The Indian Never Had a Horse and Other Poems

by Etel Adnan

Poetry. Illustrated with etchings by Russell Chatham. "Throughout the seven sections that are woven into a unified whole, Adnan displays a remarkable sensibility for the precise details that fuse the landscapes of individual and social nightmares. Through an ingenious synthesis of the best elements of the surrealist, cut-up and Language schools of writing, Adnan has attained a unique poetic voice."— The San Francisco Chronicle

Genres: Poetry

103 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1985

About the author

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958–1972.

In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959–1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, “an American poet.” In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages.

In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent books are Night (2016) and Surge (2018). In 2014, she was awarded one of France’s highest cultural honors: l’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Numerous museums have presented solo exhibitions of Adnan’s work, including SFMoMA; Zentrum Paul Klee; Institute du Monde Arabe, Paris; Serpentine Galleries; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar.

Reviews

[Edita]

Memories go by as clouds
foregoing ecstasy
and pain

[Obeida Takriti]

كثير من الأسى والدماء..
متوارٍ وراء إيمان بجمال الطبيعة المحتضنة..

[لبنى]

3.5/5

[Paula Koneazny]

I am most enamored of the long poem "The Indian Never Had a Horse," in which Adnan employs deceptively simple language in passages of startling juxtaposition. For example, this title poem's first and fourth stanzas: "The certitude of Space is brought / to me by a flight of birds. It / is grey outside and there is a trembling: / fog is too heavy a word // . . . . Sweat runs over my body. / The river beds are dry. / We forgot to brush the / Indians' teeth before the / final slaughter./ O how perfect the afternoon!"

Although her "Other" poems interest me less, they are filled with many wonderful moments and engaging language, such as "The universe is my obsession: / the sea and the sun are / forever mating" and "I am armed with a sphere an octagon and / a heart." ("An Alley of Linden Trees, and Lightning . . .")

Etel Adnan is able to effortlessly meld a classical (Old World) with an experimental (New World) esthetic. This collection, published in 1985, seems to anticipate the post-fragment yet still fragmented poetry moment we now inhabit. As if to demonstrate that uncomfortable and passionate yet unsentimental clarity can be as radical as syntactical and semantic disruption. To use a term coined by a friend, her poetry resides in a world of "juxtapotential."

[Zee]

This book was not written for me. That's what I had to keep reminding myself as I turned from one page to the next, digging a hole of confusion and references I didn't get. It's written for Native Americans, for Arabs, and for brown people in general. I thought I could get by with the understanding that I wasn't the intended audience but I could still appreciate the work - because I've done that in the past, feeling like a fly on the wall - but this is one of the works where I simply don't have the background knowledge or the experience of being a minority to relate to or truly understand this book. So if you're a POC, if you're Native American or Arab more specifically, yeah, you'll probably get it and you'll probably really like this book and know what she's talking about. But for me, 90% of the poetry went right over my head.