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Abstract
This article explores both the collapse of Palestinian futurity and practices of alternative meaning making in Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail. Through her unique negotiation with Palestinian literary modernism, including her defamiliarizing engagement of realist aesthetics within the text, as well as the defining role she assigns Israeli settler colonialism in producing modernist alienation, Shibli troubles historical truth and avoids the close-ended museumification of events. Despite the collapse of Palestinian futurity within the text, Shibli’s literary experimentation creates gaps not only in the totalizing nature of Israeli occupation, but also in its historical hegemony, reflecting the practice of what Ariella Azoulay terms “potential history.” While Shibli’s stuttering and irrational Palestinian narrator, as well as the ambiguous nature of her narrative form, might not reflect straightforward resistance to settler-colonial totality, they unsettle historical narrative from within and open up new ways to consider truth and meaning.
Notes
1 Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2019), iBooks EPUB.
2 In 2010, well before the publication of the Arabic version of Minor Detail in 2016, Adania Shibli was recognized at Beirut39, a collaborative literary festival and anthology project of the same name that sought to spotlight thirty-nine of the most promising Arab writers under the age of thirty-nine. Aside from being co-organized by metropolitan establishments including the United Kingdom’s Hay Festival, Banipal magazine, and the British Council, the anthology was published and distributed in both English and Arabic. To the extent that her work was circulated, read, and rewarded within the Anglophone literary marketplace, Shibli was thus well aware of her status as a “global” writer.
3 Anna Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), p. 6.
4 Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging, p. 6.
5 Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging, p. 7. Bernard writes that “the extraordinary portability—and perceived translatability—of narrative literature, its capacity for providing ‘information’ about a particular place and time, and its ability to link private lives to their public settings make its association with ideas of the nation seem obvious to its readers, and virtually impossible for Palestinian and Israeli writers to avoid.”
6 “When the Present Is Haunted by the Past,” posted by edbookfest, 26 August 2020, YouTube video, 50:05, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TJ1jpTYQcU.
7 Bashir Abu-Manneh, “Tonalities of Defeat and Palestinian Modernism,” in The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 137.
8 Fredric Jameson, “Introduction,” in The Antinomies of Realism (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2013), EPUB.
9 Jameson, “Introduction.”
10 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 176.
11 Toral Jatin Gajarawala, “Realism, Revisited: The Case of Dalit Literature,” South Asian Review 32, no. 1 (2011): p. 178, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2011.11932818.
12 Eric Hayot, “Realism, Romanticism, Modernism,” in On Literary Worlds (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2013), p. 5.
13 Hayot considers this the territory of “romanticism” instead. See Hayot, “Realism, Romanticism, Modernism,” p. 7.
14 Bashir Abu-Manneh, “Ghassan Kanafani’s Revolutionary Ethics,” in The Palestinian Novel, p. 82.
15 Abu-Manneh, “Ghassan Kanafani’s Revolutionary Ethics,” p. 77. Abu-Manneh points out that for an entire generation of Palestinian writers and intellectuals, the Nakba inspired self-criticism, the contemplation of just social and political formations, and the adoption of a forward-looking outlook. See Abu-Manneh, “Introduction,” p. 21.
16 Hayot, “Realism, Romanticism, Modernism,” p. 3.
17 Abu-Manneh, “Ghassan Kanafani’s Revolutionary Ethics,” p. 82.
18 Kfir Cohen Lustig, Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2019), iBooks EPUB.
19 Kfir Cohen Lustig, “Introduction,” in Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs, iBooks EPUB.
20 Lustig, “Introduction.”
21 Lustig, “Introduction.”
22 Faisal Darraj, “Transformations in Palestinian Literature,” trans. Michael K. Scott, Words without Borders, November 2006, www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/transformations-in-palestinian-literature/.
23 Darraj, “Transformations.”
24 Interestingly, this trend can also be observed in social scientific research conducted on Palestinians. In a 2017 article, Anaheed Al-Hardan points to the proliferation of research on Palestinian refugees in Syria, not just within academia but also in journalism and the policy world. Al-Hardan notes that this is a departure from the past, when researchers focused on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; she suggests that it is due to the fact that Palestinian refugees in Syria used to be a better-off community “in terms of their integration, socioeconomic status, and overall living conditions” compared with those in Lebanon who were denied basic rights and thus had formerly served as ideal research subjects within a politics of “researching down.” See Anaheed Al-Hardan, “Researching Palestinian Refugees: Who Sets the Agenda?” Al-Shabaka, 27 April 2017, https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/researching-palestinian-refugees-sets-agenda/.
