Al-Tayyeb Salih, Daw al-Bayt

‘This sense of reading ‘scrolls’ brought to my mind poetry and literature. I felt that kinship between script and the horizontality of the paper. I suddenly saw that I was going to write poetry on these papers and paint watercolours with the sentences, verses, or words. I opened up to myself, with exhilaration, a new artistic world whose possibilities I was going to explore by the very acts of painting.’ - Etel Adnan on encountering leporellos (V. Porter, Artists Making Books, Poetry to Politics, London 2023, p. 76).

Etel Adnan, a polymath celebrated for her art, literature, teachings and poetry weaves a world where drawings and words seamlessly intertwine, crafting a comprehensive narrative within the pages of her leporellos. In this 2011 leporello, Adnan’s genius shines again as she brings to life the prose of the Sudanese author Al-Tayyeb Salih with her watercolour and ink illustrations. Adnan begins the leporello, which is read from right to left, with the opening passage of Daw al-Bayt written by Al-Tayyeb Salih in Beirut in 1971. The passage describes the return of the narrator to the Sudanese village of Wad Hamid, meeting the other elders in the village and reminiscing on the changes that have happened. The passage ends with an exchange on the prolonged absence of the narrator whereby one of the elderlies says: 'Your absence from the country has been too long.' To this, the narrator thinks, "Yes, its been years." Following this opening, Adnan fills the rest of the pages with her watercolour and black ink illustrations continuing uninterruptedly a flow of scenes and images as if narrating the rest of the story or the memories of the elders to us through her brushstrokes. Her drawings lead the viewer through a captivating dance of colour, line, and imagery, lending each page an ethereal quality. Within these pages, Adnan expertly weaves together outdoor and indoor spaces, seamlessly transitioning from towering trees and blooming flowers to commonplace objects found inside a home.

Adnan was introduced to the art of the leporellos by Rick Barton in California during the sixties. She would import these accordion-style books from Japan, keeping their original fabric covers intact, with the exception of the title and date that she typically added on a label on the cover. She would then dedicate her exploration and creations to the blank pages inside the leporello, filling them with either illustrations and words or just illustrations.

Adnan later became known for her signature leporellos, a style that allowed her to brilliantly bring forth all of her dimensions to us revealing the depth and brilliance of her mind. It also allowed her to reject writing in the French language, a language she associated with her colonisers. Thus, Etel would turn towards painting as a form of ‘writing.’ She describes this in her 1989 essay titled ‘ To Write in a Foreign Language’ where she says: ‘I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was painting in Arabic.’ As such, in her leporellos, Etel would turn towards Arabic writers and poets that shared her social and political beliefs. She would then respond and intervene with her own ‘words’ created through the visual marks and illustrations she produced on the blank pages. Her exploration extended into deep spiritual and philosophical dimensions, frequently engaging with writers and poets like Al-Tayyeb Salih, as referenced in the present work. For Adnan, each of her leporello creation was a spiritual quest and an act of cultural resistance through the fusion of imagery and text.