The Arab Apocalypse

"This book, a masterwork of the dislocations and radiant outcries of the Arab world, reaffirms Etel Adnan, who authored the great poem, Jebu, as among the foremost poets of the French Language." —Jack Hirschman.

"L’Apocalypse arabe is a book-length poem composed in French by the Arab American poet Etel Adnan. It was published in 1980; Adnan’s English translation first appeared in 1989. Of the several rubrics under which The Arab Apocalypse may be read — hybrid text, visual poetry, surrealism, translation, postcolonialism — it is its nature as a work of witness that most commands my attention. Not least because it was written in response to and in the immediate context of the Lebanese Civil War (which broke out in 1975), but also because these other strands (the visual, the surreal, etc.) make the act of witnessing a provocative challenge to any notion of stability that may — innocently or otherwise — attend questions of representation in literatures of witness. In so doing, the text becomes a disaster in the process of witnessing disaster."--Aditi Machado, "On Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse, in jacket2.