Readings from and of Palestine (4)
The Palestinian writer Adania Shibli has been much in the news this fall. Not exactly because her third novel, Minor Detail—published in English by New Directions in 2020, in Elisabeth Jaquette’s remarkable translation—was awarded, upon publication in Germany, the 2023 Lißeraturpreis, a prize for “woman authors from the global South,” run by the organization Litprom and awarded at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Rather, she has been in the news because in October Litprom and the Frankfurt Book Fair strikingly declined to award her this prize in the usual public ceremony, “due to the war started by Hamas,” they wrote. The fair decided, in this context, to cancel Shibli’s appearance and to make Israeli voices “particularly visible” in their programming. Initially, this cancellation was incorrectly announced as a joint decision made by both the author and Litprom—as if she had agreed to disappear herself, as a Palestinian, from view. She and her publishers had to correct the record.
This decision to deplatform (as we now say), to silence, a Palestinian writer in a central moment of her international recognition was protested in an open letter signed by over 1,300 writers, editors, translators, publishers, and other literary workers from around the world (I also signed it). Eventually commentators from a fairly wide political range expressed concern about this kind of censorship of art and literature, this threat to the special role in society writers are often understood to have. Yet decisions like this have continued internationally throughout the weeks of the war on Gaza. Events featuring Palestinian writers or artists have vanished from schedules (some examples here); some events featuring those who have expressed solidarity with Palestine, who have protested the siege on Gaza, have been treated similarly. The 92nd Street Y canceling Viet Than Nyugen’s appearance in October is a well-known example, but there are others, such as the German museum that unexpectedly canceled part of an exhibition on Afrofuturism because one of its curators, the writer and artist Anaïs Duplan, had on social media critiqued Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal.
In Gaza—where the death toll from the siege is now at over 18,000 people, over 7,000 children—vanishings are not of events, but of people. In late November, the Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha disappeared into Israeli military custody, “part of a mass detention of Palestinian men,” when during the air assault in northern Gaza he tried to flee south with his family. His family had been granted permission to cross at Rafah, directed there by the US embassy (Abu Toha’s youngest child is a US citizen). He was released, injured, after international outcry. (The men taken with him seemingly were not released alongside him; it is not known how many Palestinians are similarly detained.) Abu Toha is also known as the founder of the English-language Edward Said Library in Gaza. I do not think the library’s locations have survived this fall’s bombings, although I can’t find a definitive account yet online…
In the time it took me to draft this post—interrupted by a week of ordinary illness—a librarian at the Edward Said Library, Doaa al-Masri, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. The Middle East Children’s Alliance, who worked with Doaa, remember her as “a kind and energetic young woman who organized many activities for children and youth at the library including reading groups, classes, and field trips for schools.” In this same week, the poet and professor Refaat Alareer was also killed, along with his brother, his sister, and her four children.
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I first encountered the work of Adania Shibli when I worked at Interlink Publishing (2004–2014). Interlink’s publisher and founder, Michel Moushabeck (who is Palestinian), has led the press in playing a vital role over decades bringing Arabic literature into English—publishing writers such as Sahar Khalifeh, Emile Habiby, Nawal El Saadawi, Mahmoud Darwish, many others. In my time there eventually I co-founded the imprint Clockroot Books, working with the brilliant editorial director Pam Thompson; Clockroot published a range of international fiction. I happened into this work, this situation, this opportunity, it later seemed—you start somewhere, you dive in. At some point in the mid-2000s I read an essay of Shibli’s that I think Anton Shammas had translated and introduced in an anthology, if I remember right, which I may not. I loved it and began to poke around—was anyone publishing Shibli’s books? Turned out many translators were interested in her work, and we were soon or already receiving various queries. Clockroot signed both of her novels—although I don’t know that we read more than a short sample or two of the second, which would later memorably be called in English We Are All Equally Far from Love. These two works are short and extraordinary. I’ll say more below. But I wanted to share here a quotation by Shibli, characteristic and distinct, as she is characteristically distinct, you do not ever confuse her work with anyone else’s, but always know her by the sharp incisive precision of her voice, which seems to be approaching reality from an angle you hadn’t conceived of prior. She is one of the great writers of narrative distance, inventor of new forms and feelings of syntactical tension. But the quote: evidently, a number of writers from the Arab world were asked at the 2008 London Book Fair about their writing and “which works [of Arabic literature] they think the world should have the chance to read.” (If you don’t know these book fairs, London and Frankfurt, they are huge events where the major rights sales of the global book industry happen.) Shibli’s answer, published in the Guardian, is below. I have had it in mind since then, using it for myself, I suppose, as some sort of talisman to try to somewhat ward off the arrogance of editing and publishing, perhaps to remind me of the arbitrariness and/or privilege of my own position as “gatekeeper.” As an editor you often feel both very lucky, and as if tossed in the waves of history; someone hands you a quite important vulnerable text to edit and you think “well, I suppose I am the one here, these are my hands that this is in.” We shared this quotation on the Clockroot Books blog as part of a sort of mission statement we wanted to offer (that blog unfortunately no longer exists because I ignored too many emails from Google).
Who deserves to be translated? Who should Western readers “get” to read? Shibli’s answer:
I remember a story from four years ago in Ramallah. One night the Israeli army stormed a building in which somebody I knew lived. Everyone was told to get out. After a few hours, the army announced it wanted to blow up the building and gave the inhabitants 20 minutes to go up to their rooms and retrieve what they could. When my friend went up he didn't know what to take; he had all of his life there, he was totally lost. He finally went to the washing machine, emptied it and went out with the washing, leaving everything else behind to be blown up a few minutes later.
In the same way, I could never say which text to have translated from Arabic into English; if I did, it might be the least important.
—Hilary Plum, h.plum [at] csuohio.edu
TOUCH
Adania Shibli
trans. Paula Haydar
Novella. Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing, 2010
Touch tells the story of a young girl in a Palestinian family, in a short potent novella divided into five chapters or categories of experience: “Colors,” “Silence,” “Movement,” “Language,” “The Wall.” Each renders an intensity of sensory experience, such that the world’s sensual qualities, not a protagonist acting or thinking (or, not as consciousness is traditionally rendered), drive each sentence and the movement of the narrative itself. Shibli’s syntax often decenters the usual expected subject, reversing or complicating who or what is acting, is perceiving, comprehending, who is acted upon and perceived and what comprehension is. Experience comes toward us, defining subjectivity; time itself is an agent. “Beneath the trees nothing but wispy, dry leaves gathered. Their crunching underfoot was the only sound on top of the mountain, until a breeze came, shuddering other leaves and bringing the sun closer to the end of the sky.” “Laughter kept the knife shaking in the air for a long time.” Her sentences are extraordinary not only for their estranging structure of imagery and action, but for how this structure allows her to move in time, in association. The young girl’s later marriage may break through, from the future, into moments of childhood. The question of Palestine, the events at Sabra and Shatila, appear not as historical events but as tensions that strain language, word by word, alienating the girl in her classroom: “The word Palestine was unclear, except that its use was forbidden.”
Many writers I know teach this novella for its distinctive structure, its rendering of childhood, its extraordinary approach to composing subjectivity, image by forcible image. A few years ago, it was the first day of a class in which I was teaching this book, but I hadn’t realized several students were enrolled who had in fact read this book previously with me, a few years before. I have read this book 8 or 10 times, I think, and looked forward to doing so again myself. But when I was going to ask the same of students, I made some apologetic noises, the beginnings of a PR campaign for why they might actually like to do this. One of the students in question interrupted me instantly: “When a book is good, who would mind rereading it?”
WE ARE ALL EQUALLY FAR FROM LOVE
Adania Shibli
trans. Paul Starkey
Novel. Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing, 2012
This is perhaps the least read of Shibli’s novels? In English critics seemed to find it too bleak. Its tone stays with me beyond even the movements of the plot—the sense of longing and daily loss, shame, frustration, very dark humor within its fragmented stories; the bitterness of the teenage character Afaf, whose father is a collaborator, and whose actions have effects beyond her knowledge. The novel is made of several interlocking narratives, each related to a series of love letters that are sent but intercepted; their writer does not know that they never arrive.
Notably, the novel in Arabic includes the letters; the novel in English does not. This was the author’s wish: she wrote to request this change when the translation was underway. Readers of the novel who discover the letters’ absence—indicated in a translator’s note at the novel’s end—often express frustration, seeming to think the letters would have provided a satisfaction that the novel, oblique and grim, did not. No, I’ve wanted to reply, that wasn’t how this book ever worked: as its title suggests, it is about disjuncture, alienation, the distances desire seeks to cross but cannot cross, what it’s like to live that desire.
I sometimes think of this novel in relation to a short article Shibli wrote in August 2014, about how the Israeli military occupation serves to divide Palestinians from one another. It appeared in the Washington Post, perhaps seeking to communicate to an English-language audience what the occupation is like to live, how it damages connection, collectivity, and the making of culture. The summer of 2014 had seen an outbreak of conflict between Hamas and Israel, followed by an Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza in which over 2,000 people were killed, according to the UN 65 percent of them civilians.
