In protest of France’s continued colonial subjugation of Algeria, Etel Adnan famously declared “I did not need to write in French, I was going to paint in Arabic.” A polyglot and renowned author, it is perhaps odd that Adnan turned away from language to abstract art in order to communicate her prodigious creative and intellectual vision. Adnan, however, did not understand the two forms as disparate and often incorporated script in her paintings and drawings in her writing. Works like her 2008 painting “Voyage au mont Tamalpaïs,” which incorporates a painted image of Mount Tamalpais in California juxtaposed with lines of Arabic script, suggest a deep affinity between painting and writing that is rarely explored in the scholarship on Adnan. This paper begins to fill this gap with an interdisciplinary examination of the intersection of images and words in Adnan’s oeuvre. Using her essay “To Write in a Foreign Language” as a point of departure, I argue that Adnan’s difficult and complex relationship with language constituted a main source of inspiration for much of her work across a variety of disciplines. In allowing her creativity to rest within the nebulous space between word and image, Adnan developed a powerful theory of dislocation that impacted future generations of Arab writers in both the United States and the Middle East.