Shibli talks about what it means that she doesn’t write 'about' Palestine, but rather 'from' Palestine. Translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette, Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli's 'Minor Detail' was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and long-listed for the International Booker Prize. But – and here we are already faced with a problem of delimitation – what is Palestinian literature, exactly? Who writes it: people in the diaspora community – Palestinian Americans, for instance – or people from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or those who live in Israel, the Arab Muslims and Christians who still make up 20 percent of the country’s population? She wants, as people say so often and so prosaically these days, to give a voice to the nameless.Īdania Shibli deserves to be better known, as does Palestinian literature as a whole. The day on which the abuse and the subsequent murder took place was exactly 25 years before she was born – and now, more than 50 years later, she reads about them and decides to investigate the story.

When the Palestinian woman in the novel reads about the rape, she is transfixed by one small detail. And neither the deed nor the revelatory article is invented both are real. The deed and the article form the thematic brackets of the novel Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. A report by an Israeli journalist documents in detail the gang-rape of a Palestinian Bedouin woman – still a girl, really – by Israeli soldiers from the IDF on 13 August 1949. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.One October morning in 2003, a young Palestinian woman is engrossed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. 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.

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