Palestinian Literature: Adania Shibli’s Novel “A Minority” – Culture

On an October morning in 2003, a young Palestinian woman immerses herself in the Israeli daily newspaper hairnet. When she reappears, she has changed. Researched in detail, an Israeli journalist documents the mass rape of a Palestinian Bedouin, still a girl, by Israeli soldiers of the IDF on August 13, 1949. Both the crime and the article form the thematic framework for the novel “A Minority” by Adania Shibli. Both the deed and the disclosure article are not inventions, they existed.

When the Palestinian reads about the rape in the novel, she is captivated by a detail, a minor one. The abuse and subsequent murder happened exactly 25 years to the day before she was born, well over 50 years later she reads about it and decides to follow the story. As is so often said prosaically today, she wants to give a voice to the nameless.

Little is known about Adania Shibli in Germany, just as Palestinian literature in general receives little attention in this country, which urgently needs to change. But that’s where the problem of limitation begins, what is Palestinian literature, who is it written by, by those in the diaspora, by the American Palestinians, for example, or by those from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or by those who live in Israel and who, as Arab Muslims or Christians, make up at least 20 percent of the state’s population? Also, Palestinian literature is difficult to measure because it is so polyglot. The great elders, Mahmoud Darwish or Emil Habibi, wrote in Arabic. Different Sayed Kashua, one of the most famous writers among Arab Israelis, who writes his novels in Hebrew and recently left the country for America, he said in protest at the oppressive political situation. But novels written in Spanish must also be included, for example “Homecoming to the Unknown” by Lina Meruanewhose family emigrated from Beit Jala in what is now the West Bank to Chile, the country with the largest Palestinian minority outside the Middle East.

Details attract attention, they are the condition for attention and interest

The author Adania Shibli speaks six languages, lives in three countries, her family history runs historically through four regions and nations, the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the West Bank, Israel. Adania Shibli is perhaps a typical diaspora Palestinian from the educated middle class who keeps returning to the area of ​​her birth. She regularly teaches at the Palestinian Bir-Zeit University near Ramallah. The fact that she, like the nameless protagonist of her novel, was born in 1974 and that she once lived in Ramallah is just another detail, because this is not about autobiographical detective games. It is about the question, which is all the more topical today: Why is the fate of individuals so close to us in some moments, why does it pass us by in others? “It may sound terribly narcissistic that it was precisely this minor detail that fascinated me about the incident, especially since the other details of the incident can be described as downright tragic,” the narrator once admits. But she is ashamed for no reason. Details attract attention, they are the condition for attention and interest.

The first part of “A Minority” documents the last three days in the life of the nameless Bedouin in frosty sobriety. Everything about it is hard to bear. The distance, for example, that results from the narrative voice that hugs one of the perpetrators. The task force officer, also unnamed, is bitten by an animal, presumably a scorpion, the night before his unit encounters the Bedouin group. From then on he experiences what is happening in delirium. The suppurating wound that he hides from his subordinates, the shimmering heat and the wasteland of the Negev desert, the dust that pervades everything, the destructive lust for power of his soldiers. Eventually he becomes the culprit himself. “He threw himself on top of her and found her mouth with his hand to cover her. She bit down hard, he pulled his hand away and buried the other in her hair.”

In her story, Shibli dispenses with the historical framework, doesn’t say a word about the armistice agreement with Egypt that had just been negotiated at the time, she dances around the word “war crimes”, which is always wrong. Only once did the officer say that his unit was stationed in the desert with the aim of securing the southern border with Egypt and “cleansing the desert of those who remained”. The first part of the novel ends with the murder of the Bedouin woman and if it had stayed that way, one would have to accuse Shibli of having exploited a terrible suffering in literature.

Edward Said, the diaspora Palestinian and early postcolonial theorist, attempted a definition of Palestinian literature in 1986. It sounds something like this: Palestinian literature is formally unstable, trying to deal with the “almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present”. Palestinian literature, he adds, is fragmentary compositions “in which the narrator stumbles over itself, over its obligations, over its limitations.” Edward Said wrote this long before Adania Shibli became a writer. But it is true that in the second part of the novel the first-person narrator is undermined by historical commitment and contemporary limitations. your obligation? To prevent the murdered woman from ending up nameless on the garbage heap of history: “The girl was and will remain a nobody for all eternity, and nobody will ever know her version of events”. your limit? With the Palestinian passport, she is immobile. In an international comparison, the West Bank’s identification document ranks alongside the Afghan or Syrian as one of the “worst” in the world, i.e. those that have almost no visa exemption.

The searcher gets the Israeli ID of a colleague, with her own she would have to turn back at the checkpoint. The Palestinian version of a road trip: illegally, i.e. with a borrowed passport and a borrowed car, and stuttering Hebrew, the young woman is not interested in adventurous exploration of the vastness, but in discovering a region just behind the wall, only ten to one hundred kilometers away away from their place of birth. On the passenger seat are two maps, one pre-48 and one post-48. The port district of Tel Aviv with its central archive of the Israeli army is her first port of call. She calls that part of the city “Jaffa” in Arabic instead of “Yafo” in Hebrew. You can only get a bit wrong with these designations as a tourist. Adania Shibli, however, sketches here with a light hand and casually a war of the names of two Semitic languages ​​that are so related.

That in conflict-ridden Israel, no act escapes without an implicit message, no phenotypic trait, or article of clothing without religious or ethnic categorization is a lesson that “A Minority” teaches. A thoughtless reach into your pocket, looking for chewing gum, may look like drawing a gun to the other person. Adania Shibli’s novel does not end on a happy note, it ends with a momentous misinterpretation of a minor matter.

Adania Shibli was nominated for the International Booker Prize last year with the English translation of ” Eine Nebensache “; Günther Orth did an excellent job of translating the tricky open semantics of Arabic into German. This is just a first step, Shibli’s other novels, such as the slim 2010 booklet called “Touch” in English, are awaiting translation. Amidst the loud and divisive voices surrounding the Middle East conflict, Shibli is a quiet, a searching, a precise observer of detail. You would like to hear more. It is fortunate that literature does not have to provide political analyses, but can show the fates of individuals. And that can be learned from “A Minority”: Every political conflict, whether geographically near or far, creates lives that, even before they really begin, come up against their own limits.