The Particulars of Particulate

Adnan’s writing offers no shortage of statements about outer space as a site of disenchantment. In October 1966, Adnan published a peculiar, slender book in Beirut, titled Moonshots, that she dedicated to “the lost virginity of the moon.”¹⁹ As the title to a book comprising fewer than twenty short prose poem segments, and six reproductions of paintings by abstract painter Jean Khalifé, “moonshots” would seem to reference both the idiom to shoot for the moon, meaning pursuing an out-of-scale aspiration, and the idea of the photographic snapshot, complete with the violence of sudden capture. The year 1966 had brought a bonanza of efforts in both domains. The race to place a man on the moon was in full swing. Although the unmanned Soviet craft Luna 2 had made its hard strike on the moon’s surface in 1959, and the United States got its Ranger 7 to the moon in 1964, no human had yet arrived at the goal. Surveillance missions landed on the moon and collected photographs. In August, the United States flew a Lunar Orbiter mission around the moon devoted to comprehensively photographing it for the purpose of identifying a landing place; the same craft took the first-ever photo of Earth from the vicinity of the moon. Given these several overlapping “moonshot” contexts, Khalifé’s small folio of images—blocked-in compositions made with brushed color and drips of ink—seems to take on the status of documents of mineral terrains and alien biomes (fig. 3).

By contrast, Adnan’s poems in Moonshots, which make extensive use of apostrophe directed to a (female) moon, shift the placement of the narrator between singular “I” and a plural “we” in ways that sustain an intimate tone yet claim little physical proximity. “The arrow of man’s desire has sailed through space and caught the secret dark side of your face,” Adnan writes on one page. “Did it find beauty or terror? We shall never know.” Elsewhere, taking up the voice of a spectator on Earth, she writes, “your images flashed on our television screens.”

Moonshots represents an early entry in Adnan’s attested concerns about positions of witness.²⁰ The book is written in English, which situates it within the merging of what Adnan has called “my own mythical time with America’s own,” yet is produced in Lebanon, at a press that otherwise specialized in French-language publications.²¹ Adnan would have been in the middle of a months-long sojourn across both Maghreb and Mashriq that generated a network of important collaborators among leftwing writers in the region, which soon generated a desire to publish her poems in Beirut’s journals in Arabic (typically translated by a friend or editor).²² Nevertheless, the oddity of Moonshots as an item can also help us to recognize the centrality of reprographic media in Adnan’s descriptions of even the most faraway places and events. Indeed, for Adnan, it is cinema that often works to establish grounds for an experience to belong to “I” and “we.” In memoirs, Adnan speaks of cinema as constitutive of her subjectivity—of making a habit of going to the movies even as a child.²³ Both “Jebu” and “The Beirut—Hell Express” reference movie houses, characterizing them as stagnant spaces, and intone the exhausting effects of television. Even Adnan’s personal experience of the first year of civil war in Beirut—the time when she was living in an apartment in Ashrafiyya and began drafting The Arab Apocalypse—involved imprinting images onto film. Her colleague and friend Jocelyne Saab had started going downtown daily to shoot footage that, as Adnan later quipped, no one asked for and yet everyone needed.²⁴ When Saab assembled the images into Beirut, Never Again (1976), a reportage showing Beirut from the eyes of a child wandering in the destroyed streets, she asked Adnan to write poetic commentary to accompany the scenes. The resulting voiceover muses on forgotten items in the rubble, observing that nothing completely disappears from even utterly demolished sites.²⁵

It was also a documentary film project that facilitated Adnan’s 1966 travel in the region, supporting a much longer and more intensive trip than her previous visits. At the suggestion of an American colleague, she took a semester’s leave from Dominican College in Morocco to help develop a film about a sardine fishery and the plight of workers caught in French and Spanish colonial monopolies.²⁶ After Morocco, Adnan went to Tunisia and Egypt to look at weaving workshops, and then to Jordan and Lebanon. The stay in Morocco proved pivotal insofar as it brought Adnan into contact with such intellectuals as Abdellatif Laabi, founding editor of Souffles, which in turn helped to create links between Moroccan and Lebanese literary journals. Still, no matter the immediacy of friendships forged, Adnan’s travel reports from the journey convey sweeping impressions of countries and cities akin to a storyboard. Traversing from west to east, following the sun in panning shots of deserts, Adnan waxes ethnographic and, at times, messianic. In Morocco, “troubadours recite in long poems those deeds of courage that the desert holds written on its sand.” In Cairo, she describes a daily transfiguration of the poorest places when, at sunset, as if to get revenge on the watchful eyes of the wealthy, “billions of shiny particles of dust” burst forth as a miraculous vision.²⁷

