Published by
Al-Araby
Al-Araby
When I heard the news of Etel Adnan’s passing on November 15, I immediately looked for my phone where I had saved her favourite artwork. Logging on to social media, I joined strangers in thanking the artist for a pioneering life of love and generosity – grateful for the radiance of her paintings, poems and essays flooding my screen, as a testament to the many lives she touched. Born in 1925 in Damascus as the daughter of a high-ranking Ottoman official father and a Greek mother, Etel grew up in Beirut, a place which would never leave her, together with the remanence of her ancestral lost home …