The universal shaman

The myth says that Adnan began to paint because she didn’t want to use french during the Algerian revolution as a reaction to the atrocities that were taken place by the French army towards the Algerian people. With an intense political and humanitarian sensitivity, she decided that using french was like being a part of the French politics that she despised. So she stopped. Bur the poetry flow inside her wasn’t to stop. And she had to find another route for it. As she wasn’t speaking Arabic and hadn’t been speaking English yet well enough for expressing her intensities she turned to painting. In fact, Arabic, her father language, was always some kind of unapproachable to her -she tried many times to learn but she didn’t manage- thus painting was her way to write poetry in Arabic instead of french.

The myth says that when her girlfriend, who was a painter and a writer, saw how marvellously Adnan could paint even at the start of her training, she stopped painting.

Beyond any myths, Etel Adnan in her autobiographical texts talks about her urge to create poetry with everything she was doing, by discovering new places, by driving and following new paths in life when felt like writing poetry - living her life was poetry making and that is why creation, painting, writing essays, journalism or poetry was such an organic and essential process for her.

And through this organicity, her art, as well as her poetry, have an ineffable power to communicate some primal senses, like speaking the oldest of languages or bringing messages from before the creation of any civilization, messages from the stars and the universe, that is her best friend.

It is some kind fo magic.

And she is absolutely capable to do this magic, to become the universal shaman because —to use her own profoundly poetic words— “a poet is mainly the human nature in her purest state”.