Lebanese-American painter-poet-novelist Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was interviewed by Gabriel Coxhead for the June 2018 issue of Apollo.

In the 1970s, having returned to Beirut to work as a journalist, she was forced to flee to Paris when the civil war broke out… Living mainly again in California, she published numerous volumes of poetry and prose… such as The Arab Apocalypse (1980), Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) (1993), and In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005).

“If I were just a painter, maybe my work would have been different, more encompassing. But my writing is rather pessimistic, because of the angle of history I got involved with, being born in Beirut. Also, it’s because words are social. I think it’s more natural if an event bothers you to express it in words. Art also is a kind of language – but it’s a language of feeling. When I paint, I am happy. I am both an optimistic, happy person, and caught in and aware of tragedy. And although I lived in California most of my life, I never had a spell of time where I could forget about the problems of the Middle East. Every morning the newspaper would remind me.”

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