Life
MELUS calls Adnan's life "a study in displacement and alienation." Daughter of a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, she grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a primarily Arabic-speaking society. Yet she was educated at French convent schools, and French became the language in which her early work was first written. She has also studied English from her youth, and most of her later work has been first written in this language.
Caught between languages, in her youth Adnan first found her voice through painting rather than writing. In 1996 she recalled, "Abstract art was the equivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words, but colors and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression."
At twenty-four Adnan traveled to Paris where she received a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne. She then traveled to America where she continued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and at Harvard University. She taught philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael for many years, and has lectured at universities throughout the United States. She divides her time between California, France, and Lebanon.
Read more about this topic: Etel Adnan
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality.... Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work—the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.”
—Vance Palmer (1885–1959)