Sara Elkamel

When Deer Sleep                 

                                                                                    —with Etel Adnan

It makes no difference                                                In the middle of the night
that we do not sleep—                                               when you have no way to go anywhere
a finger of stone,                                                        a dark stone
of awesomely unmanageable proportions               rushes out of the stillness,
pulps our dreams—                                                    already tired, already bare—
In my dream,                                                               there are a few distant lights.
I smell my lover’s fingers,                                          Gusts of wind shake the waters—
before he smells mine—                                            I wait for those lights,
To attempt to furnish the future,                                to keep the illusion alive;
I summon a small flood,                                             go into its water, its salt,
I demolish the old walls,                                            until we both disappear from the screen,      
forcing my doubt to                                                   become a distant notion—
retrace its steps.                                                         In silence, in the dark
I still smell gut strings,                                               I still feel shaky, unsure;
like dried thyme                                                         remnants of the past,
brittle around the stem,                                             are stuck in my throat—
on his fingers, which are without mine                     So many islands,
asleep with eyes flung open—                                 but on what kind of ground am I standing?
There is no single place in the mind,                       A room with no furniture,
where the pain                                                          with its chairs painted in blue
is processed—                                                          That’s the type of thing I would dream for myself.
It ravages the mind                                                   Year after year,
alone and on foot.                                                     I am a barren planet.
I am now someone who needs                                a direct voyager, a particle, a wave, who knows
the voice of no one—                                                I am rather sinking under all kinds of worries…
I am a wet doe collapsed:                                         running, and running, and not moving ahead—
in the map of myself—                                               I am in Delphi,
I am in Sinai,                                                              with the illusion that I smell thyme­,   
his strings still silent to my ear,                                  but I am happy,
and I am ocean bound—                                           how would I know I’m not?
To what is the ocean                                                  A country with no weapons,
bound,                                                                        the ocean, itself so turbulent,
I ask the dream, which                                              will die with us, or survive, for a while…
then drowns itself…                                                   I think that the ocean too has its own destiny.
Speaking of dreams,                                                 Speaking of dreams,
Countless times last year,                                         stacks of nightmares were delivered to my door—
I woke up blurting his name,                                    translated into something alien—                  
as if time’s fingers                                                     like when you were a child (in Beirut);
lodged in the throat of the night—                           the present was forever blowing        
with an absent body                                                 wide-eyed, utterly new—
sleeping to the left.                                                   We have to reconnect what words separated:
The poet tells us first,                                               silence is a flower—
that she did not dream.                                            The wind returns. It carries voices.
Then she tells us                                                       In all my wanderings I never forgot the light.
she did not even sleep.                                            I didn’t even sleep.

Note: In this contrapuntal/cento, the right column is composed entirely of lines drawn from Etel Adnan’s most recent collection, Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020).

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Statement of Homage

Etel Adnan’s latest work, Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020), inspired “When Deer Sleep”, a contrapuntal poem intertwining lines by Adnan with my own. In a series of lyrical prose fragments, Adnan (who is now 95 years old) employs “Shifting the Silence” to engage with the process of aging. “The size of the future is not any longer than this alley’s,” she poignantly writes. But her text is not fixated on the nearness of death; instead, she meditates on enriching past encounters, the places she has been and loved, and the motifs that have haunted her life—all with a presence that is undeniably characteristic of the poet. Running through this book (as well as many of her earlier works) are the themes and motifs of bodies of water, dreams, and travel. The features that tie these together, namely unfixity and the transcendence of time and space, is also the same literary condition that strikes me most about Adnan’s work. I am enchanted by the freedom in her poetry and prose, which oscillates between languages, form and voice. She writes with an elaborate balance of detail and uncertainty, nuance and ambiguity. The elasticity of the self, to me, is liberating and reassuring; the self that is continuous with dreams, oceans, and travel cannot end, cannot sleep without reverie. “Often my body feels close to sea creatures; sticky, slimy, unpredictable, more ephemeral than need be,” writes Adnan.

Etel Adnan

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 to 1972. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books that have been translated into or were written directly in English, including Sitt Marie-Rose (1977), Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012). In 2014, she was awarded one of France’s highest cultural honors: l’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.

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