A minor detail by Adania Shibli

Original title: Tafṣīl Ṯānawī, Minor detail

Translation: Salvador Pena Martin

Year of publication: 2017

Valuation: Highly recommended and necessary

Perhaps you remember, not even a month has passed: the German translation of this novel by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli had been declared the winner of the LiBeraturprise award; The award ceremony was scheduled for the Frankfurt Book Fair. However, a few days before (and after the brutal October 7 attack carried out by Hamas) the ceremony was postponed sine the, provoking reactions in defense of the writer’s freedom of expression (among others, through a letter signed by more than 100 writers of recognized prestige), and against it, with insinuations or statements that it was an anti- Israeli, pure anti-Semitic propaganda. It was, therefore, a first example (of many that would come later) of the fever of censorship and repression that the pro-Palestine movements have suffered in different countries, and particularly in Germany, self-servingly confusing anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. (And, curiously, the great champions against so-called “cancel culture” don’t seem to be very concerned in this specific case…). Thus, reading and recommending Adanía Shibli is not only an exercise in literary criticism, but also a necessary act of solidarity and denunciation, at a time when the accusation of anti-Semitism serves as a form of silencing against those who criticize the occupation and the massacre of the Palestinian people.

The novel is based, at least partially, on historical events: the kidnapping, rape and murder of an Arab Bedouin woman by an Israeli military detachment in the Negev desert in 1949, an event that is described in detail in the first half of the novel; The second half is set in the present moment, and tells the story of a young Palestinian journalist who becomes obsessed with this event, one of many in the history of the colonization of the territory, because of “a minor detail”: the date. The murder of the Arab girl coincides with her birthday. Obsessed by this coincidence, the journalist undertakes an investigation that takes her to museums and archives of the Israeli army, and to visit the place where the events took place, circumventing the numerous controls and movement limitations imposed on the Palestinians.

In fact, the division of the novel into two parts is fundamental to its significance. The first part, narrated in the third person, presents us, with absolute detail and dispassion, the life of the Israeli unit in charge of patrolling an area of ​​the Negev desert, close to the border with Egypt, to eliminate any possible hint of resistance or invasion, or any suspected Arab presence (which actually means “any Arab presence”). The narrator focuses fundamentally on the figure of the unit’s superior command, whose name we do not know, and his suffocating daily routine (marked by the baths he takes with the help of a can of water and a towel, and by the constant reference to odors). who harass him). This routine is interrupted by two events, about whose interaction much could be written: first, a spider bites him on the leg, causing a progressive effect of inflammation and infection; and secondly, their unit comes across a group of Arabs, whom they murder, and among whom was the young girl, whom they take to their camp, keep kidnapped, rape and finally murder.

A minor detail It is a notable novel for many aspects, which go beyond the crudeness of the crime on which it is built (which, I insist, is based on a real event, and recognized even by Israel, which convicted those guilty of murder). From two opposing points of view (cold and dispassionate in the first half; obsessive and fearful in the second), the work reconstructs two different moments of the occupation of the Palestinian territory with the same level of detail and thoroughness. Poetic and symbolic suggestions are not at all absent from the text: the constant presence of barking dogs, the almost ghostly appearance of a woman in the middle of the desert, who could be a survivor of the Nakba – or even the murdered Bedouin girl herself -, the superposition of narrative plots in the same spaces, just as the two maps that the narrator handles overlap and tell different stories… It is therefore a very thoughtful literary exercise that provokes contradictory and sometimes uncomfortable reactions, but that contains an undoubted and terrible beauty.

Although Adania Shibli has been very careful in her statements to the press, probably because, like the narrator of the second part, she knows that being Palestinian places her in a position of preventive suspicion, the author has been accused of being anti-Semitic and canceled for it. . However, describing this novel as “anti-Semitic” requires carrying out the same terminological and ideological deformation that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism: the demonization of criticism of Israel, the concealment of the atrocities of the Nakba, the prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory by of Israel or of this second Nakba that we are experiencing right now. As citizens, as readers, as part of a literary world that should be a space of freedom and resistance, it is a duty to promote the voices that others try to silence.

Read Adania Shibli. It is fair and necessary.