Time brings together a series of poems that were originally written in French starting in 2003 and that were later translated into Arabic, before appearing now in English. The collection was initially provoked by a postcard sent to Adnan by the Tunisian artist Khaled Najar, whom she had met in the late seventies. True to the postcard’s gestures of traveling across territories, the text is in constant movement, spanning a vast historical and geographic reach. Adnan is from many places, and in the text they shift. Her mother’s native Greece and her own time spent in Lebanon, Paris, and California all merge together:
Places disappear as they smolder, and we acknowledge the atemporal as a ghost makes a cameo in the realm of the living. Joanne Kyger, the experimental poet often associated with the Beat Generation, is juxtaposed with Bacchus, as if to signify a mixing of lineages and histories. Throughout the text, concepts oscillate between a process of dissolution and one that resolidifies, the words turning inward even as they spin out. Adnan then further accentuates this cyclical movement by invoking the process of respiration, the cosmos exhaling in temples as:
“There’s a temple in Baalbeck dedicated to Bacchus, and in Bolinas a Night Palace that Joanne Kyger protects with her poems under our footsteps a ghost rises and instantly disappears because our countries keep going up in smoke.”
(from “Baalbeck”)
“everything turns intoWe turn in toward the body with the breath, and then burst outward to encompass the monumental scope of our roots as the columns evoke a sense of history and antiquity. Throughout the different sections, Adnan continues her play with time and landscape, putting the intimacy and mortality of the body into conversation with the natural world:
breath, even
stone columns”
(from “No Sky”)
The cyclical motion continues as writing onto the natural world dissolves and reappears anew. The anthropomorphic sky molds the body from clouds. We sink into dissolution and then alight back onto a continuous present. In the same way, Time melts into the scenery, and ancestors keep us company as we move through the words as if in a dream.
“Clouds pile up,
turn into human
forms
on riverbeds
the same inscription
always dissolves,
then reappears,
as the sky has
already told me.”
(from “Baalbeck”)
In the passage above, the act of scribing becomes animistic and metaphysical. Words take on a life of their own; they interact with nature, an ephemeral record embedded in riverbeds. In another section they adorn themselves and become theatrical. Adnan writes,
“in order to perform, words dress in
Phoenician purple, and it’s in the
spaces separating them
that great adventures take place”
(from “October 27, 2003”)
In these pockets between words she allows her reader to float among, and observe from a distance, the landscape of elements she has collated. While poetry often dislocates and situates the reader in an alternate temporality by offering space on the page, Adnan takes it a step further by folding in references to antiquity and the contemporary, fusing places, and conceptually blending the human and natural worlds.
While traveling through Switzerland a few years ago, I was lucky enough to catch an exhibition of Adnan’s paintings at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. The piece that most stayed with me was a fold-out accordion book with a series of renderings of Mount Tamalpais. The softness of an Arabic calligraphy accompanies a background of colors that change shades through the folding pages. The text of Time unfolds in a similar way, shifting through nuanced hues and incorporating the landscapes that have formed Adnan’s perception of the mountains, clouds, and various natural elements.
In my first reading, I tried to index the many themes or symbols present in the text: water, fire, blood, heat, territory/geography, violence, death, angels, women, ruptures and fissures, light and shadows, sky, weather, clouds, sun (the ever-present sun, the solar mother and lunar father), nature, memory, words. Listing the elements felt overwhelming due to the impressive scope, the range pushing my imagination toward an ever-expanding horizon. I also felt there was something familiar in the collection of words I was indexing, and soon came to realize that the same elements are present throughout Adnan’s body of work. In Time, however, they appear in different tints, tinged with a new distance, a new sense of time. Throughout her numerous books, her writing has incorporated surrealist imagery, the natural world, supernatural figures, political, social, and gender-based injustice, as well as the temporal. Her 1993 book of letters on feminism written to the exiled Arab intellectual Fawwaz Traboulsi, Of Cities and Women, also interacts with the epistolary form, but in Time correspondence operates differently, serving more as a springboard for poetic reflection than as a form of direct engagement. Distance collapses, and the temporal takes on a more somber quality. Originally written when Adnan had reached her seventy-eighth year, there is a melancholy weight to her words, as if she is contemplating either her own death or even that of the earth’s.
And so, on my second reading, I realized that these themes and symbols had formed something heavy and lugubrious, that they were bathed in the purple haze of a fallen dusk. They had gathered a landscape that was smooth and in motion. The temporal became a continuous present. Through her rhetorical play, one that does and undoes in a circular motion, Adnan, the poet-philosopher, situates the reader in a trance where the clouds carry us in their drifting and we lose ourselves, as if disappearing or melting into these textures she creates.
Time also disintegrates, slowly evaporating from the sequence titles as we progress through the text: “October 27, 2003,” which marks the day Adnan first received the postcard from Najar, precedes “Friday, March 25th at 4pm,” in which we lose any reference to the year; we then move into the sequence titled “At 2 p.m. in the Afternoon,” which mentions no date, followed by “Return from London”, then “No Sky” and finally to “Baalbeck.” As these temporal markers slip away, the sense of displacement becomes complete, the reader accepting the dissolution of time and place. However, with the title of the last section she references a specific place. Baalbeck, the city in Lebanon that was once the ancient site of Heliopolis, is Adnan’s homeland, but she has been living in exile for most of her life. This name introduces a return to her origins—a cyclical interaction with her own beginnings, perhaps as she contemplates her impending end.
In a gesture appropriate to a chronological disintegration, one way out of the collection is suggested by the way in. In the opening sections of Adnan’s text, brevities are laden with complexity to create an aphoristic simplicity:
“let’s not bother to fear thoseHere we come up against a heaviness, idyllic and solemn, as well as Adnan’s revolutionary will to leverage the weight and fortify herself with dreams while the world, like her text, changes and morphs. Adnan poetically navigates the currents of desperation and hope with a clarity placed on the page in short stanzas that we can pick up and roll over in our minds again and again. Like the short lines written on the back of a postcard, the aphoristic quality of these verses allows them to take on different lives. They can be worked over with a different temporality as we return to them for multiple readings, as we explore how they interact with the preceding or following ones, and as we observe how they take on new shapes.
who insult our insubordination
the conquered will always have
the last word
I live in an invisible that has neither
bathroom nor entryway.
the invisible has no owner.
the dream never has walls,
and it’s never cold there
and my shadows stretch
over my body as it sleeps,
and the sky stops being blue, and
the light waits”
(from “October 27, 2003”)
