The Arab Apocalypse is Etel Adnan’s searing book-length poem, originally composed in French. Conceived on the eve of the Lebanese Civil War, the work fuses text and drawings in fifty-nine poems, each corresponding to a day of the 1976 siege and massacre at the Palestinian refugee camp of Tall Al Zaatar. Haunted by the blazing symbol of the sun, Adnan crafts a visionary, repetitive, and expressionist cycle, part testimony, part hermetic allegory, where the polyphonic voices of the vanquished resonate. 

The poem adopts and subverts biblical apocalyptic tradition and questions its political and religious foundations. At once a chronicle of catastrophe and a timeless “Book of Revelations”.