“We paint naturally, like we speak. This doesn’t mean that everyone is Picasso, but it’s a language,” Adnan recounted to journalist Laure Adler. “How can you teach philosophy (of art) without practicing an art?” a professor had asked Adnan while she pursued her doctorate at Berkeley, encouraging her to visit campus studios. “I went there during my free time. The professor put me in a room full of windows with a table that took up the entire wall, and on the other side there was a little stream, surrounded by nature... I made very few big canvases, but the feeling I want to get across isn’t small.” So began Adnan, at the age of 30, palette knife-ing sun and massif abstractly, exploring what a new language could traverse with the interminable anguish war incites. Raised in Beirut, the daughter of a high-ranking Syrian officer and a Greek mother exiled to Lebanon from Smyrna after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Adnan’s upbringing was directly informed by violent dissolution and melding of histories. “She thought only of Smyrna,” Adnan says of her mother. “When I would go walking along the corniche in Beirut, along the waterfront, I would see huge clouds on the horizon and I would say to my mother, to make her happy: ‘Is that Smyrna?’ Adnan spoke Greek, Turkish and French in her household, also learning her parents’ differing religions, Islam and Greek Orthodox. Under mandate Arabic was not spoken in school. Inheriting contradictions so great, so bewildering, she could have buckled beneath the belief walls have ears and sky no audience. Instead she wrote and painted against efforts to sublimate tenderness. Her first poem is of the marriage of the sun and sea. One could call it courage if it wasn’t so obvious Adnan refused initial translations of valor; to Adnan courage, valor, had always lived in love for the land and its people, regardless of which army’s cowardice reigned. She is candid about her disappointment that language does not always feel enough, that the mechanics of hand to brush, brush to canvas, exercise frustration to exhilaration, though language is the most effective means of ensuring one does not forget. “I think even after death, after grief, separations, there’s the real end which is forgetting,” she writes. “I told him how the Bay was blue, and that Angel Island was dark brown, the color of live deer skin, and Tamalpais was as green as a crushed bottle of beer.... And he smiled. America, I told him, was torn between paradise and hell, and it was not suffering, it was numb." Adnan may have preferred one medium to another, but we are indebted that she does not let us forget that recitations of the heart and lived experience do prevent the risk true forgetting presents. Abstractions of remembrance do not alter certain truths, but they can transmute what was once blunt. Remembrance is often painful, all together dizzying, but it can also be a source of curiosity and will towards a greater good.
-Katie Calderon