Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020. Pbk 10.99.
RATING: 95
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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There are numerous spoilers in what follows to the first part of this book, so if you do not know it, and want to avoid them, buy and read it before you go beyond the first paragraph here. I am giving nothing away if I tell you, quoting directly from the publisher's blurb, that '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 expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this "minor detail" of history'. First published in Arabic in 2017, it appears here in a beautifully limpid translation by Elisabeth Jaquette. You may know that Adania Shibli was due to receive Litprom's LiBeraturpreis at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 20 October 2023, but the ceremony was postponed. One member of the Litprom jury, Ulrich Noller, had resigned in protest, reportedly saying the novel had 'anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives, and it not only allows such readings, but opens up space for them' (Times of Israel, 2023); a contributor to Die Tageszeitung [taz], Otto Carsten, writing under the hashtag Antisemitismus, went further, claiming that the novel presented Israel as a 'murder-machine': 'In this short novel, all Israelis are anonymous rapists and killers, while the Palestinians are victims of poisoned or trigger-happy occupiers. Violence against Israeli civilians is probably not mentioned because it is seen as a legitimate means in the liberation struggle against the occupiers' (Carsten, 2023). In fact, as anyone who reads the book will quickly discover, there is no basis for these allegations. Minor Detail is not antisemitic in any sense; the specific claims made by Carsten are all demonstrably false; and it is far better understood as anti-colonial than anti-Israel. More than this, these appraisals entirely miss the point. The space it opens up is initially one of reflection on the founding of a colonial settler regime, and it goes on to explore brilliantly the everyday politics of place, language and existence in such a regime. This makes the postponement of the award ceremony regrettable, and the comments of Noller (if accurately reported) and of Carsten criminally obtuse. Please buy it, and read it with the same care and attention with which it is written. It's barely over 100 pages in all, in two parts of more or less equal length, and it is destined to be a classic of world literature.
(Spoiler alert!)
I offer a detailed reading of the first part of the novel here, with the intention of revealing the manner in which it constitutes a carefully crafted critique of settler colonialism. It opens, literally, with the colonial gaze. A war is recently over, and an officer in the victorious army has been despatched to the south with instructions to comb the area, cleanse it of any remaining Arabs, and secure the border. He stands on top of a hill, scanning the 'faint, winding border' through binoculars, then makes his way through the intense heat back to the camp. We learn that the date is 9 August, 1949, and the location is the Negev desert. There are two standing huts and the remains of a wall in a partially destroyed third on the site of the camp; a command tent and mess tent have been set up, and the soldiers, mostly recently recruited and poorly trained, are setting up three more tents to serve as their quarters. The commanding officer is shown to be conscientious in the exercise of his command, leading reconnaissance patrols himself, ordering daily drills and training for the soldiers, urging his junior officers to impress upon them the need to take good care of their equipment and gear, maintain high standards of personal hygiene, and shave daily. Shibli tells us nothing about the war or anything preceding it, but details minutely the commander's daily behaviour, as she will for the woman from Ramallah in the second part:
'Before the patrol, he stopped by one of the huts which he had taken as his quarters, and began moving his belongings from the entrance, where he had stacked them, to the corner of the room. Then he took a jerry can from the stack, and pure water from it into a small tin bowl. He took a towel from his kitbag, dipped it in the water he had poured into the bowl and used it to wipe the sweat from his face. He rinsed the towel, then took off his shirt and wiped his armpits. He put his shirt back on, buttoned it up, then rinsed the towel thoroughly and hung it on one of the old nails that remained in the wall. Then he took the bowl outside, poured the dirty water onto the sand, went back into the room, put the bowl in the corner with the rest of the belongings and left' (9).
The narrative is built throughout by such 'minor details'. Accounts of his daily routine establish the manner in which this un-named individual inhabits the role of commanding officer of a colonial army, in the very first days of the colonial settler regime. There are echoes here and throughout of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, which similarly plays down specific details of (South African) time and place in order to explore the generic features of the colonial encounter, and give or take the odd technological advance we could equally be on a frontier of the Roman Empire two millennia ago, the British Empire in India 150 years ago, and many other places besides. The intent is clearly to focus not on the specificity of Israel/Palestine, but on the inherent character of settler colonialism.