Switching from place to place, and medium to medium, makes for a cognitive structure that Adnan assigned to Arab poetics in particular. In her inquiry, which often took on a culturalist aspect of its own that emphasized distinctions between Eastern and Western epistemologies, she was compelled by Arabic poetry’s apparent construction around atomistic systems of relations, involving the speaking of things and modes of relation into robust yet temporary existence: each line is a complete statement, each sentence independent from the next, and every verse sufficient in itself.²⁸ These relations, recognized as products of the nontranscendent worldview of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, appealed to modern Arab poets who in the 1950s and 60s turned to writing prose poetry.²⁹ Adnan admired the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab the most, perceiving him as a figure who doesn’t conceptualize the earth the European way, as rooted in farming cycles, but instead attends to the surface of the planet. As she put it in an interview, she understood Arab poetry as engaging a terrain of matter that is fundamentally desert; even when planted, a feeling of drought and sandstorm is imminent, such that the relationship to the earth is one of a “cosmic event.”³⁰ Such a poetics takes up a position of kinetic mobility rather than originating location. It is surreal, if also human, in its intuition of sacred profanities beneath built-up cities. Adnan’s poem “The Beirut—Hell Express” borrows a proclamation from Antonin Artaud to make this case, incorporating a sentiment about Mexico City, “it is the only place on earth which proposes to us an occult life and proposes it at the surface of life,” into its montage and assigning it to Amman, Jordan.³¹

When Adnan started work on her epic poem “Jebu,” she exploited a messianic conceptualization of past civilization that resonated with the model of new poetry espoused by leading figures like Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Saʿid).³² In fact, it was Adonis who translated excerpts from the French and published them in Mawāqif in August 1970.³³ “Jebu” opens with a quotation from the Hebrew bible describing King David’s intention to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Jebusites, a Canaanite tribe inhabiting the city, then follows the awakened hero, Jebu, a fabulated figure, who traverses the natural expanse of the land. The poem’s narrators observe Jebu’s journey, but they also bear witness to the death traps of cultures dedicated to enclosure and monopoly: naming villages razed by the Israeli military (Samua, Quneitra, Qalqilya) and spying on fedayeen who are pressed to the ground, wounded, pushing toward the reclamation of a desolate territory that receives only saliva, meteors, and bullets in place of rain. Even as the poem plumbs epochal histories, making rich use of motifs that predate monotheistic occupation in Jerusalem and its holy precincts, it puts the late-arriving Jebu into a modern dystopia peopled by soldiers and astronauts. As Jebu mounts his own return, he sees the magnetic ball of the planet aflame, a radioactive and primordial entity.³⁴ The die has been cast. Water is poisoned by petroleum. The poem proclaims, in the voice of a conquering state, “we shall atomize the mountains so that there shall be no more Revelations.”³⁵

This apocalyptic imagery, in other words, takes place along a pyrrhic Moon-Earth trajectory, such that elemental relations of earth to space will collapse (or be forcibly collapsed) around their inhabitants. This is a message Adnan first brought to Shiʿr via her friendship with editor Youssef al-Khal, in the guise of something like a foreign correspondent. Adnan initially published essays rather than poems in the journal, which detail American cultural phenomena against a backdrop of nuclear warfare.³⁶ “Light in the Beginning, the End, and the Day of Judgment,” published January 1968, furnishes a disconcerting account of uses of light as an artistic medium facilitating projections and festivals in New York, California, Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere.³⁷ In it, Adnan identifies light as an apocalyptic ground to increasingly defunct preoccupations with painting and the task of figuring flesh in art, and she declares a breakdown of division between means and content of representation. Light itself is rapturous but also deadly, charged with the power to flay bodies into spectra. Indeed, as the essay asserts toward its end, the very light that inspires us is also our terror. Recalling for readers the thousand-sun radiance of Hiroshima, Adnan foreshadows another event that signals the end of all humanity. At the zero point of light, Adnan muses, our ruins as persons who try to play God also become our paradise (before God).³⁸

Adnan understood that questions about medium and illumination could lay claim to bodies; in many ways the hubris of space exploration had shown how figure and ground will always hypercondense in the elongation of time, producing prophets and new zero-points. When the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—the first man to pierce the Earth’s atmosphere and move into orbit—died in 1968 in a plane crash, Adnan explored these themes across several interrelated projects aimed at expanding her mediums of composition. She wrote a poem titled “Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut,” then copied it on a concertina-folded notebook called a leporello as a work of art. She also made a performance in sound and light. Presenting a daily reading of her poem at Dominican College, Adnan recreated the “chloroform atmosphere of absent spaces” for seated audiences in a darkened room.³⁹ She and collaborators taped a natural voice reading, and a second reading over a telephone, then used a synthesizer to modulate the sounds in coordination with lights that moved like blinking satellites.

Each new space mission further substantiated the doomed nature of travel between earth and moon. Even the earliest antiwar poetry Adnan published in the United States, such as “The Ballad of the Lonely Knight in Present-Day America,” derived critical force from pairings of hubristic voyage and tragic return. Structured as couplets addressed to a government-military overseer, its refrain reads, “I gave you a man / you gave me a bum.”⁴⁰ By the 1970s, Adnan had extended her oppositions to include the conflict of imperial atomic powers and the aspirations of the Third World. When in 1972 she received news of the arrest of her friend Abdellatif Laabi in Morocco and his detention as a political prisoner, she was viewing televised coverage of the tenth crewed Apollo mission. Penning a short note for Mawāqif, she pondered the conditions under which America sends a man to the moon, again, while Laabi languishes in prison.⁴¹ The text takes on the voice of a personified shuttle in orbit on “electric wings,” simulating a telephone dialogue with Laabi. To each triumphant word proffered by the spaceship, Laabi responds with the name of material suffering. Not discovery but prison. Not a poem but, rather, torture.

We assume that the first poem in the published L’Apocalypse arabe volume is an artifact of Adnan’s intent to write an abstract poem on the sun. Its intercalated signs are evenly distributed. A glyph of floating particulate matter—what I will call a sand glyph, as a way to class together all noncohesive particles appearing susceptible to movement by fluid forces—appears in the second line, the first to host glyphs (fig. 4).⁴² If reading from left to right, sand is the fourth glyph. First, a sun glyph placed before the word sun appears to provide emphasis, if also to undo effectiveness as a name. Next, a glyph resembling a knot of solar rays without an orb switches place in the sequence with the word sun. Third, nested circles return to fill the place for sun with a diagram of its operations, carrying the color descriptor blue. Only then does a glyph of floating sand come to stand in for the sun itself. Finally, the line reverts to glyph + color (blue). The poem goes on to describe suns that are jealous, amorous, “vain sorrowful and bellicose.” Other suns are identified as racially coded disposable subjects: “A Hopi a Red Indian sun an Arab Black Sun.” There are dramas of caprice, of radiation that powers things (the solar boats of ancient Egypt) and sublates them (a sun confined to an asylum is “tearing its skin into lightning”). Within this inaugurating terrain of moving subjects and objects, composed out of chains of descriptions of solar activity, the sand glyph is the first instance of a line of separation where description hesitates, where the color properties a poet might hope to assign do not attach.

The Arab Apocalypse allows very little to accrue. This becomes a component of its drama. It is relentless in its simulation of the stripping effects of apocalyptic judgment. In the second poem, winds pick up. Arrows connect particular words that themselves already designate action (“a sun → toward the sea”).⁴³ An eye, accompanied by a glyph of three slashing lines, confronts something with twitching lashes. There are prisoners and Native persons filled with bitter whiskey, and a howl in the desert, evoked by the doubled phoneme “hou! hou!” In this way, when Poem III proceeds to make the first announcement of a massacre, its primary quality is silence. On a page of typeset lines devoid of graphic signs, the first words state, “The night of the non-event.” The players shrug off their own characteristics. “Plainclothed army. Silent hearse. Silenced music. Palestinians with no Palestine.”⁴⁴

