, and I feel like I talked to you so much about this when I first moved here, this kind of Western analytical thinking is so different than what I am used to being from the region. Like, I feel like it's more non-cyclical, more poetic, and I felt lost when I first moved here. And you can see that in her writing, too, that she also felt lost and the subversion of one's thinking, and she was always immersed in that feeling, right? Because she spoke French, she couldn't really write Arabic, and the-- how she relates to Arabic is that she starts painting Arabic letters.

STEVE

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Calligraphy, yes.

NAZ

That’s so beautiful. Like, that's how she relates to the language, and I can feel that, too. Like, my grandparents were from Bulgaria, from Greece, from Syria, so I also feel this kind of disconnection from the culture, from the tradition, and there is this always ongoing grief in a way.

STEVE

Mm-hmm.

NAZ

But then she comes here, and she says that, "I was a poet in English language, and I entered the language like an explorer," which is so beautiful. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that because I feel like you were so immersed in that at that time, being part of the poetry world.

STEVE

Yeah. I'm gonna back up a half inch and say that, today, the day that we're talking, is the day that I was scheduled to land in Beirut.

NAZ

Yeah.

STEVE

I was going to Beirut in part to attend this annual improvised music festival, Irtijal, which would take place next week, and also, I was going to go into the archive. Etel's archive in part is held at the American University in Beirut.

NAZ

Mm-hmm.

STEVE

I feel like speaking of grief, the immense pain that has been inflicted on Beirut and Lebanon just in the past three days has been unprecedented in some ways. And it's even hard to know what to express in regards. I mean, because there's an intense grieving that needs to take place, and yet there's also this sense like, oh, there's another attack coming. There's another attack coming. And we have to say this is Israel in its relentless attacks on Lebanon, and the United States providing all the means for those attacks. So, we're caught up in that grief, and not just the culpability, but also that pain.

And my instinct in going to look in Etel's archive was how-- what evidence is there in the sense of how does she situate herself among the poets of the San Francisco Bay Area? And so, you were alluding to earlier, like she says, "I became a writer in English." And she says that she did this because of the Vietnam War, which is a colonial war inherited from the French that the Americans took over. So, in that sense, quite similar to the war that's been waged against Lebanon and other parts of the so-called Middle East. But Etel was moved to start writing poems for local little papers and newsletters against the Vietnam War, and she started corresponding with people that were, a famous anthologist that is-- has been a little lost to time, named Walter Lowenfels, compiled an anthology that was poets basically writing against the Vietnam War, but this is in the early mid-60's. And so, yeah, Etel moves into this strange language and decides she's going to stop writing in French. Not only is she going to write in English, but she's going to stop writing anything like a literary work in French. It's almost an intentional move of a kind of alienation. Of alienating oneself from that language that was already an imposition-

NAZ

Yeah.

STEVE

-into this language that is likewise a very colonial language.

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

You know?

NAZ

And she talks about Algerian War too in relation to that, and how that actually made her stop writing in French.

STEVE Yes!

NAZ

Which is very intentional. I actually wanna talk more about grief too. And another term I have been really carrying in my heart for a really long time is Surpassing Disasters by Jalal Toufic.

STEVE Yes.

NAZ

And it's such a loaded term, I don't even know how to talk about it, but that's why I think it's important we talk about it. And I don't even know if I fully understand it. But it is this kind of like when the disaster is so big and there are ruins, right? And whatever you do, whatever you build in the space of those ruins, like the new buildings or new structures, the ruin is always there. So, the ghost, it's haunted in a way. The ghosts are always there. And the disaster is so big that the meaning is lost, and the culture is lost in a way. And I think that's what just keeps happening.

Like, I feel like Etel is always so relevant, right? And when I was reading your article about The Post-Apollo Press, and Simone says at some point that, ‘I realized the war is never gonna end’. Like, she says that, and kept saying, "Oh, when the war ends, we are gonna do this. When the war ends, we are gonna do this." And she just at some point realizes, ‘well, it's never gonna end.’ And- Like history is cyclical in a way. Like Etel is so relevant, but also such a great thinker. Like, I sometimes feel like what else can we say about her? Like, I wish she was here and she could speak, you know? Because anything she says is gonna be more interesting than whatever we are gonna say about her. She's like just so amazing and so thoughtful.

STEVE

Well, it was one of the striking aspects of Etel that anyone who encountered her was immediately taken by, is she was a conversationalist in a way that that is not so much a part of our contemporary culture. And to sit down with Etel, through her personal encounters alone, there was an extraordinary history. Here's somebody who, she was in the same situations with Pasolini and Neruda, and various people that would have encounters in these international situations. To say nothing about all the Arab writers and artists of the time. But not only the kind of heroic figures of poetry and art, but also people like Henry Kissinger. She finds herself in the same room as Henry Kissinger at one point when she's a nanny working for people educating their children in French. She was hired to be their nanny and educate the children in French, and she comes to learn that these people are major Zionist fundraisers, and Henry Kissinger comes over for dinner. So it's like the places that Etel carried with her were just extraordinary, what would come up in, in sitting down to have dinner. Or sitting across from her and, and, and just Like you and I are, and talking. Just the moves and locations of her life, almost as if it were not intentional even, but just being available to what comes.

