The sun hangs overhead; we mark the days by her presence and the nights by her absence. She is the maker of myths, but what has the sun become in the age of apocalypse? How do we navigate when the sun explodes and leaves shrapnel in the skies and scorched earth on the land? Has this mythical and beautiful sun turned on us? Are she and the sky she calls her home intent on destroying us? How can we think when everything we thought has betrayed us? If thinking is the realm of intellectualism, our only solace in this engineered madness is to think with the poets.
Exceeding the paradox of repair in the ruins, Etel Adnan’s sun is more than metaphor. In their culmination, the century-old plans for Palestinian elimination are as relentless as unimaginable in their violence. But they are real, the monsters are real. As the attempted annihilation of Gaza and Palestine continues unabated, these questions occupy us. These thoughts and our interrogation of the humanity of a world that is not for us, are not new in Palestine. For generations, we have carried these questions in our bodies and etched them on our graves.
Etel Adnan offered the world a poetic intervention that was never more relevant than now. Neither prophecy nor history, she wrote about that which we are in the midst of, and that which we have been in the midst of for decades and centuries: an apocalyptic rendition of the end of our worlds and our lives in it. In The Arab Apocalypse (1989), Adnan provides insight into the madness of relentless violence, and perhaps a means to think beyond its cruelty. She tells us stories of the end of this brutal world and draws us a sketch of a journey into another world. In this and so much else, Palestine is world-making.
Imagined and composed a generation ago, in another/same war and another/same time of skies exploding, The Arab Apocalypse is a practice of horror and hope. I turn to Etel Adnan today not just for solace, and certainly not to recover sensibility, but to find a way out, in both soul and spirit; to forge a way into an otherwise world. Through her poetics of images and words, Etel Adnan captures or captions this time. In my own search for words for this structured chaos and an escape from the prison of this present, I fear and yet follow Etel’s sun in The Arab Apocalypse. We are not mere observers in the drama penned through her words, her symbols, and her brush strokes. We are in this together, with the sun and the sun’s explosions, and with our hope in the moon that will be the guide after the sun destroys herself.
II
a sun reckless and in love with the sea
…
moon as green as frozen leaf under the avalanche of a solar star
…
O sun which tortures the Arab’s eye in the Enemy’s prison! Sun yellow silence.
In the apocalypse, Palestine is not an exception: it is the center of the universe. As we struggle to imagine an otherwise world, we struggle in this cruel world, knowing that survival is neither guaranteed nor fully imaginable. Machines of war have rendered Gaza a killing field where murder and starvation reign on an entire people. If this old cruel world is coming to the brutal apex of its ending, the apocalypse is marked with explosions that target everything Palestinian—people and infrastructure, past and present, minds and bodies. As the skies fill with all kinds of weaponry that realize what was once barely imaginable in the most dystopian of nightmares, where do we turn for hope towards a new world? Is Palestine an introduction to a new unperceivably dark brutality intent on burying us all? Or, is it a watershed into a new world? This current world is on fire; the sky is falling and the sun’s explosions have scorched the earth in a reality that even the poets could not have imagined. The poets, as Etel Adnan explained and embodied, bear the keys and the burdens, in the echoes of the apocalypse:
because poets die
rather than surrender,
because they speak of hope,
and do not wear
their words like a necklace
of pearls,
because poets refuse to die,
and carry hope on their
backs, and go from door
to door, like bees do
from flower to flower,
to leave messages of defiance
in the
people’s hearts.
Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse is neither provocation nor contemplation. It is far more. In this long poem, this epic series of poems, Adnan described our soul-less reality that only the bloodiest of monsters could occupy. But if we follow her poetics, her combination of words and images, Adnan offers a compass through and with imagination—a way out, and a way into an otherwise world; into an ontology of world-making.
V
My yellow insanity green mud in my veins calcified sun a radar went insane
yellow green red purple cosmic radar a solar naked and insane man
a sun blue in a black sky a sun young in a black root YES
a woman solar a woman lunar a female sun
If we look into the sun long enough, do we witness the explosion, will it explode, or do we explode with her? We have a grammar in Arabic for settler colonial violence: Nakba. This Nakba is not new and it has always been about our annihilation. A generation into the ongoing Nakba, Adnan added her voice to the historical register of documentation of this violence, calling it an Arab Apocalypse. A generation later, in an inventory of catastrophe, Sherene Seikaly poetically reminds us:
Catastrophe is not in the future; the Nakba is not in the past. What has never stopped is starting again just as we confront the lesson that things can always get worse… Palestine is not a laboratory. It is not a site of sympathy. It cannot be reduced to a sterile problem. Palestine is a place of abundance, an abundance of lessons about persisting in the looped and looping time of the present.
