SEA AND FOG: BOOK REVIEW
When addressing the long, storied career of a particular artist, I find it difficult to choose a starting point. Art changes as life eras pass; early works could share nothing with later ones, and points of view could easily reverse. In the case of Etel Adnan, however, I have no choice in the matter – of all her many works, I have only engaged with her poetry collection Sea and Fog (2012), so it’s only from this book that I can think about her art.
Etel Adnan passed on November 14th, 2021, following a private yet acclaimed career as a novelist, poet, and visual artist. A 96-year-old Lebanese-American artist, Adnan traveled the world for her studies and work – receiving her education in both Paris and Boston, living across the globe with her lifelong partner Simone Fattal, and rendering cities from Beirut to San Francisco in her multimedia art. Her first major work was the novel Sitt Marie Rose (1978), which examines the Lebanese Civil War from a civilian and female perspective and earned the France-Payes Arabes award.
Later in life, Adnan shifted her attention to poetry and art, winning critical admiration for her collections and featuring in the MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum Biennale. Adnan publicly identified as a lesbian later in life; she won the 2013 Book Prize in Poetry for Sea and Fog in the Lambda Literary Awards, which celebrate LGBTQ authors with a far-reaching literary influence. Adnan’s work is known for its political activism, its thorough observational style, and its wonder at the universe. Sea and Fog, which also won the California Book Award for poetry within its publication year, centers all these themes.
Sea and Fog has been sitting on my bookshelf for nearly two years. It’s one of those intriguing books that I’ve encountered in a museum gift shop (in this case, the one at the MoMA PS1) and ordered online for half the price. As a lifelong fiction reader, I bought it aspiring to expand my poetic horizons – but I neglected it in favor of my more typical fare. I finally picked up Sea and Fog last weekend, inspired by an ongoing poetry class, and later learned of Adnan’s passing on the same day.
There was a level of guilt involved in meeting Adnan through her work this week – a strange sense of missed opportunity, of sadness that I’d waited so long to open Sea and Fog when it has occupied my spaces for years. However, I find a spiritual significance in the coincidence of time, especially since the collection addresses its ebbs and flows so heavily. Adnan speaks clearly through this hybrid narrative-poetic work, and she speaks about so many presently resonant things: grief, the joyous pains of life, and the loneliness of inhabiting a body. Mainly, she speaks about the sea. She explores how it mirrors and opposes the human experience, how it consoles her, and how it fits into a vast, unknowable universe. I find Sea and Fog a fitting collection to ruminate on any loss, particularly a philosopher’s, and most particularly Adnan herself after a long life of making consoling art.
Sea and Fog consists of two main sections. The first, Sea, offers a dedication to Adnan’s partner and fellow artist Simone Fattal, and the second, Fog, to poet and editor Brandon Shimoda. The first two sections take a consistent yet flexible form, organized into one to four sentence chunks of prose and moving through ruminations on the sea and human experience. The third section, II – Conversations with my Soul, utilizes shorter stanzas and doesn’t take a dedication. It isn’t listed in the book’s index, but it settles on answers to some of the book’s questions and concludes the volume.
The sections Sea and Fog move freely between subjects and thoughts, but Adnan finds a through-line in attempting to define these two ideas. She explores the sea as a primordial and changing force, opposite to human experience while paradoxically defining it. She writes on fog as a dissolution of space and a great comfort to the soul. Adnan engages bravely with the ambiguity of nature’s forces, expanding the discussion past the sea to space and time itself.
Sea and Fog deals heavily with dichotomies. Adnan recreates the linkages and tensions between space/time, circles/horizons, and mind/body by forcing them to interact within the text. She sets up countless binaries that dissolve within the ever-shifting waters of the sea, failing (quite intentionally) to establish an ordered philosophy on the universe. She evokes the paradoxical properties of water to remember and dissolve – both a structural essential to life and a highly powerful solvent.
Primarily, the poems within Sea and Fog focus on existential questions. Adnan asks how the individual fits into a universe they cannot understand, especially within a modern context of global tumult and climate change. She tentatively settles on the importance of possibility and adaptability in the final section, Conversations, drawing conclusions about her emotional connection to sea and fog without effectively defining them.
Thus, the collection reads as an epic journey of the soul, one that I vastly appreciated taking alongside Adnan. It’s never a bad time for some existential re-examination, and the fragile transition between fall and winter might prove a particularly good one. Life slows, things die, and change incubates – all lessons that Sea and Fog reinforces in its curious tone of moody optimism. It is one of the works that Adnan’s career ended on, and it’s where I begin my journey of engaging with her legacy.