Adnan identifies the onset of vertigo in Poem IV. In stark contrast to the preceding poem, both its pages spark with glyphs and directional vector drawings.⁴⁵ On the first page, a reader follows the behavior of the sun through gullies of moving liquid until, as if by means of the kind of jump cuts used by Luis Buñuel and other surrealist filmmakers, a pause is named—“eternal vertigo”—within a stream of Nilotic sluice: “a yellow world a blue sun a yellow sun eternal vertigo in my hand.”⁴⁶ The poem goes on to reference a variety of sicknesses, from cancer to shock (“Arab tortured mutilated vomits the sun hangs from his feet”) and anesthetizing drugs. But on the second page of the poem, Adnan returns to vertigo, seemingly insisting on it. She writes “colorless vertigo” and draws a sand glyph (fig. 5). The line is actually inaugurated by a different glyph, a strange slicing axis with a dot, followed by the textual designation of “a yellow sun,” and a hollow circle glyph. But, by the middle of the line, Adnan breaks the serialized syntax of color + sun with a floating hail of points, after which she reverts to writing a snapshot-like description of a sun’s action (in this instance, eating almond trees). The line has a wider margin beneath it than others, which enhances the pictorial quality of the sand glyph and makes it suggestive of a rainstorm or birds in flight. Importantly, however, Adnan asserts colorlessness, indeed, complete invisibility, as a trait. A person diagnoses vertigo in part by a loss of sight that comes from failing to correct for planetary motion—an inability to hold details in one’s gaze.

Recall that Adnan’s 1 January 1974 column in al-Safa made vertigo a property of a churning stomach as well as a site of blessing. The term vertigo recurs in Adnan’s writing with remarkable frequency, typically having to do with the challenge of registering the self within an encompassing medium that both threatens and supports. In 1968, when Adnan writes to a friend about her experiences attending a weaving workshop, she describes grappling with a massive loom and stretching threads against frames into a cosmic crucifixion, with “vertigo” arising from the incorporation of the suspended body into an infinitely expansive tapestry.⁴⁷ Elsewhere, Adnan references vertigo as a locus of exaggerated fears instilled by a parent. In an essay she wrote in 1986 tracing conjunctures at which she felt her queerness, she recalls how, when she was a child in Beirut, her mother’s admonitions about interacting with predatory men had the effect of characterizing the world as a campy horror movie, in which each man becomes like the “Chaos of Greek mythology, the original void, the unending vertigo.”⁴⁸ And in “Jebu,” Adnan designates vertigo as a site of relief for a Palestinian refugee who, after having to suffer the “perfect visibility” of the glaring Arab sun in life, is carried by Babylonian astronomers into vertigos—into familiar cosmic storms.⁴⁹

How to write a poem that embraces the finitude of beings in a finite planet, that does not allegorize nor make suffering into a lesson about the passage of time? One strategy is to draw pictures of elemental remainders rather than identifiable bodies. Here, the particulars of particulate can help, and all the more so in the frame of ostensibly Arab conceptualizations of life on the surface. Geologists would tell us that grains of sand move across surfaces by bouncing from point to point, following roughly ballistic trajectories determined by the physical laws of drag.⁵⁰ Particles of stone reduced to small spherical shapes, sand neither settles into loam or humus nor exits the system of planetary rotation. In fact, substances classed as sand possess a power of self-accumulation, harnessing wind to group together in definite heaps maintained by kinetic relations of bouncing off one another. The technical term for this horizontal motion of bouncing sand in fluid is “saltation.” Crucially, the phenomenon of saltation occurs along both ocean floors and the dunes of erosion deserts, thereby helping to demonstrate a convergence of elements at the point of activated being. Air and water alike can move sand, pushing it into storm formations. Further, the “creep” of sand by means of matching like to like exhibits a kind of imperial drive to inhabit space. Deserts expand. Clouds of particulate possess the capacity to enter and settle into voids. Processes of saltation drive sand into ancient tombs, at once obscuring them and protecting their contents.

Adnan is hardly the only Arab intellectual interested in qualities of fragility, flexibility, and mobility to produce drawings of points of floating particulate. Perhaps the most celebrated effort comes in the writings of Moroccan essayist and sociologist Abdelkebir Khatibi, whose 1974 study La Blessure du nom propre innovated intersemiotic readings of popular sign systems and histories of graphemes, and developed a reading of tattoos as “writing in dots” that both precedes and overcomes the strictures of law-making writing.⁵¹ Adnan in this period, however, was most committed to ensuring that her essays reached an audience by means of Arabic-language literary journals. And in those forums, innovative forays into structuralist analysis, including its diagrams, arrows, and bundles of oppositions (as well as their disintegration in multiplication), make for important if often overlooked context. One need only open the November–December 1972 issue of Mawāqif, which begins with Adonis’s prescription for new poetics, titled “Ten Points for Understanding the New Arab Poetry,” to find what Olivia Harrison has helped us recognize as a transcolonial project of poetics structured not only by shared legacies of colonialism but also by horizontal forms of relationality, including those explicitly revealed by the 1967 defeat as a failure of old-model developmentalist Arab nationalism.⁵² The issue features a poem by Adnan; poems by Laabi, Jean Sénac, Mohamed Bennis, and others from the Maghreb; a translation of a 1935 text by André Breton; and scores of other texts by authors across the Arab world and diaspora understood as sharing a desire to employ poetry as an explosive force against intellectual stagnation of all kinds.⁵³

The same Mawāqif issue features a massive experimental text by Syrian literary critic Kamal Abu Deeb, who was then preparing a structuralist study of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, that makes extraordinary use of an expanded sand glyph.⁵⁴ Entitled “Oppositions: An Elegy for the Babel of Voices,” Abu Deeb’s text is a celebration of the purported punishment of the multiplicity of tongues, which has bestowed a million names on a single item. It opens by addressing itself to Babel in the mode of pre-Islamic poetry of desire: an elusive woman, a flower in the desert, a moving force from which “a thousand joys spring from your body like stars, like sand.”⁵⁵ It then goes on, over twenty-six sections, to offer an encyclopedia of means to perform the Babel of names as, in fact, a function of representation: reproductions of visual art work, sheet music by Gustav Mahler, attested the chains of persons involved in transmitting the Hadith, poetry in different classical structures, and more (including a voice that speaks breathlessly about Neil Armstrong landing on the moon).⁵⁶

The glyph comes at section XIV, under a heading reading “Silence: The Language of Space and the Dimensions of Stillness” (fig. 6).⁵⁷ There Abu Deeb has written—or, rather, drawn—a cloud of points that swirl in a churning mass that fills half the page. Apparently marked quickly onto their paper support, some extend into dashes and tails. Others hang in more perfect suspense. Abu Deeb explains in his next section that he drew this “poem of silence” yesterday. That it is “a white page embossed with points in the color of silence. The silence of space: a death, a birth, or a prophecy.” This silence, for Abu Deeb, derives from the perfect condensation of information into disembodied particles that crackle and hiss in the gray emptiness of the unmarked air (and page) before acquiring color and shape again in the minds of readers. Here, the poet asserts a crucial distance between circulating speech and receiving persons. Speech acquires dimensionality and flesh within bodies, he suggests. Silence has no dimensions, no distortion, no capacity for expression. It is accordingly necessary to draw silence as an embroidery of points and not to write a poem.

What can drawing a poem of silence achieve on a page? Earlier in this essay I deemed Adnan a contextualist. Her pronouncements on the nature of Arabic cultural systems can seem naive and ahistorical in their fascination with absolute difference. Yet this contextualizing thinking also served to activate the investment in interfaces between not only elements but also writing and drawing. We find, for instance, in a 1981 lecture a long disquisition on Arabic calligraphy as a centerpiece of Islamic art where Adnan attends to the fluid lines and inaugurating dots of a calligrapher.⁵⁸ The living lines of the letter forms, Adnan notes, achieve an emotional impact as a trace of their maker even as they function impersonally as a carrier of meaning. Dots—here described as the points where the calligrapher puts their pen down on the surface—constitute both the “beginning of the universe, the unit, which means the smallest common denominator” and a sign for the mathematical zero, a great “Arabic contribution” to a world history of positional annotation.⁵⁹

