‘To Keep That Wrongness’: Adania Shibli on Relating to Language in ‘Minor Detail’

By Alex Tan

On 12 September 2024, the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli was in New York City to speak about her novel Minor Detail in conversation with Ethiopian-American writer Maaza Mengiste. Originally published in Arabic as تفصيل ثانوي in 2017 and translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2020, the haunting text was thrust into the spotlight once again just last year. In the wake of Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza since October 7, a pervasive repression of Palestinian voices across America and Europe precipitated the cancellation of Shibli’s LiBeraturpreis award ceremony at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair. The event, then, was not exactly a conventional book launch, but represented a sort of reckoning with the numerous wayward afterlives that Minor Detail has led. With her characteristic wryness, Shibli commented on the strangeness of the set-up: “I kind of like it. I took twelve years to write the book, and now it took them four years to launch it!”

The independent bookstore McNally Jackson Seaport, where the conversation was held, brimmed with eager listeners. One staff member opened the session by asking if anyone present happened to have a copy of تفصيل ثانوي in the Arabic. No one did (and I sat there regretting that I had left my copy behind halfway across the world). In the end, Shibli decided not to read from the book—a testament, perhaps, to the fact that it needs no introduction. Mengiste dove straight into their dialogue; Shibli’s answers were expansive and somehow always aslant to what was being asked, as readers familiar with her oeuvre might expect. A question about her writing process led to Shibli narrating a memory of a neighbor who would dress in pyjamas all day, so much so that it became, for him, a kind of suit.

And now Shibli herself writes in her pyjamas, too. From this humorous fact she pivoted to something profound: “You never completely wake up; this is what writing is for me. I hate writing but I think I want to conquer that difficulty. Writing is a struggle with language, a struggle that allows me to proceed into life.” She speaks with a laconic clarity that belies the sophistication of her thought, the rigor with which she has distilled a philosophy of language and aesthetic form over the years.

Mengiste was curious about this philosophy. She alluded to Shibli’s desire to pare down her writing, to take words out. “You’re there, but you’re not the main part of it,” Shibli responded. “When you slip into being too much [a] part of the process, that’s the moment when it fails. Sometimes I wake up and I wonder, is it a comma or a dot? Who decides at this moment? You’re divided between the two. As a person you become redundant; what matters is the relation between the words—a magical, mystical relation—when they find their way together. It’s also like love, the love that exists around these words, in these words, the way love is an extension towards something else. This is the struggle: to find how the words come together, away from me, away from my thinking.”

Call it a writerly decreation, à la Simone Weil; for Shibli, the ego matters less than the relation one can sustain with language. The two bifurcated sections of Minor Detail, filtered through the disparate perspectives of an Israeli officer in the Negev desert and a Palestinian girl in Ramallah, consolidate two divergent approaches to language. One is rational and unequivocal; it doesn’t “leave things outside itself”, but purports to know and consume all that lies within its reach. The other is riddled with holes, gaps, stutters. It’s a mode of inhabiting language that Shibli considers herself deeply intimate with, traceable to childhood encounters with Palestine’s absence from atlases. Villages, razed by Israeli settlers, might no longer exist on the map, but they exist somewhere, still. In a parallel way, Shibli implied, one must seek forms of narration beyond the grid. One learns to rub shoulders with erasure, to find one’s place within it.

“When you ask a Palestinian, ‘what happened?’, there is this stutter,” Shibli went on. “They will say, ‘two years ago… no, ten years ago… no, forty years ago…’ When and where to start? I was fascinated by this brokenness and this constant return; you see fragility within that, something that cannot be held within the tools that are there. I became distrustful of what is convincing. That’s how I came to this novel.”

