In The Heart Of The Heart Of Another Country

Etel Adnan

City Lights

ISBN 0-87286-446-4

 

In The Heart Of The Heart Of Another Country consists of 7 essays connected with Etel Adnan’s engagement – as a writer / woman / Lebanese-American / emigrant / Arab  / immigrant / artist / Non-Arab / intelligence / etc – with the Middle Eastern world.  It is a beautiful and profound read.

 

Ranging from memoir, to T.E.Lawrence, to the final piece [‘To Be In A Time Of War’] which consists only of sentences beginning with an infinitive], Adnan’s eye captures experience with simplicity, variety, and clarity.  Her historical insights appear as responses to & extrapolations from the details of life: organic, believable, pure – and this is the joy of it.  The reader is taken to the site of the telling not through force or agreement with the author’s dogma but through the heart & the eye.

 

What is revealed is a world [or sensibility] that overcomes war, bigotry, through the imperative of being.  It’s impossible to write about displacement or the Middle East or history without being subjective.  The problem is that most writers give the impression of aiming to be objective and of course aren’t.  Etel Adnan’s insights and beautiful writing allow the reader into the new [for most readers] world being described [hence the title], show a world that is both immanent and eternal, and affirm the victory of the individual [though not all individuals, of course] over the forces that wish to compromise the meaning of being here, now, human. You decide who they are.