Minor Detail
By Adania Shibli
Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
New Directions, US
ISBN: 978-0811229074
144pp.

Minor Detail by Palestinian author Adania Shibli is an intense, subtle novel immersed in the landscape of Palestine, shaped by the contours of the land and the conditions of occupation. It is a poetic, political work, which reveals the disastrous consequences of the Israeli occupation through the textures and movement of language on the palimpsest of history.

In the searing heat of the Negev (or Naqab, the original Palestinian name) Desert in 1949, an Israeli platoon is sent to cleanse the area of Palestinians still present after the 1948 war — the Palestinian exodus is known as the Nakba. They encounter a group of unarmed Bedouin whom they kill, except for a girl they take back to their camp, rape, murder and bury in the desert.

Many decades later, an unnamed Palestinian woman — a researcher — comes across the story of the girl’s murder in a newspaper. She becomes haunted by a “minor detail”: “The incident took place on a morning that would coincide, exactly a quarter of a century later, with the morning of my birth.” She feels compelled to recover the voice of a girl who is “a nobody and will forever remain a nobody whose voice nobody will hear.”

The novel is divided into two sections, with the story of the commanding officer of the platoon first, then the researcher’s. The two sections are joined through the movement of motifs and images, a poetic imaginary that creates echoes and solidarities that occur outside of the characters’ awareness, as if memory were woven into the fabric of language, or of reality itself.

A Palestinian author’s new novel about the Israeli occupation burns with the white heat of taking a stand against the erasure of life and memory

The novel oscillates between stillness and movement. The desert landscape thrums with energy: “The waves of sand, with their shifting shapes”, “the sound of wind slapping the tent roofs.” For the soldiers, however, it is an inhospitable landscape and the enemy is like a mirage, “their slender black shadows sometimes wavered in front of him, trembling between the hills.” This barren landscape, empty except for “infiltrators”, is what the occupiers will transform into their homeland. They will, in that famous slogan, “make the desert bloom.”

The narrative is precise and detached, the officer’s repetitive actions meticulously detailed. He is obsessed with cleaning, with purity and the sense of calm it brings — a calm he also feels after the massacre and raping the girl. At the camp, the soldiers watch as the girl is stripped, hosed down, washed and redressed. Wearing their clothes, the girl is an ersatz soldier, but that image dissipates as soon as she speaks, “crying and babbling incomprehensible fragments.” The unemotional, distant language heightens the sense of horror.

On his first night in the desert, before the incident, the officer is bitten by an unseen insect. The wound suppurates; the sickness spreads through his body and seeps into his mind. One can read it as a metaphor for the Israeli experience, of an initial wound (the Jewish holocaust) caused by an enemy no longer at hand, so a new enemy must be created: “Without warning, he jumped around different parts of the room, crushing several small insects that were crawling on the floor. Two spiders and a moth; he eradicated them.”

The occupier is driven by what Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls the “phantasy of extermination”, a totalising desire to dominate and destroy. In contrast, the researcher sees things through relation, the “possibility of a connection between the two events, or the existence of a hidden link.” Motifs from the first half emerge in the second — dogs barking, the smell of gasoline, spiders’ webs — enacting a poetics of relation in a tense, rising rhythm.

Mind and language are formed by place, and if the novel’s first half inhabits the open expanse of the desert, the second is riven by borders and marked by erasures. The rhythm of the second section is, like Mahmoud Darwish’s description of one of his own works, “mutawattir (nervous, tense, taut, on edge).” The language stutters as the woman finds her thoughts and movement blocked. The woman’s psyche is saturated by an occupation that transgresses boundaries — tunnelling through houses, blowing up buildings, erasing villages, killing without compunction — and so the woman is driven by anxiety and fear, an “inability to identify borders.” By making Palestinian space shifting and unsettled, the occupation also destabilises the mind.

The novel describes imprisoned life under occupation. To research the killing, the woman has to travel to a different sector of the West Bank, where the incident took place and where the museums and archives are (which she may not have access to as a Palestinian). For residents of one sector to travel to another is impossible, or nearly so. Her journey involves borrowing identity cards, crossing numerous checkpoints and negotiating blockades.

One can read it as a metaphor for the Israeli experience, of an initial wound (the Jewish holocaust) caused by an enemy no longer at hand, so a new enemy must be created.

In the museums she visits, we see the institutionalisation of history. But because official histories operate through absences and silences, they leave cracks through which ghosts of the past can emerge. As she wanders through the military museum, the woman is gripped by shivers, recalling the fevers that wracked the officer’s body.

Here, time has become disordered: We are trapped in the suspended time of occupation, what professor of modern Arab politics Joseph Massad calls the “present continuous act of destruction that remains unfinished.” The temporal paralysis causes the ghostly resonances that play across the novel. Space, too, is disoriented, with the Palestinian landscape present in its absence.

When the woman opens a map from 1948, “horror rushes over me. Palestinian villages, which on the Israeli map appear to have been swallowed by a yellow sea, appear on this one by the dozen, their names practically leaping off the page.” These are the names of the dead. It is striking that all the novel’s characters are unnamed. Names have power, says Massad: “The very name ‘Palestinian’ functions as some magical incantation that could obliterate [the Zionist] at the existential level.”

If land constitutes collective memory, the erasure of its names and places creates a landscape of silence. On her way to the site of the murder, the researcher gives a ride to an old woman whose hands are “traced with blue veins that recall the lines” on the old maps — history written on the human body. The researcher wants to talk to the old woman, but “the silence between us stretches on, as vast as nature’s silence expanding around us.” Yet, when the old woman gets out of the car, “she looks directly into my eyes.” The look is one of mutual recognition, an affirmation of one another.

In an interview, Shibli said that survival under occupation requires keeping “a secret hidden zone that the oppressor finds so minor that they wouldn’t bother to destroy it ... a tree, a stone, endless minor objects.” In Memory for Forgetfulness, his extended prose poem on the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, Darwish wrote about the gesture of a hand, the act of making coffee, all the “details that suggest a human essence.” In the face of violence it is the silent, hidden zones and minor details that sustain life. Shibli also described her text as “perforated language”, a poetics (and ethics) of the minor, the hesitant and the weak against the coloniser’s overwhelming power.

The woman’s compulsion to uncover the murdered girl’s story is a form of resistance, a desire to assume responsibility for the dead, despite the awareness of danger. This is what English writer John Berger memorably called the “stance of undefeated despair.”

Shibli’s novels have the remarkable quality of being slim, spare, yet expansive, as if they stretch to the horizon, taking in the sky, the earth, small lives, minor characters. The insistence on details is a stand against the erasure of life and memory, a faltering but radical struggle against the forces of obliteration.

We are confronted with fractured language, with a clarity that slowly emerges as if from the shards of a broken mirror. In the disorienting echo-world of the novel, this logic of meaning unfolds into a final, catastrophic collision. Minor Detail burns with a white heat.

The reviewer is a freelance writer and editor focusing on the arts, culture and higher education

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 13th, 2020