NAZ

Mm. I feel like being on that table also is, the table is, I think, very important, right? That's where you meet people, and I feel like there were a lot of those tables at the time, right? And you can see it a little bit in your article, too, how collaborative it was. And I think I'm also really drawn to that as well, that kind of collaboration and co-creation and co-existing together in a way. As I am one of the founders of Collective Çukurcuma that we started with Mine in 2015 in Istanbul, and I am just very interested in that kind of thinking together all the time. And just having, like, carrying Istanbul with us all the time on our shoulders almost everywhere we go. But having that table always. And having ready for a conversation.

And how they make Post-Apollo Press together with Simone for example. Or how she attends Ann O'Hanlon, the workshops in the Bay Area. And how it's so transformative for her. Or the little bookshops here in the Bay, because Bay Area has a very important literature tradition as well, which maybe you can also talk a little bit about. But I feel like that conversation, ongoing conversation, and that kind of sense of community is so important for her.

STEVE

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah. I love that idea that you say of the table, because some of the photographs and videos that have circulated of Etel in the past decade, since she became extremely well-known as a painter within that world of professional painting. And the international art world have her sitting at a table because she worked at a table. But, you know, to visit Simone and Etel in Sausalito was to sit at a table and have dinner or a lunch, and Simone would prepare always a beautiful meal. But when I think about The Post-Apollo Press and how it was initiated as a way to bring this Lebanese writer's books into an American audience. I was in Beirut three years ago for a symposium that was held at AUB to celebrate Etel's work and life, but also to mark her archive being placed in the special collections at the American University in Beirut. One of the things that is there is correspondence, and at first I thought immediately, "Oh, I want to see who among the Bay Area poets wrote to her." And then it occurred to me, well, most often you wouldn't be writing. You would just be making a plan to have dinner together or to go hear some music together or to meet up somewhere, if you're living here together. You and I don't write to one another.

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

But a friend reminded me, well, most years they were also in Paris, so then the idea that these letters would be something that would carry on. Because I do know of some poets that had a written correspondence with Etel, and so my idea was to go into the archive and see what is the written evidence of her connection. And in that way, it's like how does one land... It's almost like rewriting that essay, How I Became a Woman- artists in Lebanon, to how I became a writer in the United States, and a writer and artist in the United States. And there's a kind of, I don't know, like a very intimate, I almost wanted to say the word geo-locating, but in that sense that we too are of the earth. You know? That you locate yourself amongst the people with whom you speak.

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

And with whom you correspond.

NAZ

Yeah. And I think that is-- I'm very excited about this project that you have cooking in your mind because I think it's important to locate her here. You know this, but for others who don't know about this, I wrote my thesis about the discovery narrative of Etel.

STEVE

Yes! Say more about that please.

NAZ

Yeah. And in the art world, and it kind of relates to this, I think what happened with her art practice is that, first of all, she was discovered, right? And discovery is such a wrong loaded term, and it happens a lot to the woman artists of colour. After a certain age, they are suddenly discovered by the mainstream art world. And it's almost like they didn't exist before, and suddenly they are 80 and they are discovered and amazing, and it's like celebrated. And I was so annoyed by this, and I realized in Etel's case, it's like her presence in other places wasn't counted in a way. And it was like her exhibitions that she had, at other more small non-profit spaces, or her presentation by non-Western curators, didn't count.

STEVE

Mm-hmm.

NAZ

So, when she had her first shows here, for example, at SFMOMA, it was called Homecoming of Etel Adnan to the Bay Area.

STEVE

Mm-hmm.

NAZ

But she was already here, and she already had all these shows here. So, what makes that a homecoming for her?

STEVE

Right.

NAZ

So, there is this kind of erasure and this kind of ignorance almost.

STEVE

And a kind of local appropriation too.

NAZ

Exactly. And I think that's why the archives are really important, like what you are talking about. But also, how you want to locate here is really important because the other thing that happened, she is so multidimensional, right? Like, she lived here. She-- In the Bay Area. She lived in Paris. She lived in Beirut. She did, like, drawings, paintings, videos, leporellos, which we should talk about. And I feel like the art world, the Western art world, has such a hard time defining or putting her in a box. And you can see this when you look at the press releases that came up at the time. It's like she's either the Lebanese painter or the Lebanese poet or like- there is no way to define her multidimensionality in a way. And how do we do that? Like, how do we hold that space for her?

STEVE

Yeah. It's interesting because that discovery narrative is such, I mean, it's the animating mythos of manifest destiny in the United States, right? And of every colonial movement that, ‘this place didn't exist until we recognized it, named it’. It almost has to do with that sense of like a scientific nomenclature that can be given to classify something into its proper position. Yeah! Because, as you say, she exists as an artist and writer, and then there is this discovery, which I think of almost in relation to the word that you brought up, untranslatable.

NAZ

Mm.

STEVE

The untranslatable, because the thing that I was thinking about, a term that could fit a glossary, but it's very, very parallel to this, is the hidden. And the hidden turns up in Etel's writing, but the hidden is when you think of it as that which remains unknown in what we know, that which remains unseen in what we see, and in a very real sense stays unknown, stays hidden. This is totally antithetical to the notion of discovery because discovery is kind of stripping open and making a claim, right? Making a property claim in a sense like, "This is ours now. We have this as part of our collateral," which those terms of appropriation have moved into a kinda common parlance. And certainly, the business world speaks all the time of these things that are our property. And of course, it's the art business world that does this mass appropriation. I mean, Etel climbed all the way to the pinnacle in her last decade or so. As she's dying, there's a show at the Guggenheim Museum devoted to her art in New York City. But, you know, the untranslatable, the hidden leaves the kind of, what Édouard Glissant famously talks about as the Right to Opacity, that it isn't our right to know everything. I was at a screening of Palestinian films two nights ago, and there's this amazing commentator on the Palestinian revolutionary cinema, Nadia Yaqub, who says, "There's always more to the image than you can extract from it." And in that, she's very conscientiously speaking of Glissant's Right to Opacity. But yes, the hidden, the untranslatable, those things that have to be preserved and have to be protected so that everything is not laid open to discovery, to appropriation, to extraction.

