IN/SOMNIA

Etel Adnan

The reader quickly notices that Adnan refrains from following the traditional subject, verb, object sentence patterns and invents semantic and lexical items throughout her book. Sometimes, Adnan creates an auditory effect by adding vowels to words like “feever” and “stoooory.” Other times, her words are separated by slashes, hyphens, brackets, asterisks, and question marks or are followed by arrows and colons rather than dashes… Adnan’s use of such symbols conveys the illogic of war’s logic without ever mentioning the word “war.”
— Rim Zahra and Razzan Zahra, Al Jadid