In the article, Shibli wrote:
In recent years, Palestinian society has become trapped in geographic divisions: Gaza vs. the West Bank, but also inside the West Bank. By 1996, the Oslo Accords allowed the Israeli authorities to control Palestinians’ lives by controlling their movements—mainly between cities rather than inside cities, as was the case before then. What used to be an open space where people could travel freely between all the Palestinian areas, and even into the Israeli areas, has been divided into four zones, with connections between them controlled by more than 500 checkpoints and roadblocks and a wall 26 feet high. That wall does not so much divide Palestinians from Israelis as Palestinians from each other.
The last time I visited Gaza was in 2000. Before then, I used to visit Gaza City quite often, while working on art and theater projects. With the eruption of the second intifada, or uprising, I could no longer travel there, and my contact with Gazans was reduced to e-mails that vanished with time. I would meet with Gazan writers, artists and intellectuals at events around the world—anywhere but Gaza. It turns out that this geographic division has been the most efficient way to occupy and manage the Palestinians; it has destroyed the idea of a Palestinian culture, of a society with coherent connections.
Consequently, since 2000, the Israeli occupation has felt like an individual, rather than a collective, problem. For instance, when Palestinians cross an Israeli-controlled checkpoint, we go through a revolving gate that allows only one person at a time, or we sit in a line inside a car. Naturally, you want to cross the checkpoint first, before your fellow Palestinians. And it is the other Palestinians in the line who may delay you. They might jump the queue, because they, too, need to get somewhere urgently, while the Israeli soldiers are the ones allowing you to go through. The enmity felt while crossing a checkpoint can thus often be directed more toward Palestinians than the Israeli soldiers.
Every time I return to Ramallah from Berlin, where I live for part of the year, I feel compassion and understanding for the suffering of my fellow Palestinians. Yet once I stand at a checkpoint, I protect my spot and boil with anger at anyone who pushes me in the cramped line.
Perhaps it’s worth noting the simple fact that a novel is a useful form in which the terrible complexity of experience like this—moment by moment, subjective, intensely personal, yet also collective, historical, hugely consequential—may be rendered, offered, felt, witnessed, shared.
MINOR DETAIL
Adania Shibli
trans. Elisabeth Jaquette
Novel. New Directions, 2020
This novel has been much written of so perhaps I’ll be brief here. I taught it last year and rereading reaffirmed my sense that this is a perfect novel. I mean that in terms of its writing, and the potential of the form. Minor Detail comprises two novellas, and in their relationship—how they call back and forth endlessly to one another—they convey the Palestinian catastrophe of ’48 and its ongoingness. The novel centers on an incident of extraordinary violence from 1949, in which an Israeli military unit in the Negev sexually assaulted then killed a young Bedouin girl. The novel’s account is seemingly drawn from a long article in Haaretz. Shibli elaborates little on the article’s account; strikingly, she mostly declines to imagine the subjectivity of the perpetrators and her narration instead is one of violent action and of landscape itself—a spider, a dog barking, the movement of light on the hills. In the second half of the novel, a young woman in the present day reads an article (we assume the same real-life article) about this event and takes it upon herself to investigate the incident further, following a path into history and its archives laid out by Israeli reporters, but as a Palestinian woman who cannot move freely across the restricted, checkpointed, highly enforced network of Areas A, B, and C that determine the course of individual and collective Palestinian life: “Then I ask [the Israeli journalist] if, as a Palestinian, I can enter these museums and archives? And he responds, before putting down the receiver, that he doesn’t see what would prevent me. And I don’t see what would prevent me either, except for my identity card.”
What follows is a detective novel of sorts, but in relation to a 50+-year-old crime whose perpetrators are known. Our nameless protagonist gets stuck on the fact that the girl’s murder occurred on what would later become her birthday, a minor detail that reveals the structures through which the girl’s life became in history a minor detail, nearly erased, an absence in and from the archive. Our protagonist finds a way to mark this absence, one the reader would not expect and cannot forget—this novel’s own argument about what it might mean to “arrive at the complete truth” of history’s absences:
… a group of soldiers capture a girl, rape her, then kill her, twenty-five years to the day before I was born; this minor detail, which others might not give a second thought, will stay with me forever; in spite of myself and how hard I try to forget it, the truth of it will never stop chasing me, given how fragile I am, as weak as the trees out there past the windowpane. There may in fact be nothing more important than this little detail, if one wants to arrive at the complete truth, which, by leaving out the girl’s story, the article does not reveal.