NAZ

Exactly. And also, to just be aware, I guess? I don't know how to put this nicely, but when I was working on my thesis, one of the curators I interviewed was Salwa Mikdadi, who is a Palestinian-American curator. And she did show her work in DC in 90's, and she was talking about that, how they were already exhibited in Venice, in Philadelphia in, like, 40's, 50's, 60's. And Salwa actually built this amazing archive at NYU Abu Dhabi recently, and I got to visit it. It's just so amazing all the work that she has done. But how can the art world be also more aware and not just be so ignorant, and in the language that is used, so that we are more aware of these histories. And it's not a discovery anymore. I mean, the other problem, other part of this problem is that, why are all these woman artists acknowledged so late in life when it's too late for their practice? But I feel like that's the point of another discussion.

STEVE

Yeah, the structural misogyny.

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

Yes, exactly.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Field Recordings by Naz and Steve, Run Off.

STEVE

What you're saying about the awareness.

NAZ

Yes.

STEVE

It's a different quality, it's a different affect, it's a different mode of being than this thing that gets called consciousness. Being conscious. Or even stripped down in a more horrible way, being woke. Awareness, in, to my thinking, is aware of the larger scope and the unknowability. So that it isn't a question of, ‘oh, I become aware, therefore I have it. I take it into myself, I appropriate it, it is mine, it's proper to me’. And so, I love that you went to that word awareness rather than being conscious or that there's a proper way to put things into our knowing. But there's this unknowability that is also a part of that larger sense of awareness, that when we look at one another, we are able to be with what we don't know. Rather than a sense that, ‘oh, so and so I've learned is okay. The, they have my approval, they can move in my orbit, I can remember them, I can call them by name’ and so forth. So, it's rather allowing for that unknowability and the immense amount of the unknown.

When I was in Beirut three years ago in February, this symposium dedicated to Etel Adnan had different people presenting work. And it was very revelatory to be there in the environment in which she grew up. Even with some of the people who had known her for 15 and more years, and to hear everyone talk about how they come to this work, how they come to this person, how do they come to a sense of what they might know, what they might learn. And for me, part of what prefaced my going there was by-- I've been obsessed with music and probably more at the experimental end, but it's taken all kinds of ramifications of curiosity about music and sound. Probably about a decade ago, I ordered a couple CDs from Beirut, and they were from this label, Al Maslakh. And Al Maslakh is a region in Beirut. It's literally slaughterhouse, but it's an area down near the water, and this was the name of the record label. I knew one musician who recorded there, and I thought, "Oh, this is curious. How did Eddie Prévost from Britain end up in this scene in Beirut?" And so, I wanted to speak about Etel in parallel to this contemporary music that was coming out of Beirut. And my sense was that one way of doing that was to think about how Etel sounds. And I don't know if you wanted to listen to a little bit of Etel's voice?

NAZ

Yes! Let's do it.

STEVE

Naz and I were comparing notes and she had sent me a recording a couple nights ago from at the Serpentine Gallery where Etel reads from her book, The Arab Apocalypse. And maybe if we heard her brief opening remarks, and then the first of the poems she wrote. She goes to the back of the book, she goes to poem XXXIV. They're in Roman numerals, and the poem begins, "Oh, no, the amorous storm sets in the West." And so maybe we could just, to get some of her voice into the room.

NAZ

Yes, and her presence.

STEVE

Hear her opening remarks, and then that first poem.

TRANSITION SOUND:

Etel Adnan: Thank you for being here. Uh, I will read the, the last poems of a book called The Arab Apocalypse, which I wrote years ago, um, the early years of the civil war in Lebanon. And I thought then that that war was the beginning of, um, like a wrong turn in history, the beginning of an ongoing apocalypse. So, I would read the last sections of a book of poems.

Oh no! the amorous storm sets in the West

the sun sings by candlelight the sad victory laid out on the slabs

a man has died in Beirut a woman too

it’s their first night of rest in a long time

Tecumtha Indian warrior climbs on Mount Arafat

6,000 men 100 tanks decimate the Companions of the Resistance

Oh how cold is the ground in full summer when it is watered with blood!

Jisr al-Basha got ready for the Revelation Tell Zaatar perfumed with flowers

a young man and his beloved die hand in hand

the bride is welcomed by the sun the moon covers the adolescent with praise

they sleep together on their bed riddled with bullets for ever! for ever!

STEVE

And hearing her voice, you know?

NAZ

I know! So much music.

STEVE

Yes exactly. And-

NAZ

I actually, can I say something about one of your books? I brought it here.

STEVE

Certainly.

NAZ

Yeah. It's the Inside Song one, and the one sentence I always remember from your book is, and you wrote it here for me, is that she's singing, "I get excited when she does that. You would, too." I think that's so beautiful, and I feel like that's what Etel is doing. Like, when she's reading, she's singing almost.

STEVE

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it's this voice that is, it pitched at this particular tonal quality-

NAZ

Mm ...

STEVE

that, that feels like it, it doesn't lie entirely easily in English.

NAZ

Yeah.

STEVE

You know? That it carries this traces of the multiple-

NAZ

Exactly, Yeah.

