I have always been an immigrant, wherever it is I have lived in the world.

I left Egypt, where I was

born, at three months of age. I lived in the West as an Arab infant whose family had imposed exile.
When I returned home as a teenager, I was a stranger to my own extended family who scoffed and
giggled at my polyglot Arabic accent. Now that I am living in the United States again, I realize that I
have been code-switching my whole life: not only speaking, but also writing in a foreign language, a
tongue and vernacular that is not my own, constantly attempting to assimilate. Being a millennial
diasporic Arab, I have watched the world devour the image of my people and their collective
identities on many stages. I’ve been privy to everyone from presidents to school kids spewing
bigoted rhetoric, seeing the Arabic-speaking world conflated with the violence of religious
extremism, a condition created and spoon-fed to the public by political commentators who have
perhaps withdrawn themselves from their own complicity in making history.

I’ve always longed to find a native polyglot like me, someone who could discuss the mutilation of the
Arab image in the Western consciousness, with whom I could talk about Putin and Paris, Netanyahu
and Nagasaki, Tehran and Tel Aviv. But increasingly, the freedom of expression is stripped and
buried in the Arab world — the critical young Egyptian author Ahmed Naji, for example, was this
year sentenced to prison for writing novels that speak of sex and hashish. Egypt, the largest of Arab
countries, is becoming akin to the violently oppressive and homophobic Cuba that Reinaldo Arenas
protested. With the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, the image of the Muslim as well as the
Arab became hollowed of any poetry: an apocalypse engulfing image and text.

As we seek resurrection and resuscitation from these ashes, there is one figure that I keep returning
to, one who eloquently captures the essence of this collective trauma, and that is the poet, essayist,
and painter Etel Adnan. She was born in Beirut to a Syrian father and a Greek mother from Smyrna in
1925. Adnan grew up in a household where multiple languages were exchanged: Greek, Arabic,
Turkish, and French, to name the ones that I am certain of. However, in her meditation on growing
up, “To Write in a Foreign Language,” Adnan explains how writing in English (as opposed to the
many languages spoken in her familial home) became a form of resistance; she then proceeds to
untangle the concept of home and the diasporic tongue’s potential to roam across multiple
territories. Hers was a life lived in multiple self-imposed and forced exiles from the Arab world
(specifically her native Beirut); she spent much of her life between the urban metropole of Paris and
amidst the mountain ranges of Sausalito, California. In these places, Adnan worked between prose,
poetry and painting, merging these worlds into a tapestry of her imagination. Her elucidations
evoked a hybrid being — a creolized subject, persistently developing a sense of home in foreign
lands.

In her collection In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, Adnan negotiates these memories of
her native Lebanon. She begins: