I look back at the Israeli map for a moment, to check that I should take the Kibbutz Galuyot exit to the right, and a moment later it’s announced by several giant signs, just as new high-rise buildings emerge from the horizon. A few shepherds with their livestock on a distant hill. Clothes hung out to dry behind a gas station, the driver of a slow vehicle I overtake, a thorn acacia tree standing alone in the fields, an old mastic tree. Little details drift along the length of the road, furtively hinting at a presence. After a disappearance, that’s when the fly returns to hover over the painting. It’s been a long time since I’ve passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right.
The road is nearly perfectly straight, but even so, I keep glancing at the Israeli map unfurled across the seat next to me, fearing that I may get lost in the folds of a scene which fills me with a great feeling of alienation, seeing all the changes that have befallen it. The car cuts through the landscape at high speed. Minor Detail was translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, the Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974, holds a PhD from the University of East London, and has published three novels in Arabic.
Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.The following is excerpted from Adania Shibli's, Minor Detail, a novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba-the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people-and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence.
A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people.
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