STEVE

-of the mother's Greek and the father's Arabic, and the colonial French of school.

NAZ

The accent, right? And I have such a hard time with it, and I feel like it is so import- I have an accent, and I think it's really important to carry that accent. But it is a battle, I have to say, in US because it can be used as a weapon against you, too. But it is so beautiful, but how does one carry that? Baggage almost.

STEVE

Yeah. Well, that sense of the accent. People talk about unmarked individuals or standards of the American or Anglo-American world and so forth.

NAZ

I mean, the problem with that, I think, is when that happens, usually it's, so the question is although where are you from? And then you answer, "I'm from Istanbul," "I'm from Beirut." And the answer to that usually is like, "Oh," like, "Tell us more." Like, "Tell us more about your pain. How are you doing, and how is your family?" And after a while, it just- It is true there is so much pain, but it's not the only reality. There is also so much resilience and joy. And this implicated pain from the Western perspective, like, there is something so wrong about it that, like, we always have to perform it for the Western gaze. And I think maybe that's why you are drawn to the music scene because I think it's so liberating. I was drawn to the music scene, as you know. I recently did a show at Asian Art Museum about the rave culture and the dance floor of West Asia, of what's called Middle East, because I was so, again, annoyed with this narrative of the fetish of pain.

STEVE

Mm-hmm.

NAZ

And I wanted to show that there is more than that. And for me, for example, one of the places I found my identity was the dance floor, both in Istanbul, but also after I moved to the Bay Area. And I feel like maybe for you, too, when you went to Beirut and were just immersed in this music world, I am sure it was, like, really liberating.

STEVE

The aspect of going there was, in a sense, really just kind of putting faces and voices to what one hears through the recorded media, which is a document.

NAZ

Mm.

STEVE

And for instance, getting in touch with and having dinner with Sharif Sehnaoui and-

NAZ

Tell us about that night, please.

STEVE

Yeah, it was beautiful because Sharif runs the Irtijal Festival and was the founder of one of the musician-run music labels in Beirut, and was a member of one of the early bands that is still in existence called “A” Trio, or “A” Trio with the quotation marks around the A. And Sharif is a guitarist. We went to a restaurant. He said, "I want to just take you to my favourite sort of simple traditional restaurant in Beirut. It's called Divan." And we were there early, and there weren't many people in the house, but it was a big place, and we had a lovely meal. And as we're sort of talking, the phone rings, and he speaks in Arabic, and afterward he says, "Oh, it's my mother. She's asking about how to cook the sausage. She's making dinner for Simone." And so, Simone Fattal, of course, was there for the symposium as well. But Simone, sh- “my mother is making dinner for Simone. Simone and Etel were with my mother when I was born." And so, to me, everyone I met at this symposium had some connection to somebody who I knew about or had known. And I don't know, I love this kind of accident of encounter in that way, which is maybe different from the idea of discovery.

NAZ

Yes.

STEVE

Like that we're there together. We're neither one has a superiority over the other.

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

You know?

NAZ

Yeah. It's friendship. You have this friendship with both Simone and Etel, too. I remember when I was writing my thesis that you were going to Paris to stay with them, actually, I believe. And we were talking about it.

STEVE

On a visit, yes.

NAZ

Yeah, a visit. And I never got to meet Etel, but you also introduced me to Simone recently, actually, maybe last year when she visited the Bay Area. And it was like a full circle moment for me to just get to meet them. I actually also wanna talk about how I met you. Maybe it's a little bit late in the conversation, but I think it's important-

STEVE

No, please.

NAZ

Because we are friends too.

STEVE

Yes.

NAZ

And I met you also, like, through a magical encounter, I think. When I first moved to the Bay Area and got into the grad school, I was offered to be able to, like, TA one of the classes, and I looked on the website, and I just saw your picture. I didn't know you. I saw your picture, I read about you, and I said-- and I applied, and you accepted me. So, I was a TA for you.

STEVE

I was a teaching assistant for one semester. One Semester, yeah.

NAZ

And we have been friends since. And when you also organized the memorial for Etel, what was that bookshop called?

STEVE

It's, um, Medicine for Nightmares.

NAZ

Yeah, which is a great bookshop, by the way, in the Bay Area.

STEVE

Yes. One of San Francisco's landmarks in the sense of bookstore culture.

NAZ

But I feel like that was such a special event, too, and it-- that also felt like friends gathering in a way. I feel like we all knew you mostly, like everybody who was speaking that day.

STEVE

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

NAZ

And some of them knew each other, but that sense of community, right? Is, I feel like is always there.

STEVE

Yeah. It's interesting because for 25 years, and even before that, I put together programs bringing people together to present their work. Poets, but not necessarily poets. At that memorial, there were various people that I was aware of that I knew, but often that I didn't know well. And I wanted always to invite people who the combination of their being together, it's a little like making plans for dinner guests in a way. You know, the combination of their being together has this potency to it, and that different people have entirely different histories and approaches and ways of thinking and speaking. And what happens when I put them together, I want something to happen that is unforeseeable, which is maybe close to the untranslatable in that sense.

NAZ

Yeah. We have been having a reading group with Collective Çukurcuma since 2015, I think. And when we first started with Mine, for us it was also to bring these people together, and we always also had a table with food, either dinner or lunch or tea, and just, like, gathering around that table. And we did read Etel at that time. We actually, I think, read that text which is called The Cost We Do Not Want to Pay for Love.

STEVE

Right.

NAZ

And her relationship to love and the cost the love comes with.

STEVE

Well, I've been reading in the past week, I read this really wonderful book of interviews with Laure Adler.