Once attuned to the culturally freighted semiotic play of Arab poets in the 1970s, including interest in multidirectional “writing” in sound and silence, we can follow the sand glyph through The Arab Apocalypse anew. We know that Adnan associates the inescapable sun with a damned terrain. One of the most arresting passages from The Arab Apocalypse, in Poem XL, expresses the breakdown of not just ethical witnessing but also the drive to document. It involves the sun itself taking photographs of Palestinian suffering. “A concrete roof collapsed on 500 bodies / and the sun took the picture for the CIA’s archives / sun camera majestic lens Prince of the gaze / white white white is the result of the sun’s clicking / when teeth become as white as eyes.”⁶⁰ Here, the sky illuminates the world with an encompassing threat of capture, absorbing the color of substances with the colorless light of scrutiny. Given the space of paralyzing visuality sustained across the whole of The Arab Apocalypse, the sand glyph introduces a kind of escape. It puts a marker on shared atmospheric flows that move unseen—albeit with the HOU! of singing sand—and never resolve into embodied things.

The sand glyph appears at least three more times in The Arab Apocalypse. One instance comes in Poem XVIII (fig. 7). This is a poem where, as Aditi Machado has analyzed, a second narrative within the poem—that of the sun itself dying—makes itself known.⁶¹ The text tells us that the sun has lived “half its life STOP. 5 billion years on each side.”⁶² When the glyph appears, in this case a pyramidal formation of carefully arrayed sand, there is an element of being caught unawares. We have read for a second time the doomed accounting, “5 billion solar years,” after which the sand glyph acts like a stop, before text attaches to it like a predicate: “are grass snakes hiding in the texture of TIME.”

In the case of Poem XXV, a sand glyph is squeezed between the words “fetuses” and “winds.”⁶³ Following narration about the sea and efforts to enclose it in electric wire and tanks for fishes, it becomes a visual bridge to a statement about a violent eternity: “the silent march of Matter-Spirit in the body of the amputated is an eternal voyage.” Finally, Adnan places a pyramidal sand glyph to the side of the text block in Poem XXVII. It marks the conversion of dead children into sand that roams over the earth by saltation. Adnan writes that an ancient coast has “distributed to the waves the scattered organs of the solar disc STOP.”⁶⁴

Which is to admit that the glyph we have been following through The Arab Apocalypse is neither the most frequently employed nor the most unusual in its knotting together of traces of bodily gesture and diagrams of cosmological agency. Yet it may be one of the most transformative, most apocalyptic. Once we begin to see dots of particulate as signs of vertigo—as evidence of a churning world that shakes its contents across all layers of ground—other marks on the page become infected. The poems are studded with typed ellipses, as well as repeating graphic signs of continuation and series. And because a line of typed-out letter o’s in Poem XXVIII is situated directly across from the pyramidal sand glyph in Poem XXVII, not to mention framed by circles and spirals, they transform into rolling sediment.⁶⁵ Indeed, Adnan herself seems to have felt she got carried away by the play of dots and circles that multiply and roll; the proofs of her English translation show that she had drawn a single anchoring dot on the bottom of most pages, only to later scribble them out and restore the empty white border.⁶⁶

But, then, can’t we say that the role of these glyphs is to get carried away, be co-agitated in and by the world? Much writing about The Arab Apocalypse has rightly lingered on the apocalyptic animations of its suns and skies: “a militant sky aims its Kalashnikov at the earth Bang!”⁶⁷ This imagery exaggerates the totalizing atmosphere of wartime violence. Yet, as a more elemental exploration of the poem can help to remind, Adnan perceived that everything that lives on a rotating planet will eventually be picked up and flung. Any open circle—whether a vehicle for sound, an apparatus for telescoped sight, or other—may get filled with inky matter, thereby converting to a bullet (figs. 8 and 9). Any point of particulate might roll around, kicking up kinetic activity that forms surface crusts or fills sepulchral voids. The real task of salvation, as Adnan would have it, and as she draws it in this poem, is to create a society in which there exists an awareness that we all have a moral right to everything—not that everything be shared equally but that all belong to the earth equally.⁶⁸ A utopian realism, yes, but one that becomes inescapable at the interface of air, water, and earth, where any and all material bodies are sustained in vertigo.