Shibli

The protagonist of Adania Shibli's Touch is a little girl, the youngest of nine sisters, who discovers love, death, literature, violence, betrayal, infidelity, alienation, loneliness and decay as she trips through the disjointed plot of a novella that runs just under 75 pages. Shibli never names her, never describes her and fills in few details of her time and place. She defies basically every convention of novelistic form. There is no setting, no character development, no detectable sequence of events set in motion. Divided into five chapters, the book barely tells a story at all. Instead, Touch purrs along like an extended prose poem - all words and sounds and images - as Shibli picks up the glinting fragments of the girl's experience, then turns them over in her hand to see how they refract the light of a world so radically constricted and reduced. Shibli's first complete work of fiction to appear in English translation, Touch was originally published in Arabic (as Masaas) in 2002. Editions in French and Italian followed shortly thereafter. A few excerpts and short stories have lately appeared in literary journals, such as Banipal, and anthologies, such as Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World, which was published this spring to coincide with the Hay Festival's series of literary events in Beirut. On the page, the translation of Touch feels fresh, signalling the arrival of a young stylist who writes like no one else. In the press, it has suffered, just a bit, from ...

You may not have heard of her until now, but as South African Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee marveled of Adania Shibli’s third novel, she “takes a gamble in entrusting our access to the key event in her novel—the rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman—to two profoundly self-absorbed narrators, an Israeli psychopath and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale, but her method of indirection justifies itself fully as the book reaches its heart-stopping conclusion.” Finalist for the National Book Award, Adania Shibli is one of Arab literature’s prodigious younger talents, and Minor Detail, which was 12 years in the making, is the work she was destined to write. Reviewed by novelist Layla AlAmmar. Minor Detail, a novel by Adania Shibli Translated by Elizabeth Jacquette ISBN 9780811229074 Layla AlAmmar In light of the infinite array of atrocities, actual and symbolic, perpetrated on the Palestinian people over the better part of a century — forced displacement, occupation, human rights’ abuses, ethnic cleansing, bombings and besiegement — Minor Detail (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette). The first half of the narrative fictionalizes this incident. Told from the perspective of an Israeli commander, it takes place over four days in (what became) the Negev desert when a group of soldiers—tasked with “cleans[ing] it of any remaining Arabs”—massacres a tribe, takes one of its daughters captive, gang rapes and kills her. The novel mirrors the reality of what followed, whereby the...

New York. New Directions. 2020. 144 pages. ADANIA SHIBLI'S THIRD NOVEL, Minor Detail, cements her position among the top ranks of Palestinian novelists working today. In her latest book—a short but powerful novel—Shibli interrogates a world of unstable and shifting boundaries and borders, from the Negev Desert a year after the 1948 war to a contemporary version of the tightly controlled lands of Palestine and Israel. Written in two discrete sections, Shibli centers the first on an encampment of Israeli soldiers in the Negev Desert during the late summer of 1949. The buildup of dreamlike, haunting prose, which describes the soldiers’ lives in the desert and their patrols in the intoxicating heat, finally builds to the rape and murder of a Palestinian teenage girl, who is then buried in the sand. The book’s second half is set decades later and follows a woman office worker in Ramallah. The unnamed narrator offers the reader unfettered access to her interior philosophical ruminations. Early on, she muses, “Borders grant a person a sense of serenity, despite everything else.” Yet the woman is restless and unsatisfied. At work, she reads an article about the death of a girl in 1949. The woman discovers the girl was killed on the same day as her own birthday, but twenty-five years before she was born. The woman surmises, “One cannot rule out the possibility of a link between the two events, or the existence of a hidden connection.” The terrible nature of the girl’s death, a mino...

• • • • • Real Estate Israel • • Podcasts • Video • • The Daily Edition What Matters Most Today • Tech Israel Updates from Silicon Wadi • Real Estate Israel Weekly Update • The Weekend Edition The Best Reads of the Week • Weekly Highlights Choice Voices From The Blogs • • Atlanta Jewish Times • The Jewish Standard • Jewish Chronicle • The Jewish News • The Australian Jewish News • Become a Partner • • Join our community • Sign in • • • • • SHIBLI, Israel — For years, the obscure Bedouin village of The reason is simple: it always reminded me of my longtime friend and colleague, Victor Shiblie, publisher of the Washington Diplomat. Victor was born and raised in Maryland, but traces his roots to Ramallah — and every time I drove along Highway 65 heading north to Tiberias or the Golan, I would think about turning left at the junction and taking a look at the village that (sort of) bears his name. Earlier this year, with a little time on my hands following an assignment in Nazareth, I did exactly that — and ended up with a story I wasn’t expecting. Diyab Shibli, 67, explains the artifacts he’s collected over the years and now displays at his Bedouin Heritage Center in Shibli. (Larry Luxner) I met Diyab simply by following the signs to the Bedouin Heritage Center, which I realized was someone’s house. After knocking on the door several times with no response, I was about to walk away when the kindly Arab gentleman opened it and invited this confused visitor in for coffee and bak...

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Touch centers on a girl, the youngest of nine sisters in a Palestinian family. In the singular world of this novella, this young woman’s everyday experiences resonate until they have become as weighty as any national tragedy. The smallest sensations compel, the events of history only lurk at the edges--the question of Palestine, the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. In a language that feels at once natural and alienated, Shibli breaks with the traditions of modern Arabic fiction, creating a work that has been and will continue to be hailed across literatures. Here every ordinary word, ordinary action is a small stone dropped into water: of inevitable consequence. We find ourselves mesmerized one quiet ripple at a time. appeared asked became blue body brother brown carried closer cold color continued courtyard covered dark direction disappeared distance door dress ears edge eighth sister empty everything eyes face father feet fields fingers fixed floor followed front girl’s glass green hair hand head heard holding inside jumped leaves legs lifted light lines little girl longer looked mirror mother mountain mouth moved movement neighbor night once opened paint passed picked picture piece playing prayer punishment pushed quickly rain reached remained rest searching shadow shepherd shoes shut side silence sitting soft Sometimes sound standing started stayed stick stood stopped stretched talked teacher television tree tried turned veranda waited walked wall wanted watching wind wi...

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