25 Hoda El Shakry, “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 23, no. 5 (2021): p. 672, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2021.1885471.
26 El Shakry, “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible,” p. 672. El Shakry reads this in relation to the practice of sumud that is generally understood as “a mode of non-violent protest or resistance” and “carries the connotation of everyday survival, endurance, and resilience” (p. 672).
27 El Shakry, “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible,” p. 673.
28 The Present, directed by Farah Nabulsi (Native Liberty and Philistine Films, 2020), distributed by Netflix, 24 min. The film depicts a day in the life of a Palestinian worker living in the occupied West Bank who tries to buy a wedding anniversary gift for his wife but is thwarted by the everyday obstacles of occupation, such as road closures and arbitrary checkpoint scuffles.
29 El Shakry, “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible,” p. 672.
30 Kfir Cohen Lustig, “Palestine as Text and Sign: The Aesthetic of Private Life 1993—” in Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs, iBooks EPUB.
31 Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (New York: New Directions Books, 2020), chap. 1, iBooks EPUB.
32 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), chap. 3, iBooks EPUB. Arendt originally used this phrase to describe Holocaust criminal Adolf Eichmann, of whom she writes, “What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
33 Lustig, “Introduction.”
34 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 1.
35 Jameson, “Introduction.”
36 Darraj, “Transformations.”
37 Abu-Manneh, “Introduction,” p. 28. The post-1967 period saw a decisive turn toward modernist techniques, not just in Palestine but elsewhere, as Arab writers confronted the failures of the postcolonial nation-building efforts they observed.
38 Abu-Manneh, “Ghassan Kanafani’s Revolutionary Ethics,” p. 81.
39 Abu-Manneh, “Introduction,” p. 28.
40 Bashir Abu-Manneh, “Foreword,” in Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance, eds. Rachel Gregory Fox and Ahmad Qabaha (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), p. 1. Abu-Manneh reiterates this notion of a retreat in praxis when he introduces Palestinian writing in the post-Oslo moment with the phrase “suffering’s glow,” coined by poet Najwan Darwish to encapsulate the lingering feelings of “anger, disillusionment, betrayal, and despair” that suffuse Palestinian life and writing following the failure of the Oslo peace process.
41 Nora Parr, “Killing God to Find Palestine ‘after the End of the World’ in Adania Shibli, Mahmoud Amer, and Maya Abu al-Hayyat” in Post-Millennial Palestine, p. 156.
42 Parr, “Killing God to Find Palestine” in Post-Millennial Palestine, p. 156.
43 Parr, “Killing God to Find Palestine” in Post-Millennial Palestine, p. 157.
44 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
45 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
46 Azoulay, Potential History, chap. 1.
47 Julie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). The policy of closure was adopted in March 1993, shortly before the Oslo I Accords.
48 Peteet, Space and Mobility, p. 10.
49 Peteet, Space and Mobility, p. 9.
50 Peteet, Space and Mobility, p. 9.
51 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
52 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2. The narrator possesses a green identity card, which marks her as being from Area A in the West Bank. In order to travel to the site of the murder in the south, she borrows the blue identity card of her colleague from Area C. She also needs to rent a car without a yellow number plate, without which she cannot travel beyond the West Bank, but has to borrow a credit card from another colleague to do so. Shibli draws our attention to the arbitrary nature of these hurdles in the way these random colors are imbued with bureaucratic meaning.
53 Peteet, Space and Mobility, p. 21. These checkpoints are part of a complex system of spatial closure and separation pursuant to the Oslo Accords, which divided the West Bank into three zones: Area A, under Palestinian control and forbidden to Israeli citizens, comprising about 17 percent of the West Bank and including the urban centers of Ramallah, Nablus, and Bethlehem; Area B, comprising mostly Palestinian towns and villages that remain subject to frequent Israeli military incursions; and Area C, which makes up about 60 percent of the West Bank and is under complete Israeli control, remaining forbidden to Palestinians without a permit.