As regards the rape and murder of the young Bedouin woman that is at the centre of the story, Shibli is entirely faithful, as to the bare facts, to the account published in Haaretz over twenty years ago (Lavie and Gorali, 2003). What she adds is a reflection on settler colonialism as an enterprise, conveyed entirely through invented 'minor details': virtually at the start, the commander is bitten in his hut, apparently by a spider, and suffers a reaction that provokes nausea, fevers and cramps, and develops into a serious infection. This event and its repercussions dominate the first half of the novel. Shibli details successive occasions on which he applies antiseptic and dresses the wound, without avail - his condition grows steadily worse (11-13, 14, 20-22, 28-29). In between, in grimly comic episodes that clearly echo the frontier patrols intended to eliminate the 'enemy', and brilliantly capture the futility of such a quest, he 'patrols' his hut, finding and exterminating arachnids and insects of various kinds:
'He continued his patrol of the room, now unhurriedly combing the walls with his eyes. Two spiders and a moth: he eradicated them, then climbed onto the table, raising his head to the ceiling and fixed his gaze on the previous corner when dark dots and lines began carrying before his eyes, followed by an absolute blackness. He lost his balance and nearly fell, so he quickly jumped down, pulled out a chair and collapsed onto it. Then he rested his head on the edge of the table and squeezed his reddening eyelids shut. Meanwhile, a little insect advanced towards the edge of the room and slipped through a crack between the floor and the wall, escaping into the gap' (23, cf. 27).
When the young Bedouin woman is captured, he first orders that she be placed under guard in the second hut. Then, in an extended set piece (29-34), he has her brought out, strips her of her clothes, hoses her down, has her wash herself with soap, hoses her down again, and has her dress herself in a shirt and shorts taken from the soldiers. 'By putting on her new uniform, the girl resembled the members of the platoon standing around her, apart from her long, curly hair' (33). So now he has the medic delouse her hair with petrol then cut it short, to the ears, then has the clothes and hair burned, and again places her under guard. He tells his officers to place the camp on high alert, and: 'As for the girl, he would take her to the central command office himself or leave her in an Arab area at the first opportunity; they could not keep her there for long. In the meantime, they would let her work in the camp kitchen' (35).
This sequence of humiliation/assimilation mimics, for me, a strategy of subordinated incorporation into settler colonial society, but it is swiftly followed by its reversal, and she becomes 'the enemy' again:
''Suddenly the door opened and the girl stepped out, crying and babbling incomprehensible fragments that intertwined with the dog's ceaseless barking [a dog has accompanied her to the camp]. And in that moment after dusk, before complete darkness fell, as her mouth released a language different to theirs, the girl became a stranger again, despite how closely she resembled all the soldiers in the camp' (36).
Events now take a sharply different turn. The commander orders a special meal to celebrate the morning's successful patrol, and delivers a speech which opens with the injunction "If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first", then goes on to extol the settler colonial enterprise of bringing 'civilization' to barren and unpopulated lands:
'We ... will do everything in our power to give these vast stretches the chance to bloom and become habitable, instead of leaving them as they are now, desolate and empty of people. ... For although it now seems completely arid, these expanses of desert will gradually recede with the planting of trees, and as our people engage in agricultural and industrial ventures, which will enable them to live here. But to realise all this, we must first conquer this area's fiercest and most destructive enemies, and protect it as best we can' (37-8).
He then offers the soldiers the choice of sending the young woman to the camp kitchen, or all 'having their way with her'. They opt for the latter. In short order, he has her brought to his hut, and after a quick patrol around the camp, hunts again for bugs, killing a spider, attempts to dress his wound but is immobilised by cramps, rests, wakes up, assaults the young woman, who bites him, and subjects her to two acts of rape. In the early morning, she is transferred to the second hut, and made available to the other soldiers. Throughout, he has been aware of 'a mix of putrid smells', which he has attributed to the young woman. But the stench remains after she has gone. He sets out to wash himself and:
'He took off his shirt and placed it on the chair, and did the same with his trousers. He froze. The swelling on his thigh had burst open, and the bite was now a small crater of decaying flesh, which held a mixture of white, pink and yellow pus and gave off a sharp, putrid smell' (48).
I don't suppose that it was in Shibli's mind, but this reminds me of William Blake: 'O rose thou art sick/The invisible worm/That flies in the night/In the howling storm/Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy'. Whatever, the colonial encounter is rotten from the start. Its intended subjects can never be completely subdued or exterminated, and the contradiction between assimilation and othering can never be overcome. On the commander's orders, the young women is stripped of her shorts, which are returned to the original owner, driven a short distance from there camp, shot dead, and buried in the sand.
This is imaginative writing of a very high order, but it is the second half that raises the novel to an exceptional level. I shall not deal with it in any detail. Briefly, more than fifty years later, a young woman in Ramallah reads of the incident (let's say, in Haaretz in 2003), and notices that the death of the victim took place exactly 25 years after she was born. She resolves, on the grounds of this 'minor detail', to set out herself to explore the available archives, as by leaving out the girl's story, the article does not reveal the 'complete truth' (66). There is more than a little literary artifice at work here: it is clear that no archive will reveal that story; but the truth that the road trip she undertakes does reveal is the truth of the colonial settler regime of Israel/Palestine. It is wonderfully well done, in a narrative that connects back to and reworks the themes of the first part of the novel, and reminded me forcibly, for stylistic reasons, of Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings. In short, fiction of the highest order, beautifully conceived and written, and profoundly humane.
References
Lavie, Aviv, and Moshe Gorali. 2003. 'I Saw Fit to Remove Her from the World', Haaretz, 29 October, https://www.haaretz.com/2003-10-29/ty-article/i-saw-fit-to-remove-her-from-the-world/0000017f-db62-d856-a37f-ffe2fa5b0000.
Otte, Carsten. 2023. 'Debatte um Autorin Adania Shibli: Schatten auf der Buchmesse', Taz, 10 October, https://taz.de/Debatte-um-Autorin-Adania-Shibli/!5965811/
Times of Israel, 2023. 'Frankfurt Book Fair hit by furor after postponing prize for Palestinian author', 16 October.
(Spoiler alert!)
I offer a detailed reading of the first part of the novel here, with the intention of revealing the manner in which it constitutes a carefully crafted critique of settler colonialism. It opens, literally, with the colonial gaze. A war is recently over, and an officer in the victorious army has been despatched to the south with instructions to comb the area, cleanse it of any remaining Arabs, and secure the border. He stands on top of a hill, scanning the 'faint, winding border' through binoculars, then makes his way through the intense heat back to the camp. We learn that the date is 9 August, 1949, and the location is the Negev desert. There are two standing huts and the remains of a wall in a partially destroyed third on the site of the camp; a command tent and mess tent have been set up, and the soldiers, mostly recently recruited and poorly trained, are setting up three more tents to serve as their quarters. The commanding officer is shown to be conscientious in the exercise of his command, leading reconnaissance patrols himself, ordering daily drills and training for the soldiers, urging his junior officers to impress upon them the need to take good care of their equipment and gear, maintain high standards of personal hygiene, and shave daily. Shibli tells us nothing about the war or anything preceding it, but details minutely the commander's daily behaviour, as she will for the woman from Ramallah in the second part:
'Before the patrol, he stopped by one of the huts which he had taken as his quarters, and began moving his belongings from the entrance, where he had stacked them, to the corner of the room. Then he took a jerry can from the stack, and pure water from it into a small tin bowl. He took a towel from his kitbag, dipped it in the water he had poured into the bowl and used it to wipe the sweat from his face. He rinsed the towel, then took off his shirt and wiped his armpits. He put his shirt back on, buttoned it up, then rinsed the towel thoroughly and hung it on one of the old nails that remained in the wall. Then he took the bowl outside, poured the dirty water onto the sand, went back into the room, put the bowl in the corner with the rest of the belongings and left' (9).
The narrative is built throughout by such 'minor details'. Accounts of his daily routine establish the manner in which this un-named individual inhabits the role of commanding officer of a colonial army, in the very first days of the colonial settler regime. There are echoes here and throughout of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, which similarly plays down specific details of (South African) time and place in order to explore the generic features of the colonial encounter, and give or take the odd technological advance we could equally be on a frontier of the Roman Empire two millennia ago, the British Empire in India 150 years ago, and many other places besides. The intent is clearly to focus not on the specificity of Israel/Palestine, but on the inherent character of settler colonialism.
As regards the rape and murder of the young Bedouin woman that is at the centre of the story, Shibli is entirely faithful, as to the bare facts, to the account published in Haaretz over twenty years ago (Lavie and Gorali, 2003). What she adds is a reflection on settler colonialism as an enterprise, conveyed entirely through invented 'minor details': virtually at the start, the commander is bitten in his hut, apparently by a spider, and suffers a reaction that provokes nausea, fevers and cramps, and develops into a serious infection. This event and its repercussions dominate the first half of the novel. Shibli details successive occasions on which he applies antiseptic and dresses the wound, without avail - his condition grows steadily worse (11-13, 14, 20-22, 28-29). In between, in grimly comic episodes that clearly echo the frontier patrols intended to eliminate the 'enemy', and brilliantly capture the futility of such a quest, he 'patrols' his hut, finding and exterminating arachnids and insects of various kinds:
'He continued his patrol of the room, now unhurriedly combing the walls with his eyes. Two spiders and a moth: he eradicated them, then climbed onto the table, raising his head to the ceiling and fixed his gaze on the previous corner when dark dots and lines began carrying before his eyes, followed by an absolute blackness. He lost his balance and nearly fell, so he quickly jumped down, pulled out a chair and collapsed onto it. Then he rested his head on the edge of the table and squeezed his reddening eyelids shut. Meanwhile, a little insect advanced towards the edge of the room and slipped through a crack between the floor and the wall, escaping into the gap' (23, cf. 27).
When the young Bedouin woman is captured, he first orders that she be placed under guard in the second hut. Then, in an extended set piece (29-34), he has her brought out, strips her of her clothes, hoses her down, has her wash herself with soap, hoses her down again, and has her dress herself in a shirt and shorts taken from the soldiers. 'By putting on her new uniform, the girl resembled the members of the platoon standing around her, apart from her long, curly hair' (33). So now he has the medic delouse her hair with petrol then cut it short, to the ears, then has the clothes and hair burned, and again places her under guard. He tells his officers to place the camp on high alert, and: 'As for the girl, he would take her to the central command office himself or leave her in an Arab area at the first opportunity; they could not keep her there for long. In the meantime, they would let her work in the camp kitchen' (35).
This sequence of humiliation/assimilation mimics, for me, a strategy of subordinated incorporation into settler colonial society, but it is swiftly followed by its reversal, and she becomes 'the enemy' again:
''Suddenly the door opened and the girl stepped out, crying and babbling incomprehensible fragments that intertwined with the dog's ceaseless barking [a dog has accompanied her to the camp]. And in that moment after dusk, before complete darkness fell, as her mouth released a language different to theirs, the girl became a stranger again, despite how closely she resembled all the soldiers in the camp' (36).
Events now take a sharply different turn. The commander orders a special meal to celebrate the morning's successful patrol, and delivers a speech which opens with the injunction "If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first", then goes on to extol the settler colonial enterprise of bringing 'civilization' to barren and unpopulated lands:
'We ... will do everything in our power to give these vast stretches the chance to bloom and become habitable, instead of leaving them as they are now, desolate and empty of people. ... For although it now seems completely arid, these expanses of desert will gradually recede with the planting of trees, and as our people engage in agricultural and industrial ventures, which will enable them to live here. But to realise all this, we must first conquer this area's fiercest and most destructive enemies, and protect it as best we can' (37-8).
He then offers the soldiers the choice of sending the young woman to the camp kitchen, or all 'having their way with her'. They opt for the latter. In short order, he has her brought to his hut, and after a quick patrol around the camp, hunts again for bugs, killing a spider, attempts to dress his wound but is immobilised by cramps, rests, wakes up, assaults the young woman, who bites him, and subjects her to two acts of rape. In the early morning, she is transferred to the second hut, and made available to the other soldiers. Throughout, he has been aware of 'a mix of putrid smells', which he has attributed to the young woman. But the stench remains after she has gone. He sets out to wash himself and:
'He took off his shirt and placed it on the chair, and did the same with his trousers. He froze. The swelling on his thigh had burst open, and the bite was now a small crater of decaying flesh, which held a mixture of white, pink and yellow pus and gave off a sharp, putrid smell' (48).
I don't suppose that it was in Shibli's mind, but this reminds me of William Blake: 'O rose thou art sick/The invisible worm/That flies in the night/In the howling storm/Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy'. Whatever, the colonial encounter is rotten from the start. Its intended subjects can never be completely subdued or exterminated, and the contradiction between assimilation and othering can never be overcome. On the commander's orders, the young women is stripped of her shorts, which are returned to the original owner, driven a short distance from there camp, shot dead, and buried in the sand.
This is imaginative writing of a very high order, but it is the second half that raises the novel to an exceptional level. I shall not deal with it in any detail. Briefly, more than fifty years later, a young woman in Ramallah reads of the incident (let's say, in Haaretz in 2003), and notices that the death of the victim took place exactly 25 years after she was born. She resolves, on the grounds of this 'minor detail', to set out herself to explore the available archives, as by leaving out the girl's story, the article does not reveal the 'complete truth' (66). There is more than a little literary artifice at work here: it is clear that no archive will reveal that story; but the truth that the road trip she undertakes does reveal is the truth of the colonial settler regime of Israel/Palestine. It is wonderfully well done, in a narrative that connects back to and reworks the themes of the first part of the novel, and reminded me forcibly, for stylistic reasons, of Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings. In short, fiction of the highest order, beautifully conceived and written, and profoundly humane.
References
Lavie, Aviv, and Moshe Gorali. 2003. 'I Saw Fit to Remove Her from the World', Haaretz, 29 October, https://www.haaretz.com/2003-10-29/ty-article/i-saw-fit-to-remove-her-from-the-world/0000017f-db62-d856-a37f-ffe2fa5b0000.
Otte, Carsten. 2023. 'Debatte um Autorin Adania Shibli: Schatten auf der Buchmesse', Taz, 10 October, https://taz.de/Debatte-um-Autorin-Adania-Shibli/!5965811/
Times of Israel, 2023. 'Frankfurt Book Fair hit by furor after postponing prize for Palestinian author', 16 October.