Citing Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love as a text she’s returned to, Shibli noted how, upon a rereading, she felt seized by a particular sentence in which Genet confesses his inarticulacy in the face of pain. The ability to inflict pain, in her view, is not something distant, but resides within each of us as potential. She’s interested in “how we often cause pain without noticing”. As the youngest child of her family, Shibli recalled her older sister—“very mean and evil”, she quipped—running to their mother and fabricating a story that led Shibli to be punished for something she didn’t do. It was a “beautiful story, but it was not reality”. She realized, then, how one could manipulate language to suit one’s ends, and determined never to give in to this impulse. Slowness is preferable to her; she wants to work with vulnerability, in order to “discover a different way of existing”. If literature allows us “what is not available in reality”, we might find or invent in it new forms of being.

Yet nothing can make up for the singularity of every lost life. Asked about her PhD dissertation on ‘visual terror’ post-9/11, Shibli remarked that we can never have access to the victims’ pain. “Each time I think about Iraq, I think about the saying ‘Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, Iraq reads.’ I think about all the readers in Iraq who were killed,” she said. Along with the spectacle of suffering, the mass media perpetuates what Shibli terms a “politics of identification”: “Either we are for or against. Whereas language implicates us, demands something of us, goes back and forth between us. In 2002, when Israel was invading cities, a friend said to me, ‘Don’t allow anyone to take a photo of my dead body.’ This, for her, was the moment of losing her dignity. There is nothing that can bridge that. It’s not about witnessing; I’m not witnessing anything.”

A heavy silence settled over us. Mengiste thanked Shibli and opened the floor to questions. Audience members pursued sophisticated lines of thought, ranging from the feminization of the landscape in Minor Detail to the dimension of sexual violence and the scene featuring the IDF history museum. Shibli often looked pensive, offering kind answers while seeming to relinquish any control over how the novel might be received or interpreted by readers. “I have no more relation to the book,” she declared. “I finished it and it’s over.” She was frequently very funny—a quality she’s not given enough credit for. Someone asked if she would consider J.M. Coetzee to be an influence. “I’m influenced by everybody, even by you right now with your question!” Shibli said. “I’m too greedy to choose one, I love them all. Sometimes I think it’s a fraud that my name is on this novel, when the words of so many others come into it.”

Someone else brought up translation. Did Shibli ever consider writing in English? Not really: “Many unfortunate things have happened to me, but the only lucky bit is that I was born into Arabic. I really love Arabic. You say I’m fluent in English, but I would say I’m not fluent even in Arabic. There’s a writer—he’s well-known so I won’t name him—who tells me, you write good, but you write wrong. I like this wrongness; it’s important. You grow up with the scars that carry on in your language, and I think about how to keep that wrongness, almost like an accent. It’s just a little bit of sound, a different intonation or pronunciation of a letter, but when translated, what accent can the text carry? I want Arabic to continue haunting the translation, not for the English to be perfect.”

Finally, an audience member elaborated on the theme of the landscape as a character in Minor Detail, how it seems to resist settler occupation. Shibli disagreed; turning the land itself into a mere agent of resistance would be to assign it a specific role, when nature is much more immense than what we can fathom. Trees, in fact, can be “participants in the crime sometimes”; the Israeli regime has time and again resorted to planting trees to literally cover over the ruins of brutalized villages. And when the Israeli military built a wall: “They felt so sorry for some plants that they took them away. These plants are now refugees! For Palestinians, when you hear the words ‘natural reserve’, it’s like oh, the terrorists are coming. The patrols. You are seen as the actor against nature. The reserves are built to eliminate Palestinian presence.”

Nature can be, and has been, weaponized by Israel to advance its settler colonial project. But in Shibli’s estimation, nature—much like someone else’s pain—holds something that we don’t have access to. We lose sight of that mystery when we try to subordinate it to our gaze. “The land is taking care of you, actually, and is carrying the secrets of your existence,” she shared. “It was this sensibility that I grew up with. Nature allowed us many possibilities to play and to enact villagers’ lives, to turn destruction into a moment of life.”

Alex Tan is a writer currently based in New York. They’ve been Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote Journal for three years, where they frequently review Arabic literature in translation. Other essays are forthcoming or have been published in The Markaz Review, Words Without Borders, and Full Stop Quarterly; some of these writings can be found at https://linktr.ee/alif.ta.