NAZ

Mm.

STEVE

And done with Etel late in her life, in Paris. She says- and one of the things about Etel was her openness and her complete, you know, ability to talk about things that you might find difficult to speak about yourself. And she speaks about her being unable to be about except in a wheelchair, but she also speaks openly about, for instance, having a love affair with her professor- at the Sorbonne. And to me, this was not just an anonymous kind of moment of frankness or revelation or something that, that goes against the grain of our contemporary ethos. But rather it's like, oh, who was this person, Étienne Souriau? But Souriau's ... One of his major books is called The Different Modes of Existence. And so, to me it was like people jump over that name in this book of interviews because he's not that well known, but his work has been translated recently into English. And I saw it spoken of, first in a review that was looking at Souriau vis-à-vis someone like Philip K. Dick, with this notion that there are different modes of existence. There are different dimensions of existence that are happening at once. There are different planes of perception.

NAZ

Oh, that's so beautiful.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Field Recordings by Naz and Steve, Marie-St.

NAZ

That actually brings me to one of the things I also want to talk about, is about, [The] Arab Apocalypse. The way she writes is not only letters, but also with symbols as well. I think this kind of what you are talking about, the different perception. And because she was immersed in so many different languages, that does something to someone's consciousness, right? And it's hard to perform, I think. But she says about this that the act of writing is an act of drawing.

STEVE

Mm-hmm.

NAZ

This is also another quote. She says that, "I did not need to write in French anymore. I was going to paint in Arabic."

STEVE

Mm-hmm.

NAZ

And these kind of different perceptions and different... I think she's so playful in a way, right, with the language and the way she thinks, and it's because she was immersed in all these different languages.

STEVE

Yeah, and serious play.

NAZ

Yeah.

STEVE

I mean, because the other thing about the reception alongside the discovery narrative, the reception of Etel as a painter was that there's something cute about her.

NAZ

Mm-hmm.

STEVE

That, oh, here's this small woman who makes these amazing works and then speaks in such a brilliant way. Isn't that wonderful?

NAZ

Yeah, so true.

STEVE

This kind of, um, minimization of the person. That diminishment.

NAZ

Yeah. That is so true. I never thought about it, but that's so true. Because she has so much depth, and you are so right that there was so much dismissive about that depth in a way. And she is so serious, like the things she wr- and she was a journalist at some point, too. Like when she went back to Lebanon and she worked as a journalist. And, like, when you read all her writing, like, she is writing about the war, and the consciousness, and the space, and the art, and the nature.

STEVE

Right. She was the editor of the cultural pages for two newspapers. There was a catalog published, or a book that was published for that exhibition for Etel's works at California College of Arts. And it was a remarkable book because what they had done was to find, in the archive, all the writings by Etel. Those cultural pages that she had edited for the newspapers in Beirut, just prior to the civil war, and translated them into English and collected them into a book. I was aware of this book, but it was, unless you knew about it, you had to go to the gallery to find the book and buy it there. And so, three years ago, when I was preparing to go to Beirut, I was in the CCA library. And they have a little shelf that I always look at, which is people will leave books for free. I went there, and there were about six copies of this book of Etel's journalistic writings collected and translated into English, but from Beirut. And so, I grabbed them up. And Simone was coming to town that week, and I met with Simone, and she said, "Oh, well, can you give me some?" So, I gave most of those to Simone. Maybe kept one. And then the time came when I was about to fly to Beirut, and I went back to the library at CCA, and there were, like 30 copies of this collection of Etel's writings. So, I scooped them up and put them in my suitcase, and then was able to give them to people in Beirut, which was really beautiful because it wasn't something that was readily accessible to anyone there.

NAZ

Yeah. I love that you carried those in your suitcase also from one place to the other. I feel like that's something I can definitely relate with. And with Mine also many years ago, we organized this exhibition, House of Wisdom, and it was all artist books, and we carried them in our luggage, like, from one place to the other.

STEVE

I remember this, yes.

NAZ

And I feel like there is something about the immigration process that is so much about carrying stuff in your luggage.

STEVE

And, and also the refugee situation where you're allowed one suitcase perhaps.

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

And what can you carry when you're told immediately to evacuate for instance.

NAZ

Exactly. I know. And Etel writes about this. She talks about how she lost the letters of her father to her mother during the First World War. He writes in French, and she talks about, like, how they are so proud to be writing in French at the time because it's this language that's taught in the school, and that she's very upset that she lost those books many years later. Because she is changing the space and travelling.

STEVE

Yeah, the letters were gone, yeah.

NAZ

I know. It's so sad. All the things we lose through the process, it’s very sad.

STEVE

Right. Which is a part of that unknown within the known.

NAZ

Exactly. Yeah. And the untranslatable too, I guess. Like, I feel like you just carry that grief from one place to the other also in a way, and that is what's so untranslatable, I think, about this. It just doesn't translate.

STEVE

No, I feel that now in the desire to communicate with the people in Beirut who are under bombardment. Like, what can you bring with your words? It's, it-- there's an insufficiency always in what you can bring.

NAZ

Exactly. Yeah. And I feel like there's almost a kind of performativity in a way that, like, what can we say or what can we do that's…you know?

STEVE

Right. Am I saying something to cover my guilt?

NAZ

Exactly. Yeah. Because I feel like there's also so much lip service.Especially in the art world. And it happened so much with this, recently, in the last few years to make the collections more aware, and let's bring more woman artists, let's bring more artists of colour to our collections, for example. But without really having the infrastructure to be able to hold those practices in the collections, like the cost we need to pay, right? Is really important. And if we are not gonna do that, then it turns into a lip service.

STEVE

Yes. Coming up against, I mean, the untranslatable, the hidden, the unspeakable, in a sense. As the unspeakable is happening, what words are there? I mean, words become so futile.

And I was thinking about the choreographic, and what immediately came to mind was this notion, the writing of the chorus, or the dancer voice chorus, you know? They were thinking about the movement and stillness of all bodies. And by that I don't mean human bodies per se, even the body of this plant, of this canister that's holding my coffee. One of, one of the awarenesses that I think Etel has, is of things. And not just of being as residing, say in human beings or in some overarching divine being. That rather we're in a world where we're among living things, and the living can't be broken down into organic, inorganic. In that classification manner of the scientific west or scientism, you know?

NAZ

Yes, I love that. It's so beautiful, and in her poetry especially, how she talks about the sun moving or the moon moving, or how she talks about the fog. I love how she talks about the fog.

STEVE

She returns to these motifs.

NAZ

Exactly. And it is such a presence, the fog here in the Bay Area. It even has a name.

STEVE

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we live in a zone where it's so cold in the summer you have to leave.

NAZ

Yeah, exactly. You know? But I think it also relates back to what you were saying about the hidden. Because the fog also functions as a veil in a way. And then it dissolves, and then you are able to see, and what does it mean to look through that veil?

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Music pieces from Land 03 (أرض ٠٣) A compilation for the displaced in Lebanon.

NAZ

Should we read also a little bit from her poetry?

STEVE

Yeah. I have a little bit, and then you have a little bit.

NAZ

Okay. Yes, yeah. Let's, let's both- Okay.

STEVE

Let's both read what we like.

NAZ

Okay, let's go.

STEVE

I brought this small passage. I mean, the book Seasons is one that I overlooked. Somehow I missed it as her books were coming out. And so, I've been going back to this one because it's the start of the books of poetry that Etel ended up thinking of, a series of four books. And Night, which you have, is one of those. Seasons, Sea & Fog, Night, and then Surge are the four books that carry this continuity with them. And her sense was that they were a series of books spread across multiple years, but this is from Seasons.

She says, "Ravaged by darkness, the moon is dangerous. The spring has hit its periphery. Down on Earth, savage seas are moving toward their middle under melancholy's heavy banners. Disasters are not acceptable. The hidden is inbuilt in thinking. Nature's daily presentation of diversity distracts one from the non-essential."

You know, to me, as I'm reading this work, I'm noting how broken it is, and somewhere within that book she says, "Is what is fractured, is it only fractured or is it multiplied?" And you would think that a book, Seasons, that is in four sections, you would be able to say, "Oh, we're in spring now, and then we move into summer, and then we move into fall, and then we move into winter." And so, there's this kind of circulation that gets carried. But within the book itself, the markers that would indicate where we are in a particular season or where we are in a particular geography are not particular to a given place. And so, just in the way that her language is composed of these multiple languages, her geography is composed of these multiple geographies that are held within a single paragraph, you know? So there, If we think of this as a kind of refraction rather than just a shatteredness or a shattering, that rather there's a multiplication of awareness perhaps.

NAZ

Mm. I think it's also the cyclical way of thinking that's non-Western, I guess we can say. And this fragmentation is also really, I see it as a result of the immigration process because you remember in fragments in a way. And even when you were speaking, I was thinking about the seasons. What are those four seasons, right? Even in the Bay Area, it changes so much from day to day. It is supposed to be summer now, but it's winter, as one can say.

STEVE

Yeah.

NAZ

Yeah. But I love that, and I think it is also very intentional, right? How she's doing that. I wanna read something from Night.

STEVE

Yes.

NAZ

She writes, "Eternity is non-evident. There is this endless rotation of the sun and the skull, the stillness outside, and a storm within. At least a river is always flowing in some part of the country. Winds, always gathering speed, shatter the order of things. We return home in tears”.

I just love that last sentence also, and I was wondering which home, because I feel like she has so many homes. I wonder which one she calls home, or if it's home in that sense, or is the body is the home, or Mount Tam is maybe the home.

STEVE

Yeah, and the idea of return. Which is almost like, and not a return to the self, but a return in a sense to the familiar. That of course home could be whatever dwelling you're within, and especially if you're, have uprooted yourself. And her leaving was very intentional. She talks about winning a scholarship, and her mother says, "No. No, absolutely not." And this is the very end of World War II, and her teacher, Gabrielle Bonheur, who was a French scholar, writes about poetry extensively and taught poetry within the school that Etel attended. She was selected by Bonheur to get the scholarship, and her mother said no, and she went anyway. So, there's this willfulness and an intentional leaving and going into what one doesn't know.

NAZ

Yeah. And she leaves so many times after that, too. Like, I also find the moment she leaves California very interesting, after she teaches at Dominican school, and then she decides to go back to Beirut.

STEVE

Yes.

NAZ

I think either 70's or 80's. The

STEVE

early 70's.

NAZ

Yeah. And then she writes about that moment, and then she starts working as a journalist, and she writes about that moment, like how lively the culture scene was in Beirut at the time. And I think I was being a bit nostalgic about Istanbul a few years ago, especially like early 2000s. Like 2010s. I remember that. And that kind of, just the joy of it and just being together and producing together and living together. And I think it's so sad when she has to leave that. And then she goes to Beirut, and she starts writing in French again, which is also interesting. So, she shifts the language one more time.

