Tag: Adania Shibli

Adania Shibli: We Are All Equally Far from Love & Touch

Adania Shibli is the queen of stark but poignant and powerful prose. I’d feel pretentious if I tried to say more than necessary.

Having read Minor Detail already, I downloaded these books in response to her unjustly cancelled award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair that was supposed to take place on October 20, 2023. Shibli’s first two works are described as non-political. I disagree. But maybe they are, if one compares them to Minor Detail, her most famous work, which exposes the rape and murder of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers.

In these two books there is no talk of occupation or governments, most characters do not have names, locations are vague, they recount ordinary lives; but I don’t think it takes a genius to notice that the dismal lives depicted in these earlier works are consequences of systemic trauma and oppression.

For books such as these, it is not the reader’s duty to offer literary analysis, or to say whether they liked it or not. It is the reader’s duty to empathize. Because today, even empathy is hard to come by.

Adania Shibli: Minor Detail

Adania Shibli has a sharpshooter’s precision;

in her choice of words and in her choice of details major or minor,

in her choice of literal depictions that have the power to stand as metaphors,

even in splitting the book accurately in half to give an equal number of pages for the first part and the second part of the story,

in her sense of irony in picking a character who seems to have an inability to identify physical borders and who is obsessed with an actual news report of a rape and murder case that was committed exactly twenty five years prior to the day she was born,

and in her choice of singling out a story of the rape of a Palestinian woman by Israeli soldiers in a place where senseless killings occur on a regular basis.

What Adania Shibli does not need to spell out is that a story of violated boundaries is always a story of rape, and vice versa.

This incisive portrait of the Palestinian plight begins as a bullet in motion, without you knowing.

You’ll only know upon impact,

when it hits you,

at the very last page.