‘Fog is My Land’: A Citizenship of Mutual Estrangement in the Painted Books of Etel Adnan

In a 1989 essay titled “To Write in a Foreign Language,” Etel Adnan describes the trajectory of her relationship to Arabic, a language associated with shame and sin in the context of her French convent education in Beirut, but which her Syrian father had her copy by rote from an Arabic-Turkish grammar as a desperate means of recuperation. Her family’s common languages were Turkish and French; Adnan acquired knowledge of Arabic writing through a channel more somatic than semantic. During the Algerian war of independence, when a dream of Arab unity emerged, Adnan’s attitude to the languages of her inheritance changed: “I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.” How does this dream constitute itself in Adnan’s poetry and painting? And how are readers to parse the sometimes unintelligible sign systems that result? This chapter will explore the geopolitical implications of Adnan’s “xenoglossic” poetics, which sporadically merges the mediums of writing and painting in folded leporello books, to contemplate how her practices of transcription and supralinguistic gesture enable us to revise reigning discursive categories of cultural nativity and solidarity, citizenship and statelessness.