"My spirit is anguished by colour," writes Etel Adnan . "Do colours have the power to break the time barrier?"
In My Center is Not in the Solar System: Tributes to Etel Adnan , co-published by Bidoun and Mack , we discover a timeless Adnan through the tender collection of essays from friends, collaborators, and admirers, alongside a selection of the Lebanese-American poet, author and visual artist's final, previously unpublished artwork. Born in 1925 in Beirut to a Syrian Muslim father, a high-ranking Ottoman officer from Damascus, and a Greek Catholic mother from Smyrna, Etel Adnan grew up in a home with only two books: a Quran and a Bible. Thus, she ventured into the world, like a near-blank canvas, acquiring colour after colour as she moved from Beirut to Paris to California.
Throughout this journey, Adnan emerged as one of the most singular voices of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her late fame produced two radically different yet equally powerful bodies of work: her writings and her paintings.
In literature, she gave us Sitt Marie Rose (1977), a searing, polyphonic novel that stands as one of the most important anti-war texts to come out of the Lebanese Civil War , and The Arab Apocalypse (1980), a visionary, prophetic book-length poem that creates a hallucinatory language all its own.
Alongside these, she created a vast universe of small, radiant abstract paintings and vibrant leporellos that feature mountains, suns and endless horizons. In her own words: "It seems to me that I write what I see, paint what I am."
As much as this book is an intimate homage to her person and her work, it functions as a literary puzzle. Each contributor pieces together their own Etel, the one that haunts their private psyche.
She becomes Ariadne's thread between their different universes. Each essay seems like a dispatch from an ongoing conversation among the writers, Etel, and a wider constellation of artists, philosophers, and poets.
As I turned the first pages, I felt an immediate shock of recognition. Suddenly, I was invited into a conversation I had long been part of, as a reader and a writer. Nietzsche, Rilke, Paul Klee, Frank Lloyd Wright, and George Jackson appeared one by one, like old companions around a literary table.
It was so natural to be swayed between verse and prose, for each line is a familiar epiphany that I had in intellectual solitude. This invisible library, which brings every contributor together in the memory of Adnan, is a window into a world where colour, thought, and poetry move freely across languages and continents.
As many people as there are, there are many spaces in Adnan's life. Beirut, the city of her birth; Paris, where she studied philosophy, and California, where Mount Tamalpais became her daily companion.
In the book, she evokes the multitude of houses she accumulated in her lifelong pursuit of a true home.
Yet the city that stood out most vividly was Paris, particularly her apartment on Rue Madame, which became her final resting place. She lived there for decades with her partner, Simone Fattal , where she passed away in 2021 at the age of 96.
As Enrique Vila-Matas wrote, Paris is a city that never ends. It is, without a doubt, a mecca for exiles and wanderers — and for Adnan, as it is for many of us, it became a chosen home:
Paris is beautiful
it aches
to say so
Paris is naked
is too familiar
does not need us
Yet we love the rain
falling on a stone
fountain
water on water
like a Beirut puddle Omar Berrada In Berrada's poem or in Adnan's abstract landscapes, exile becomes an assemblage of haikus. And Paris, in its contradictions, is a city that generates them endlessly. Everyone passing through this city loves it through the loss of every other place.
In different eras of modern history, Arabs were brought by force majeure or by choice to foreign lands, and in the guilty attachments we develop towards our host cities like Paris, remembrance becomes a form of resistance against erasure.
Memory is mentioned over and over, and maybe most powerfully in the conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Etel Adnan: Hans Ulrich Obrist, " Do you think we write for our own time, or for the future?" Etel Adnan, "I think that right now we need to actively remember, even more than we have in the past. In the past, memory essentially produced itself. We lived in a city, and in this city was a library, museums, friends. Memory was already lodged in stones and in the people who knew them. Today, we are scattered and dispersed, constantly faced with the void. Entire cities have been destroyed in our time. Before the war, we didn't need to think about Beirut, because Beirut was there. But the Beirut of the 1960s has disappeared. If memory doesn't preserve that Beirut, it will be gone forever — we have to make a real effort to remember it. And this is going to be more and more true of other places, too." With each homage from the contributors, my version of Etel began to take shape as well. As I got to know her through the verses of others, I kept coming back to what she said in her book Journey to Mount Tamalpais (198 about Paul Klee when talking about death: "I would like heaven to be a place where I can go to talk to Paul Klee. Together we will look at circles and see dots in them and in the dots we will discover universes and we would visit them within all the houses he has painted." In the classical Islamic mystical tradition, the smallest mark could contain everything, like the nuqta beneath the letter ب could hold the entire universe.
This is what makes Etel's corpus so strong; it distils reality without explicating it. This mirrors what she saw in Paul Klee' s work: a single dot exerts an immense gravitational pull, drawing one toward an edge far beyond the frame, somewhere behind the sky.
In her hands, the mountain becomes a bridge into Hurufiyya . She called it "painting in Arabic". Just as poetry is the abstraction of prose, her abstract painting reveals the inner truth of the landscape.
A small leporello or a single mark on paper becomes large enough to hold exile, war, love, mountains, and the Beirut that no longer exists.
Adnan said, "Through the long night of the species we go on, somehow blindly, and we give a name to our need for a breakthrough: we call it the Angel, or call it Art, or call it the Mountain." This breakthrough is repeatedly brought back in her works and the tributes to her work.
In La Yugular, Rosalía sings that the entire world can fit into a single drop of saliva. Adnan fits it in a dot, a mountain, a colour, a letter. My Center is Not in the Solar System: Tributes to Etel Adnan , is a Paul Klee circle, with many dots in the form of essays and poems, and each one is a universe of its own. Chaima Gharsallaoui is a journalist and filmmaker from Paris Follow her on Instagram: @ chaimagharsallaoui