STEVE

Right. She writes Sitt Marie Rose in French, which brings about death threats because it's a not very veiled rendition of actual events. When I was in Beirut, in the library archive, they had found a poster which was from protests by women. It was the face of Marie Rose Boulos, who had been murdered. And there had been protests at the time, and this poster was there on the wall from the mid 70's, from the early period of that civil war erupting in Beirut. And when Etel published the novel, it was published in Paris by a feminist press called Des Femmes. And she started to receive death threats because of what she was telling and the side that she appeared to land on in what became the civil war. And so, she ends up leaving by herself, going to a small apartment in Paris and living there, and eventually joined by Simone.

NAZ

Mm-hmm, yeah. I was also thinking about this kind of translatable. She talks about the first book I think she wrote was in French, and she wanted to translate into Arabic. And she talks about the impossibility of that because the gender issue, the sea is female in one language and male in the other language. And that's the whole point of this book, so it's just untranslatable, and she ends up not translating it. Which is so interesting.

STEVE

Right, right, right. And it's almost like we're talking about the queering of the terminology.

NAZ

Exactly!

STEVE

You know, like why is the French ‘mer’ gendered as feminine, the sea? Why? And what does that do? What does that do to feminise this body of water, or this ship, or this land? You know? I mean, there's this massive feminisation of the land mass of the Americas, for instance when the discovery and invasion comes from Europe. That it can be conquered.

NAZ

Mm-hmm.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Field Recordings by Naz and Steve, Pacific Vista.

NAZ

Should we read more from Etel? A little bit?

STEVE

Please ...

NAZ

So, I'm gonna read two maybe, if that's okay?

STEVE

Yes, please.

NAZ

Okay. So, this one, “We were born at the origin of sadness. That's why our parties are so dazzling. They end up burning children and houses”.

This was very inspiring for me when I was working on the rave show at the museum because I feel like this kind of duality is also very hard to explain, and I found it very untranslatable when I was working on the show. That it's neither nor. There is pain, but there is joy, and the parties are so dazzling because of that sadness, and that really speaks to me, in a way. And this is the second one I'm gonna read.

“Don't leave the Mediterranean elsewhere. In all seasons, there are nothing but snares, and the regrets you will conceal will strangle you. Don't leave your childhood and its sorrows. The first desire will accompany you to the last breath. Streets lead to illuminations, but never peace to the heart”.

And she wrote this one in Paris in October 27th, 2003. I just love that how she says, "Don't leave the Mediterranean." I miss Mediterranean all the time, and I always imagine myself swimming in the Mediterranean when I'm in a difficult situation, and that the sorrow will always follow you in a way. There's also another Greek writer who writes about... I forgot his name, but I will remember. Who writes about the city will always haunt you, will follow you wherever you go.

STEVE

Kavafis.

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

He's in Alexandria, in Egypt. Yeah, amazing poet.

NAZ

Yeah.

STEVE

Yeah. I'm glad that you brought that work in because it's a different work for Etel because she actually writes those poems in French, and they're written as verses. And so then the book comes to us, through its recent publication, through translation. So, somebody, Sarah Riggs is an American poet and very versed in French, married to a Moroccan man, Omar. But that work had to be translated, and it's a beautiful translation, but it's unusual for her, you know, something called her to write it in French. She was hearing it in French. And her early encounters with poetry were largely French poetry. They were Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and other poets, Apollinaire and so forth. These modernist poets, the great French modernists that were being taught in the French school in Beirut.

Etel's last book is called Shifting the Silence, and when I spoke about that I heard last several books of poetry in Beirut three years ago. I was looking at that idea of how does one shift silence? Does it shift into sound? It can also be shifted into silence, and there's a silence that's carried within writing. And one of the aspects I always find in poetry is that there is that conveying of silence, not just of sounds. And one of the things I got to in terms of thinking about how Etel sounds, vis-à-vis, how the contemporary music is sounding in Beirut, was this way in which she's using a simple kind of quotidian common language. Though it's working against normativity. The way that she uses and juxtaposes these various geographies and turning-- Like every section that one reads, you're shifting, shifting, shifting. And it feels like this is a way that the mind works. It doesn't work in continuities. And what I came up with is this notion that there's a sounding, in otherwise ways, in place of the world delivered as violence. That in thinking about these musicians and the work that they're making, and Etel and her particular way of sounding, that they are proposing this otherwise, to that violence, that is imposed upon us. You know, the end of her book, Shifting the Silence, it's her last book of poetry, and I'm thinking about how she uses the word "we." And it's very hard to say we. Do we say we the Turks? Do we say we the Americans? We the San Franciscans? We the poets? We the painters, et cetera? But I'm thinking about the “we” in Etel. And what occurred to me was this, that it becomes a whoever.

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

And there's a beautiful line. The very last book published by Post-Apollo Press was a translation by Michael Sells of Ibn Arabi, and the book is called The Translator of Desire. And so, it's this classic Arabic work that, that Sells does beautiful renditions into English. And the “whoever” in this work comes forward as whoever suffers love's ills. And so, I thought about Etel as having this capacious “we”, which I think we can hear coming from the last part of her last book of poetry, Shifting the Silence. She imagines this angel requiem, and it's these angels who are astronauts. She has this, we're in the realm of the post-Apollo. Which, the Apollo mission, she saw as creating a different kind of mode of time, an era that we entered when people went to the moon. And so, the moon that is drawn is the logo of The Post-Apollo Press, on their books that Etel drew, and Simone repeated on every one of those publications. But, you know, she imagines this new angelic order to sing, “and I say to sing against those who believe in revelation as mass extermination." The choir, and this is Etel, “but the choir kept telling them that revelation is indivisible. It's one”.

