The canonical greats such as Mahmoud Darwish or Emil Habibi wrote in Arabic. Palestinian literature is also hard to define because of its polyglot nature. And why for her, as a writer, so many of the questions surrounding colonisation, dehumanisation and ethno-nationalism come down to language
Shibli talks about what it means that she doesn’t write 'about' Palestine, but rather 'from' Palestine. Translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette, Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli's "Minor Detail" was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and long-listed for the International Booker Prize. But – and here we are already faced with a problem of delimitation – what is Palestinian literature, exactly? Who writes it: people in the diaspora community – Palestinian Americans, for instance – or people from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or those who live in Israel, the Arab Muslims and Christians who still make up 20 percent of the country’s population? She wants, as people say so often and so prosaically these days, to give a voice to the nameless.Īdania Shibli deserves to be better known, as does Palestinian literature as a whole. The day on which the abuse and the subsequent murder took place was exactly 25 years before she was born – and now, more than 50 years later, she reads about them and decides to investigate the story. When the Palestinian woman in the novel reads about the rape, she is transfixed by one small detail. And neither the deed nor the revelatory article is invented both are real.
The deed and the article form the thematic brackets of the novel Minor Detail by Adania Shibli.
A report by an Israeli journalist documents in detail the gang-rape of a Palestinian Bedouin woman – still a girl, really – by Israeli soldiers from the IDF on 13 August 1949. One October morning in 2003, a young Palestinian woman is engrossed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
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