Surpassing Borders and "Folded Maps": Etel Adnan's Location in There‪.‬

The translation of reality into language by a writer creates possibilities of interrogating conditions of human existence and aspects of recorded history. The poetics of movement across spatial, temporal, and political constructions by a poet like Etel Adnan allows her to conduct a meditation on mortality, which becomes not just a spiritual and metaphysical journey, but is also linked to worldly concerns and the consequences of human actions. At the core of Adnan's poetry is the material political world that is coordinated with the inner landscape of thought and memory that poetry originates from. Her project is truly transnational in its scope: Adnan meticulously confronts the demands of defining place, history, and subjectivity, letting time and space continuously dissolve in her work. Etel Adnan's poetry has equally been informed by her training in philosophy, art, and literature. Her last volume of poetry There (whose subtitle is In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other) interrogates the construction of being in space and time. The book is a long prose-poem and consists of a sequence of 39 poems, all of which are titled "There," except for the one that falls in the middle, called "Here." Adnan's rumination on the self and other and the symbiotic relationship between the two comes from her acknowledgment of the multiplicity of the self. Her perceptions are based on her experiences as an exile from Lebanon and are honed by her attempts to make sense of the personal implications of war and violence throughout the world, especially in the Middle East. The source of Adnan's voice is not just one of exile, even though Lebanon is a virtual part of all her written work. She relentlessly tries to deal with the paradoxes of defining and classifying people, objects, and emotions, for instance, how someone is branded the "other" and declared an enemy. (7)