And my last line that I got to in that talk was, I hear Etel's indivisible sounding as all beings or none. And in that sense, not just all persons, but all beings, all being, that has to be protected, that has to be regarded, that is a part of our awareness and a part of our work. There is this violent “we” that says, "We” the Americans, “we” the poets, “we” the Lebanese," et cetera. But rather, how is there an inclusive sense? And I feel like this we and this whoever is something to aspire toward that is against the apocalyptic.

NAZ

Exactly, yeah. I actually love that you talked about this. I always have a hard time when I work with American editors, because I also use we a lot when I write, and it's just something I use, and they always ask me, "Who is we?" And I have such a hard time answering that question. I feel like in the American editorial mindset, it can be very violent sometimes because they want to know everything, right? So you can't leave anything, like, hidden, your glossary term. And just open for discussion or open for your imagination, and that's the beauty. Like, this is why you are reading my writing. This is like a two-way conversation. I am not gonna describe everything to you as a writer. And I think Etel does that so freely, so unapologetically, that I think she inspire the next generation of writers, thinkers, painters, and humans in general.

STEVE

Yes, beautiful. And there's the delusion of behaving as if it is all known.

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

Like, the argument against using “we” is that it has an ambivalence to it, right? Like, oh, we don't know who this is. We can't categorize “it”, this person. You must say “I”, and this press to be, to individuate to which Fred Moten and Stefano Harney speak of as the individuation as a division, a violent division of one from everybody else. And so this press, this American press for the individualization and the moving of a person into the individual that is apart.

NAZ

Yeah, because it is collective, and it's to study together, right? That's like what we do even now, like talking to each other. We are in the presence of each other.

STEVE

Absolutely.

NAZ

And we are a collective.

STEVE

Yeah, it's beautiful.

NAZ

I think we are done.

STEVE

That's beautiful. Can we end with Etel?

NAZ

Yes.

STEVE

I wanna play the, the very last poem that she reads at this reading at the Serpentine Gallery in 2010, October 17. It's from The Arab Apocalypse. It's Roman numeral number, what is that? LXLIX. Is that 59?

NAZ

We believe you.

STEVE

Yes. And but the poem begins, "When the sun will run its ultimate road."

TRANSITION SOUNDS:

Etel Adnan: This is the last poem.

When the sun will run its ultimate road

fire will devour beasts plants and stones

fire will devour the fire and its perfect circle

when the perfect circle will catch fire no angel will manifest itself STOP

the sun will extinguish the gods the angels and men

and it will extinguish itself in the midst of its daughters

Matter-Spirit will become the NIGHT

in the night in the night we shall find knowledge love and peace.

Thank you.

STEVE

“In the night, in the night, we shall find knowledge, love, and peace”.

That's the last line of a book called The Arab Apocalypse. This line that was used for the title of the symposium on Etel Adnan in Beirut, and it's an extraordinary place to come to after all the movements amongst all this violence.

NAZ

That's so beautiful. I think this is a great place to end. Thank you so much, Steve.

STEVE

Thank you, Naz.

NAZ

It’s always so great to be in conversation with you.

STEVE

Oh, absolutely.

NAZ

I miss you.

They laugh together.

STEVE

I miss you, too. And we need to-- What we're going to do is go up on Mount Tamalpais

NAZ

Exactly.

STEVE

And bring our little telephone tape recorder.

NAZ

Exactly. We will do that.

STEVE

And record some ambient sounds. And I can bring you to the house that Etel and Simone lived in.

NAZ

We will do that.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: Field Recordings by Naz and Steve, Treespace.

MINE

Thank you to Naz and Steve for this episode.

MARTIN

For the transcript of this episode and for resources mentioned in the conversation, go to rosechoreographicschool.com/podcast. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description wherever you're listening right now. As part of the ongoing imagination of the school, we are compiling a glossary of words that artists are using to refer to the choreographic. Every time we invite people to collaborate with us, we also invite them to donate to the glossary, and it's hosted on our website. If you'd like to get in touch with us, email us on info@rosechoreographicschool.com. This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. The series is produced and edited by Hester Cant, curated by Mine Kaplangi, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.

Bibliography:

Transition Sounds:

LAND: 1, 2, 3 — compilation for the displaced in Lebanon

from Tunefork Studios, Beirut (99 tracks total)

- LAND 1, December 2024, 41 tracks

- LAND 2, March 2026, 26 tracks

- LAND 3, March 2026, 32 tracks

XXXVI (song) - Julia Holter (A song in reponse to Etel Adnan's poem, XXXVI)
you are the house around which i am the wind (song) - xlmxkhfi [Sarah Huneidi]

We have permission to use the songs; and the reading by Etel (via Penn Sound) is available for any educational, non-commercial re-use.

Naz and Steve collected some ambient sound recordings as "transition sounds" from Mt. Tamalpais, which figures prominently in Etel's personal cosmology.

Work by Etel Adnan:

The Arab Apocalypse (poetry book)

- XXXIV (poem in The Arab Apocalypse)

Seasons (poetry book)

Night (poetry book)

Sea & Fog (poetry book)

Surge (poetry book)

Shifting the Silence (poetry book)

The Cost We Do Not Want to Pay for Love (poetry book)

Journey to Mount Tamalpais (essay)

Growing Up to Be a Woman Writer in Lebanon (article)

Leporellos (various works)