Queer Elders California . com
A small pilgrimage to Etel Adnan's Home
November 14th marks the anniversary of Etel Adnan’s death.
Famed writer, artist, painter, and thinker, I’ve long been drawn to her work for its linguistic flexibility and depth of attention.
Earlier this year, I made a pilgrimage to Adnan’s former home in California.
I borrowed a friend’s car and drove across the Golden Gate Bridge—straight through the tunnel to Marin County, yelps of joy pillowing from my mouth. I’d found the address on a defunct website, QUEER ELDERS CALIFORNIA . COM or something like that, the site decorated with digital lisa frank stickers and rainbows from the early 2000’s.
See how the dead re-arrange the living.
I parked the car and walked down winding streets. Blue balloon air and lilt of sea. Small white traingles speckled the water—sailboats, I figured, or docked boats. Where was Mt. Tamalpais?
Occassionally, I passed women in expensive athleisure, dragging their costume dogs on leather leash. What had happened to the artist colony that used to work from Sausalito? Is it always so easy to push the arts out? Always, yes.
Adnan’s home was blue with a lemon tree, windows facing the sea. I breathed in sea, fog, eucalyptus, sun. Rapturous morning light. A wild iris flummoxed beneath beads of dew. A slick hum of pleasure took me by the hand; my dear friend Shaina clicked the camera.
The lemon tree was sturdy and squat—likely planted then tended by Adnan and her wife. But the new owners seemed negligent. Mid-August and the lemons overripe. There must’ve been over a hundred lemons knobbing the branches, skin puffy and thick from neglect.
I reached my hand over the brown fence and grasped a single, bulbous fruit.
The lemon had swollen to the size of an orange, hefty in my hand.
What to do with it?
I smashed the lemon into a salad dressing. Before composting the pithy fruit, I managed to save two seeds. Bitter lips.
I carried the seeds back with me to Berlin, sealed in wet plastic bags for germination. Friends delivered nutrient-dense soil and we placed them—tap-root down—into pots. But I had left them too long in the bags. Despite my best efforts, the seeds succombed to rot…
Born in Lebanon, Adnan moved seamlessly between Paris, California, and Beirut, forging an idiosyncratic language for exile and displacement, for memory and love. During the Algerian Revolution, she stopped writing in French altogether. She had a life-long love affair with the moon and the sea.
In 1982, Adnan’s wife, Simone Fattal, started The Post-Apollo Press and began publishing Adnan’s English poetry. Time slows in Adnan’s writing and takes on a reflective quality, an eleastic depth. An excerpt, here:
absence. displacement. waiting. then comes rejection. anger follows. shame makes the beds
the shadows jostle between the walls of the scarcely visited cities. time nips at out heels we are afraid to arrive last
I love the rain when it wraps me like a river. grafts me to the clouds. I share in the properties of the sky. I grow like a tree
— Adnan, from Time, translated by Sarah Riggs
See how the dead re-arrange the living, lemons in our hands.
No seeds.
Tree to tree.
R E A D I N G S
My Mother by Ellen Bryant Voigt
“Like a Crow on the Wing” by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, an excerpt from Prieta Is Dreaming, a new book of Anzaldúa’s (previously un-published!) short stories.
They Feed They Lion by Phillip Levine
Speaking Tree by Joy Harjo
songs addressed to the moon by Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Proof by Erica Hunt
H A P P E N I N G S, E T C.
I had an essay published in the latest issue of the American Poetry Review. Entitled “Language the Letter, Letter the Language,” I trace my frequent pilgrimage to Lublin, Poland, and explore the material history of wood and leaden type. If you’d like a PDF of the piece, just send me an email and I can share it with you.
Berlin…. save the date for the Winter Solstice (December 21). I’ll be reading poems—both my own and the work of Bernadette Mayer—in our yearly celebration of Mayer’s epic composition, Midwinter Day. I’ll be with fellow poets Lotta Thießen and Katharina Ludwig at Cafe Plume and hope that you’ll join us for the shortest day (and longest night) of the year.
Earlier this year, poet a.Monti and I recorded a radio show on Adnan’s poetry. I’ll link it below in case you’d like to listen:
