Etel Adnan in a Conversation That Waited for Its Time

In February 2016, in a strange twist of fate, I found myself at the home of Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal in Paris. I had flown there for the sole purpose of meeting with Etel to record an interview with her. I had initially planned to publish our conversation in the Home issue of The Outpost, the magazine I edited and published at the time. But just before going to print, and for reasons that were not very clear to me then, I decided to pull the interview from the issue. I had a strong feeling that I should wait on it, that the time was not yet ripe for it. Patience is a virtue, I reminded myself, especially if you are sitting on a recording of Etel Adnan. In the next five years, I listened to this record several times from different angles, wondering what to do with it, often doubting my decision not to publish it when I had the chance. Yet I was still guided by the feeling that the time hadn’t come yet. The interview was expansive, like Etel herself, who lived several lives and bore witness to histories both crude and crucial. My own memories of the interview are akin to a phantasmagoric journey, yet hazy. I remember going in a little nervously with my jumble of notes and tiny white Sony recorder, which my first editor had gifted me when I went into journalism just before I turned 20. I remember the conversation being interrupted several times—by the sweet woman who comes and cooks for them, the phone, the doorbell, until Etel grew visibly agitated by those interruptions and stopped answering them. I remember emerging onto the streets of Paris after the interview in a daze. I walked for hours under light drizzle and the luminous moon, trying to grasp the immensity of what had just transpired. Etel was a giant and I am grateful to have met her. After the explosion in Beirut, as I laid down on my bed to recover from my injuries, I returned to this conversation and was struck by a short passage in which she recounts a journey she took in several Arab countries in 1966. I knew I wanted to dig deeper into this story. I also wanted to bring that story to the stage. It felt like the time had ripened and I was ready. In early November 2021, in another twist of fate, someone put me in touch with the editors of Al Hayya who proposed I publish a large portion of the interview in their first issue, save for the little passage I am developing the performance around. What followed was a quick and unexpected turn of events. I finalized the transcript and shared a rough draft with them. They started to work on the final edit, we looked for translators, fished for photos, and fact-checked. And then, on November 14, Etel passed away. The news came crashing down on me. Five years later, it all made  perfect sense. The interview could not have found a better home. Nor at a better time.