To Be in a Time of War

I’ve returned once again to Etel Adnan’s essay “To Be in a Time of War.” Adnan wrote it in 2003, the week the U.S. invaded Iraq. She’s in California, it’s spring, unusually sunny for the Bay Area, there’s her beloved Mount Tamalpais, there’s the Golden Gate Bridge. The physical beauty of her surroundings, its solidity, clashes with where she is metaphysically—in Iraq, in Baghdad, where any sense of the solid and the certain has been shattered by a “shock and awe” military campaign perversely called “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

In the essay, Adnan lists the minutiae of her days. She walks around her apartment, watches the clock, slices a piece of cheese, puts it in her mouth, chews it, washes her hands, listens to the radio, gets in her car, goes out to restaurants, attends readings, travels to New York, stares at trees, notices shadows. She’s angry at the indifference around her, admires protestors, feels guilty for eating, shakes at the sight of an emaciated woman walking across a parking lot, imagines entering the tomb of Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and telling him Bassorah is being destroyed; she’s unable to sleep, she dreams of Palestine, of deserts. She longs for Baghdad.

Adnan is unsettled, in despair. The essay itself is restless. This is in part because of its form: nearly every sentence and every clause begins with an unconjugated verb: “To say nothing, do nothing, mark time, to bend, to straighten up, to blame oneself, to stand, to go toward the window, to change one’s mind in the process. . . .” If verb tense is language committing to time, it’s as though she’s refusing to commit to time. She has entered, instead, an elemental state, a kind of threshold space vibrating with emotion. I’ve often thought that at the moment we begin to narrate our life we separate ourselves from it—though on this reading of Adnan’s essay, I’m noticing what I can only describe as a kind of integration: she has invented a form that allows her to hold as much as she can of the unbearable present.

The U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, its method of “shock and awe,” is similar to what we’ve witnessed in these last weeks as the U.S. and Israel have launched their new war on Iran, an assault that in the first few days alone reportedly damaged or destroyed 10,000 civilian structures—including an elementary school in session in Minab. As of this writing, this 2026 war has displaced 3.5 million people in Iran and, having already expanded to Lebanon, displaced another one million people there. Adnan speaks to the surreal, almost absurd reality of living in a country which so casually and catastrophically bombs another. But the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a different war, and Adnan’s experience with it was her own, her grief entirely hers. I don’t want to co-opt it, only to be near it, together in the terrible discomfort that reverberates from that earlier time into our time now.

Adnan once described herself as “a person of the perpetual present.” Born in Lebanon in 1925 to a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father, she spent her life living and working in Beirut, Paris, and San Francisco. She wrote dozens of books—works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, among them a novel about the Lebanese Civil War, Sitt Marie Rose, which she wrote in one month, in French, as the war was unfolding. She stopped writing in French for a time, in solidarity with the Algerians during their fight for independence, and painted instead. She wrote poems in English against the Vietnam War. She wrote about war, but she also wrote about fog, mountains, the sea, mythology, literature, and the Arab world—especially Lebanon, both as it lived in her mind and as it was when she returned to it after many years.

She was almost eighty when she wrote “To Be in a Time of War.” She later described the circumstances that led her to it:

In March 2003, war was brewing in Iraq. History was again bringing unbearable tensions. My imagination was on fire and my anger was increased by the triumphant tone of the news. In California, very few people were really concerned. Few had ever been to Iraq, and fewer were those ready to consider the destruction of Iraq in terms of human and cultural loss. I was numb with apprehension, and it happened that at some moment, sitting at my table, detached from my environment, projected to an East of my own mind, and alienated from myself, I took paper and ink and started to write “To Be in a Time of War.”

Anger . . . numbness . . . detachment . . . self-alienation. In the grip of these emotional states, Adnan turned to the page. To feel again, beyond the anger; to quell the fire that risks turning imagination to ash. To refuse the numbness that keeps us alienated from ourselves, and from each other.

~

We are in a time of war, and have been, not just for these last weeks but far longer. Those of us living in the U.S. have watched two presidents wholeheartedly fund and arm Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza—“a live-streamed genocide,” it’s been called, as Palestinians have been documenting their everyday horror through dispatches, poems, stories, photographs, and reels. It’s all there, available for us to see— Israel bombing hospital after hospital, soldiers shooting at people retrieving water or standing in line waiting for food rations, the IDF openly murdering civilians, including children and journalists. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the general population seems intent on ignoring the horror—or talking around it, as if to offer some sort of justification.

Many have written about the failure of the West in the face of this violence. Isabella Hammad, in an essay on teaching Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, describes how, since Israel’s war on Gaza, she’s “found [herself] passing over books that failed to offer [her] a route into thinking about the great brutality of the period through which we are living.” In his memoir One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad maps his twenty years of living in the U.S. and Canada, and his growing disdain for the West and its promises. Pankaj Mishra, in increasingly heated essays for Harper’s, has called out the way in which writers not only refuse to oppose power, but sidle up to it. Christina Sharpe asks in her essay “The Shapes of Grief ”: “What are the words and the forms with which to do and say and make what we need to live in, now? Not only in some future time but now. What is our work to be? isn’t a grand question. It is a simple question. The question at the base of our writing.”

It’s these questions of Sharpe’s that I’m sitting with in the early months of 2026 as, amid the ongoing destruction of Gaza, Trump’s administration escalates its wars abroad, deploys ICE to U.S. cities, and rolls back hard-earned rights with an utter disregard for civil society and civilian life. Though this may not seem like the time to examine the work we do as writers, when there’s a need to be in the street—or to question literature, when many of us in the arts are scrambling to secure funding for its very survival—I think it’s essential that we keep asking fundamental questions about the work we do, as part of a larger, necessary examination of the practices and habits of our own lives.

What is the role of literature right now? In this time that we’re in, this time of war? What is the impact of war—of witnessing an ongoing genocide? On people’s imaginations, people’s souls? On those who are nearest to the violence, who are in it every day, or whose loved ones are in it every day, and who feel compelled to write about their every day, out of helplessness, or to ask for help and understanding and a little bit of grace? Who feel, as they confront death, the need to assert their humanity?

What is the impact of ignoring a war because the bombs are falling there, not here? Of refusing to call a genocide a genocide? What happens to our capacity as writers, as humans, when we barricade ourselves into the center of our comfort? To what extent have our privileges uprooted our lives from the context that makes those privileges possible?^# What happens when we choose, above all else, a preservation of self?

What do I mean when I say “preservation of self ”? The self as my body? The self as my mind? The self ’s environs— its home, its immediate family? What is the worth of defending our lives if we do not seek to protect the lives of others? ^#

How might we reclaim the language that has been weaponized against us? How might we be more precise with our words? More inventive? How can the stories we tell, the stories we see ourselves in, reveal something new? Offer a different angle, another insight? How deeply can we probe our lives—so that we might identify the structures that form them, these underlying structures that at times confine us, but that also connect us to everyone else?

Can we see the page as a place where we might meet? In what rooms? On what pages? / Between the you and the I, here. / This room. These pages.^#

~

The page is a room you enter. Empty or full. With your words or others’.

These days, when I read a poem, a personal essay, or a story, especially in the pages of a book, I notice a shift in my body. After a lifetime of reading it’s strange to encounter this new sensation—to feel my mind slowing its churn, a churn that creates a pressure in the head that I’m only aware of when I open a book and it eases. I’m not looking for an escape, but for reading’s calibrating speed, how it allows for deep thinking, sense-making, imagining. Lately, I’m most drawn to writing that’s committed to truth telling, that’s willing to play with language and form while still engaging, however unintentionally, however slantwise, with the difficult questions and experiences of now. A few pages in, I might pick up my pencil to write in the margins—the mind and body meet in the hand, a conversation begins—and though it’s not exactly an exchange, something is being shared, as one mind nudges another along.

It’s an active kind of intimacy, a powerful antidote to isolation and fear. A healthy inner life can be a kind of ballast in a present colonized by violent governments intent on suspending us in a chaos of their making. But reading can also be an activating intimacy. It returns us to ourselves, sharpens our senses, and then redirects us back to the external world—with the ability to see it, and our places within it, more clearly.

Our daily lives are political. Now is the time to ask ourselves what of the world we’re letting in and what of it we’re guarding ourselves from. To treat imagination and language as tools of resistance. To work harder to be more alive to one another. Such examinations and exchanges are what literature has always offered. It isn’t meant to change the world—but to keep us as open as possible to all the ways in which we might change it.