Adania Shibli

Harrowing and terrifying. I read this in one sitting and my face contorted into a grimace with each page I read and when I finished, a deep indentation between my eyebrows had formed. Minor Detail is a fictional story about a true event: 1949 a year after the Nakba, IOF soldiers capture, rape and murder a Bedouin girl - this was covered up by the state and the IOF for decades (in 2003, the Guardian reported, “the government and army understood the shame that would fall on the armed forces if the girl's fate became known to wider Israeli society, so the murder and trial were classified as secret.”) The story is told in two parts: the first being from the POV of the IOF commander in 1949 and the second part is several years later from the POV of a Palestinian woman attempting to learn more about the girl who was murdered.


To note: Litprom canceled a celebration that was to be held at the Frankfurt Book Fair for Adania Shibli - who was awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis for this book.
The Los Angels Times article detailing this

The referenced Guardian article… (mehr)

From Little Things Big Things Grow

This a a book I will never forget. It shows the true horror that can be enacted when one group of people see another group of people as less than human.

The book is in two parts and starts off describing an officer of the Israeli army getting ready for his day in his camp in what is now known as southern Israel. It is 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba, and the officer’s actions and ablutions are described in minute detail. Every action, every part of him putting on each item of clothing is described. At first I thought that the character was suffering from OCD, but eventually it came to me - every detail, every thing we do has its importance.

During that day in 1949 a Bedouin girl is captured and abused physically and mentally. A dog has followed her. She has her clothes torn from her body. They are thrown carelessly into a heap and petrol poured over them. They are burned. Her long hair too is covered in petrol and cropped. The dog howls. All this described in minute detail. She is then put in a hu and the officer leaves the camp and the detail of camp life stop. For the reader there is silence except for the howling of the dog. But we know and can imagine what is happening.

Many years later in the Occupied Territories an Arab office worker learns what happened to the girl in the camp from a newspaper article. She becomes obsessed with the story, as the day of the girl’s capture is the day after her own birth

She can’t get hold of any official documentation because she is Arab. So she decides to go to the area of the camp to see if there is any record there. This is no easy task as being a non Israeli she can’t rent a car or even travel without a pass, and even then she has to line up at checkpoints. Nevertheless she manages and her efforts and trip south are described in minute detail.

Arriving south she rents a room in the Israeli Area A. She luxuriates in bathing in hot water and in having continuous electricity. The next morning she gets inter the rental and drives. There is a smell of petrol. A dog follows her.

The book ends fittingly. I’ve written all that is necessary.

It is shattering. It is brilliantly written. In both partís it is fearful and unsettling.

I highly recommend this novel.… (mehr)

The book opens on August 9, 1949, exactly one year after the Deir Yassin massacre in which 110 Palestinian men, women, and children were murdered in their village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. An Israeli officer and his men are in the South Negev desert along the Egyptian border searching for Arabs. They set up camp, and that night, the officer is bitten in the thigh by a spider. After several days of searching, they discover a small group of Bedouin by an oasis. Within minutes the Arabs and their camels are slaughtered, all except for a young woman and a dog. Four days later, she too would be dead.

"We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins, and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago. And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring that the area remain barren, then we will act as an army.

The second chapter is about a woman in the present day who reads and becomes obsessed with an article about the girl's death because it occurred exactly 25 years to the day before she herself was born. She decides to investigate the incident further, but is hampered by borders: those that physically limit the movement of Palestinians and those that she has internalized in order to protect herself in a highly violent and unpredictable environment that is Israel.

It's the barrier of fear, fashioned from fear of the barrier.

The writing is very spare, and at first I was confused by the focus on minor details in the book (even despite the book's title, my first clue). Why write the minutiae about how the Israeli captain washes up and shaves every day? But as the story unfolded, I realized that every word was there for a reason.

But despite this, there are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence.

Obsessions with cleanliness versus decay, the howling dog, chewing gum: every detail would have meaning. Everything ties together despite the fragmentation of history and the unending cycles of violence. The ending is as devastating as it is inevitable.… (mehr)