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Unsettling Narratives of Migration: Art, Embodied Feminism, and the Idea of the Journey in the work of Etel Adnan
Abstract
This paper examines the trope of the journey in three works by Etel Adnan: Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986) The Manifestations of the Voyage (1990), and Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz) (1993). In each of these texts, Adnan focuses on some aspect of nature (Mount Tamalpais, the linden tree, stars, the sea) and pairs it with specific built environments (a staircase, a road, a city) to explore ideas on art, feminism, loss, and exile. In Of Cities, Adnan declines to write “a formal letter on ‘feminism,’” as her friend Fawwaz Traboulsi had requested for his magazine Zawaya, and instead composes a series of letters from different cities to which she travels, with the purpose she says, of “living that which was given to me.” In Tamalpais, Adnan declares the mountain a woman and elucidates how “geographic spots become spiritual concepts.” In Manifestations, she asserts that “exile emigration the voyage/ are the halts of Knowledge,” inviting us to explore the relationship between places, movement, and the literary trope of the journey. Unlike the triumphalist wanderings of Odysseus, the exploratory "rihla" of Ibn Battuta, or the poetically ambitious journeys of Bashō and Dante, Adnan invites her reader on a “journey into the unknowing.” From the vantage of exile and through her painter’s eyes, Adnan traces layers of history in geography, describes the shape and color of light on surfaces, observes the ruins of abandoned places, and elucidates an embodied feminism that situates women’s experiences in specific social, economic, and political conditions as well as in nature and in specific places. This paper argues that Adnan’s uses of the idea of the journey disrupt typical narratives of gender, nature, art, nation, and migration. A comparative approach to her work, moreover, reveals how it not only converses with older texts but also resonates with more recent narratives of migration by Arab American writers such as Laila Lalami, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Rabih Alameddine, who, like Adnan, unsettle the relationship between the detached observer and the knowable subject, between the place of departure, nature, art, gender, and the notion of arrival. -Etel Adnan, Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz). Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1993, 3. -Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais. 2nd edition. New York: Litmus Press, 2021, 4. -Etel Adnan, The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestation of the Voyage, The Post-Apollo Press, 1990, 42. 6 Ibid, Of Cities, 34.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Ethnic American Studies