54 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
55 Darraj, “Transformations.”
56 El Shakry, “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible,” p. 671.
57 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
58 Amal Eqeiq, “From Haifa to Ramallah (and Back): New/Old Palestinian Literary Topography,” JPS 48, no. 3 (Spring 2019): pp. 27–29, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2019.48.3.26.
59 Eqeiq, “From Haifa to Ramallah,” p. 26.
60 Eqeiq, “From Haifa to Ramallah,” p. 26.
61 Darraj, “Transformations.”
62 Eqeiq, “From Haifa to Ramallah,” p. 30.
63 Eqeiq, “From Haifa to Ramallah,” p. 36.
64 Eqeiq, “From Haifa to Ramallah,” p. 37.
65 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
66 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
67 The president of the Jewish National Fund of Canada spearheaded a fundraising campaign among the Canadian Jewish community to raise millions of dollars for the establishment of Canada Park.
68 Peteet, Space and Mobility, 2.
69 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
70 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 1.
71 Thora Siemsan, “On Working with Archives: An Interview with Writer Saidiya Hartman,” The Creative Independent, 3 February 2021, https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-with-archives/. In this interview, Hartman admits, “I work a lot with scraps of the archive. I work a lot with unknown persons, nameless figures, ensembles, collectives, multitudes, the chorus. That’s where my imagination of practice resides.” Shir Alon, in a recent article for the Los Angeles Review of Books, evoked Saidiya Hartman’s archival work to explore Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. See Shir Alon, “The Ongoing Nakba and the Grammar of History,” LARB, 21 June 2021, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ongoing-nakba-and-the-grammar-of-history/.
72 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): p. 10, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.
73 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
74 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
75 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
76 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
77 Parr, “Killing God to Find Palestine,” p. 159.
78 El Shakry, “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible,” p. 672.
79 Lustig, “Palestine as Text and Sign.”
80 El-Shakry, “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible,” p. 673.
81 Parr, “Killing God to Find Palestine,” p. 157.
82 Parr, “Killing God to Find Palestine,” p. 157.
83 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
84 Lucy Brisley, “Trauma Theory, Melancholia and the Postcolonial Novel: Assia Djebar’s Algerian White/Le Blanc de l’Algérie,” in Postcolonial Traumas: Memory, Narrative and Resistance, ed. Abigail Ward (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 97–111.
85 Brisley, “Trauma Theory, Melancholia and the Postcolonial Novel,” p. 99.
86 Brisley, “Trauma Theory, Melancholia and the Postcolonial Novel,” p. 106.
87 Eqeiq, “From Haifa to Ramallah,” p. 26.
88 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
89 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
90 Abraham B. Yehoshua, “Facing the Forests,” in The Continuing Silence of a Poet: The Collected Stories of A. B. Yehoshua (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998).
91 Azoulay, Potential History, chap. 1.
92 Azoulay, Potential History, chap. 1.
93 Azoulay, Potential History, chap. 1.
94 Azoulay, Potential History, chap. 1.
95 Brisley, “Trauma Theory, Melancholia and the Postcolonial Novel,” p. 107.
96 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” p. 6. Italics added for emphasis.
97 Shibli, Minor Detail, chap. 2.
98 Canadian writer and organizer Harsha Walia recognizes how bordering and ordering practices, in their “enclosure of the commons,” reinforce unequal colonial relations “at the political, economic, social, and psychological levels.” See Harsha Walia, “Introduction,” in Undoing Border Imperialism (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2013), EPUB. Gary Fields further explores how practices of “enclosure” shape meaning in the way they define the displaced and dispossessed as trespassers through the use of spatialization mechanisms like fences, hedges, and walls, which regularize and order the landscape to potent cultural and symbolic effect. See Gary Fields, “Enclosure in a Historical Mirror,” in Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).
99 Abu-Manneh, The Palestinian Novel, p. 148.
100 Abu-Manneh, The Palestinian Novel, p. 136.
101 El Shakry, “Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible,” p. 672.
102 Azoulay, Potential History, chap. 1.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Fatima Aamir
Fatima Aamir is a current JD candidate at the University of Toronto and completed her MA at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature in 2021. Her literary and legal research interests lie in imagining liberation.