Seikaly began writing this inventory in the midst of genocide, an inventory of “the age of catastrophe,” in every editorial note for the Journal of Palestine Studies, creating a living archive of the apocalypse and teaching us how to confront the history of genocide. Seikaly records the details of indescribable violence as she tells the tales of our people facing a monstrous world exacting its own death on the bones and blood of a Palestinian people who will not be eliminated. Echoing Adnan, Seikaly seems to know that the hope of survival is based not on this world, but rather on what Adnan put forward: a people who shall confront the exploding sun.
VII
I took the sun by the tail and threw it in the river. Explosion. BOOM…
Numbers are the albatross of witness. Counting the dead coincides with counting the military units who seem to have only one objective: annihilation. Nothing more or less, for annihilation is everything. In Gaza of 2025—in the months of spring when flowers are meant to bloom and when nature reminds us of hope—machines of death replaced the flowers and the killing fields cast the only shadow over land and sea. The exploding sun has forsaken Palestinians in Gaza. The killing machines are relentless and cruel. Do the monsters behind the machines ponder what this mass murder and destruction will do to them as well?
Our time is precious, we have no time for such questions. If the ending of the world has occupied me for two years, it has occupied Palestinians for seventy-seven. The death machines that disrupt the rhythms of life create a repetition, a recurrence, a loop. Breathing and breath have become a commodity we are no longer afforded. But we continue to breathe. How can we write otherwise? Etel Adnan wrote anyway.
You have a need to free things up, to put them in order, to clear away nonessential things to make room in your head, so that an image can take its place… We need poetry amid this chaos and chatter.
At the end of the world, when we are faced with the material reality of monsters all around, we must consider what it means to be part of and witness to this “apocalypse of the sun.” In fleeting moments of serenity, I measure the proximity to the falling sky through the shared horizon of Gaza: the horizon of destruction and the horizon for hope.
VIII
I counted one sun after another and my legs got covered with ants
I counted the ants and the suns blinded me Palestine with no Palestine
Adnan does not give us the kind of slogans we were long taught we needed to defy the wars of monsters. Adnan teaches us that it was never our task to confront monsters to prove our own humanity. She lets us linger, she asks that we linger, perhaps she demands that we linger with the pain, with the betrayal, and with the confusion of being the target of war; with the confusion of being so debased and so thoroughly removed from the register of humanity in this cruel world that a war of annihilation is almost a historical inevitability. Adnan does not offer room for the obfuscation of this reality; her poetics are clear. This violence is not new. It has wielded its tentacles of brutality over the heads and bodies of oppressed peoples for centuries.
XX
an Apocalyptic sun explodes I hear the cracking of bones
And so, by the twentieth stanza of this Arab Apocalypse and in the twentieth month of this iteration of genocide, the sun explodes. And so… the sun exploded. The sun is creator and liar, beggar and thief, pundit and creep, darkness and despair. It has become an accomplice of this cruel world and an engine that shall bring this world and its reign of monsters to an end with her explosions. The sun is the bearer of worlds.
XXIII
the sun has ripped skins bellies feet and brains
And the trees! Even the grains of sand exploded
Beirut capsized into the sun’s heart its spell annihilated it
In Palestine in 2025, thinking is frenzied; the stanzas blend into a seemingly incomprehensible series of words from/of this exploding madness. In the “vortex of death” and “constellations of sorrow,” the ruthless sun “took the road to EVIL” ; the sun is the brutal present born of a brutal past with “other purpose than being a shroud.” We climb, with Adnan, to “the highest tower to look into the sun” to face her and her turn towards madness; “the poet came with blind words and empty pockets.” The sun has betrayed us or fulfilled her original mission of trying to destroy us, and yet, “between sky and earth three Palestinians are sailing / like slow fish half earthbound half celestial they circle Mother earth.” Even while “the sun has burned the lips of the poets,” the words continue to flow and Palestinians will swim and fly.
LIX
When the sun will run its ultimate road
fire will devour beasts plants and stones
fire will devour the fire and its perfect circle
when the perfect circle will catch fire no angel will manifest itself STOP
the sun will extinguish the gods the angels and men
and it will extinguish itself in the midst of its daughters
Matter-Spirit will become the NIGHT
in the night in the night we shall find knowledge love and peace
And there again, the earnest desperation to/with the sun… Adnan lives with the sun in promise, in misery, in death and in love… in betrayal, and finally, free of the gravity in the sea of the universe and the hold of the sun—freedom only derived through the end of the cruel world and the explosion of the sun… Adnan explains that we have the moon… The lunar no longer holds, but keeps us held as we soar. In “knowledge,” we know that the violence that prevents thinking will implode with the sun’s explosion. In “love,” we know that we have been with love all along and that love is the “peace” in the after of the apocalypse.