One of the most powerful responsibilities of literature is to ascribe human voices to the momentous, overarching events of our world. This month, Asymptote has selected Adania Shibli’s unflinchingly powerful Minor Detail, a novelistic reflection on the violent and painful consequences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, from the War of 1948 to present day. With an astutely visual language and an unwaveringly intelligent morality, Shibli’s work is an impeccably crafted totem of resistance and justice.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo (UK), Text Publishing (Australia), 2020
The smell of gasoline, the sound of a dog howling, the taste (or distraction) of a simple stick of chewing gum—these are only a few of the motifs surrounding trauma and pain in Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. It is August, 1949, and a group of Israeli soldiers have set up camp in the Negev desert. As they patrol the nearby areas, they encounter and ambush a group of Bedouins, returning with a single survivor: a young Arab woman. Shortly after, she is hosed down and raped by the officer in charge. Over half a century later, a woman living in the West Bank crosses the border into Israel, looking to uncover the details of the case. Her journey reflects a changed Middle East.
As a literary project, a historical record, and a translation, Minor Detail is, simply put, brilliant. My knowledge of the Arabic language is limited, and so my goal here isn’t to compare the translation to the original text. Instead, I want to focus on narrative structure and style—two elements clearly on the minds of both Shibli and Jaquette, whose collaboration proves a success on all fronts.
Minor Detail is split into two consecutive narratives of nearly equal length. First, we follow an unnamed Israeli officer suffering from a venomous bug bite. Over the course of five days, the narrative proceeds with the technical, methodical precision of a military operation. We watch as the maniacal officer shakes his clothes and jumps around the camp hut, searching for insects in the midst of sandstorms and a scorching desert sun. The prose is sparse and cutting, bare enough to progress without passing judgment. Even as the Israeli soldiers stumble upon the Arab settlement—which we, as readers, know will end in massacre—we are told, simply and unwaveringly, “then came the sound of heavy gunfire.”
This is one of Shibli’s greatest strengths as a storyteller: she trusts her readers to fill in the gaps. In perhaps the most shocking scene of the book, the Arab woman held captive is sprayed repeatedly and forcefully with a hose. The officer aims the hose directly at her, “pushing suds to areas the bar had not reached.” Then he aims the hose at the dog, evoking a cackle from the other soldiers, who have been watching nearby. Each action, each event, speaks for itself; there is no unnecessary embellishment or superfluous exchange.
When the novel begins, a year has passed since what the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba—the forced displacement and exile of over seven hundred thousand Arabs. The Israelis celebrate this as the War of Independence—a contrast brought to light in the second half of the novel, set years later, in Israeli occupied Palestine. Our narrator, again unnamed, reveals that “the borders imposed between things here are many.” When a nearby bomb shakes her office building, spewing dust through the open window, she comments on the interruption to her work, rather than the bomb itself. “I absolutely cannot stand dust,” she says, “especially that kind, with its big grains that make a shuddersome sound when dusty papers rub against each other, or when one marks on them with a pen.” Such detachment suggests that borders and bombs are a part of the narrator’s everyday life.
She continues to make her way toward the site of that brutal rape, which occurred twenty-five years to the day before she was born, a minor detail that will “stay with [her] forever.” Reaching the Qalandiya military checkpoint, she encounters a little girl selling chewing gum, who will accompany her, both literally and figuratively, in her journey across the border. The gum, at first, seems a trivial nuisance, the ploy of a little girl “with mucus running from her nose” (she tries giving her a tissue, instead of money). But the gum becomes something much more significant: a coping mechanism, almost a nervous tick. A delaying tactic, to fend off fear and anxiety. Shibli seems to be guiding us to the larger question at hand: Why should any human being have to endure that fear to begin with?
As the narrator’s journey continues, we come to see how histories have been altered, erased and replaced. Physical artifacts, like a map showing Palestine “as it was until the year 1948,” preserve a memory no longer allowed under Israeli occupation. On the Israeli map, these Palestinian villages “appear to have been swallowed by a yellow sea.” Shibli points to specific landmarks and facilities—the Ofer Prison, the Ben Shemen Interchange, Canada Park—all built on Palestinian lands, never returned to their rightful owners. What can we make of these “developments”? At what cost were they built? Who was displaced? What were their names?
Nearing the end of her journey, the narrator stops at a gas station and spills some gasoline on her hands and pants—a reminder of the gasoline used to delouse the Arab woman in the first half of the novel. It is this tidal motion, this continual undulation, moving forward then back, that governs the novel and fuses its sectional divide. The two narratives are not so independent, after all, if we consider how memory works. How one association leads to another. How one small fact recalls a larger one. How every minor detail matters.
Minor Detail is a book that says precisely what it needs to say—nothing less, nothing more. And I mean this as the greatest complement, the highest form of praise. Shibli writes to both give voice and honor silence; Jaquette does the same, rendering her prose with a sharpness that pulls us along, on edge. There is pain, here. But there is history, too. The smell of gasoline. The sound of a dog howling. A simple stick of chewing gum, reminding us of how the world gives and takes, and how we, as humans, are complicit in the act.
Daniel Persia has divided his time between Boston and Brazil, serving as Regional Leader for the US-Brazil Fulbright Commission and Editor-at-Large for Asymptote Journal. His most recent translation, “Writings,” by Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, was published in April 2019 for the re-opening of the Chillida-Leku museum in Hernani, Gipuzkoa, Spain. Working primarily from Spanish and Portuguese, his research explores collaborative and inclusive frameworks for translating Afro-Brazilian/Black Brazilian literature. He will begin his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University in Fall 2020.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: