ADANIA SHIBLI
Palestinian author Adania Shibli is currently in Berlin, but her writing springs from everywhere, where oppression has permeated everything, from the streets to the soul and to language. The first half of her most recent book, Minor Detail (2017), is a disturbingly close look at an Israeli commander responsible for the murder of a Bedouin-Palestinian girl in the Negev after the 1948 Nakba. The portrayal is too close for the reader to see a criminal without also seeing the human committing the crime – a depiction the novel insists upon. The second half of the book symmetrically contrasts the desert atmosphere laden with imminent disaster with the anxious – and ultimately futile – quest of a young woman to hunt down the traces of a murder that took place more than half a century before.
Interview by Claudia Steinberg
Claudia Steinberg Has the pandemic influenced your writing?
Adania Shibli I write every day, but with so much stillness to allow for it, I have written more than in many years. Writing takes place in silence, and if I am writing a new book, I should remain within that silence.
CS You live in Berlin now. Does the distance to Ramallah and Jerusalem have an effect on your writing?
AS Strangely, my absence from Palestine for more than a year has created a feeling of intimacy with Arabic. It’s like having the language all to myself. My son and I speak Arabic with each other, but the classical language is only present through reading. Classical Arabic is not commonly spoken and mostly read, with the exception of the news, which nobody wants to really listen to. As a purely silent language, the relationship to classical Arabic outside Palestine has become much stronger for me.
CS You have called Arabic a “witch”. What do you mean by that?
AS It has power and magic, a bewitching magic. My language changes with each novel. It can feel like throwing dust into the air; it descends without a sound. In the book I’m writing right now, though, language has a heavy presence – it’s almost like rocks. In Minor Detail, the tension is between eloquent language that gets its clarity from a position of power, and broken language. In the first part, the language is solid, immutable. But in the second part, the words feel almost like running barefoot over pebbles on a beach; like putting them into your mouth where you can barely speak.
CS You have expressed your aversion to the “dictatorship of the narrative”, and violence quietly inhabits the language in Minor Detail as if it were its medium.
AS I think of language not as a medium, but as an entity, an existence – and a witch. But it is also forgiving because it can hold both playfulness and injuries within it, and not to its detriment. An important author has said that I write well but wrong. I have been attracted to the wrong because if the language has so many correctly written poems and novels and short stories already, it won’t mind if one person does things wrong. For me, this wrongness is like a scar: if my language lives in a context of violence and occupation and colonisation, it suffers. It is inevitable to realise how it suffers, how it breaks – and how one hides one’s own language in order to save oneself from a humiliating encounter after being heard speaking Arabic. What happens to a language when speaking it is not perceived as normal? What words emerge after that silence?
CS Do you perceive the silencing of your language as an injury to your identity?
AS I’m interested in exploring the experience of violence on language and not necessarily on myself, because I don’t tend to make a connection between me as a person and my writing – I really perceive the two as separate.
CS Does that relate to your need to be still and quiet and let the language come to you, as if from outside?
AS That starts from an instinct. Once it becomes too conscious, I become too careful. I don’t want to instrumentalise language, so I write the way I wish to live: a life that does not have instrumentalisation at its centre, in which my use of words does not reproduce power hierarchies. Some people think that my texts are not fiction. They are in fact authored by so many moments, so many people, so many sounds. I prefer to be on the margins, watching, without intervening; it is in these moments that the words appear, that the sounds of letters approach me. And later, when I write, I’m in that same position of stillness. It is the connection between these two modes of being – in life and in writing.
CS There’s an intense silence in Minor Detail; you can hear its hum. In light of what you said, do unspoken words contribute to the ones that came to you?
AS I’m captivated by what cannot be said and yet can be written. It is the silence within the landscape, between people, of history, even of what awaits us in the future. I’m intrigued by activities that you cannot control, like hearing. It’s almost like your being on an audible level mingles with others: we fade into others and can no longer identify ourselves when we hear.
CS In Minor Detail, the silence, combined with the heat, is also an atmosphere full of portent. You succeed in creating claustrophobia under the wide-open sky: a triumph of words over nature.
AS So maybe the witch is mightier than God. We can argue about that.
CS You have said that your novels are designed by the landscape of Palestine, but from the “inside you” and that you never write about Palestine. Are you referring to the perspective of being inside Palestine or the view of the Palestine within?
AS Palestine is a mode of living, an experience of injustices, of human degradation, of dehumanisation. This has had a defining effect on me as a human being, but I also ask how these conditions influence the way you construct a narrative. For me, Palestine is almost a literary school. In that enclosed, isolated place, literature is a kind of layer that still has its questions to literature elsewhere. When I’m writing I sometimes also feel haunted by a word or even a whole sentence that comes from elsewhere and seeks to have a place, wants to be there in Arabic.
CS Minor Detail reveals how violence has been inscribed into the entire topography of Palestine. It has been radically divorced from nature with manmade infrastructure making the navigation of day-to-day activities extremely cumbersome. Anxiety rises when your protagonist drives through the obstacle course that is Palestine.
AS It is a landscape that constantly throws you out, that does not allow for any intimacy. Because if you long for some part, it may be gone. One summer afternoon you might find a lone group of three gentle trees that give you a jolt of life, but the next time you drive by they have disappeared or the route has changed. You realise that you should not get too attached. But you can write about these three trees; they won’t disappear from the language, so they continue to exist. It’s not escapism, but rather a way to preserve an emotional openness.
CS There is also the wound that the Palestinian landscape has suffered with the deliberate uprooting of so many olive trees by Israel, depriving many of their livelihoods.
AS As a child I had a fight with my mother because I felt she cared more about the olive trees in the grove than about me. I was about 11, and I noticed how much she loved those trees, and I confronted her. But these trees were taking care of us and we were taking care of them. Uprooting olive trees is very cruel, let alone an ecological disaster. Still, I don’t like olive trees.
CS You speak a number of languages, including Korean. How has that affected your writing?
AS Knowing languages seems to open Arabic to other sensitivities. You discover that in Korean they say something in a certain way, while the Arabic can express the same, very differently. And since I’m said to write wrong, I might as well play with that. In Korean you don’t have a he or a she, so you need to mention the names throughout the text. Arabic is a very gendered language, with the exception of one form: the two, as in a pair. It is the only place in Arabic where gender disappears: the phrase encompasses the possibility of a male and a female, two females, two males. They can suddenly form this unit, and then dissolve just as quickly. This openness is fascinating to me.
CS You grew up in a country oppressed by the Jewish state, and now you’re in a country where at every corner, you are reminded of the fate of the Jews under Hitler. With the surge the extreme right in Germany, anti-Semitism has risen. What are your thoughts about this?
AS I don’t like to define oppression by the state through religion. I don’t talk about the Jewish state or the Muslim state or the Christian state; I’m against the state per se. In Palestine, you don’t feel oppressed by Jews – you feel oppression. The state exploits differences between people to justify its legitimacy. It’s all manmade and it’s done everywhere – even within our love relationships. The question was always how we relate to differences, even very small differences. They are used to committing injustice; that was a lesson I learned about racism at a very young age. My parents experienced the Nakba when they were 15 years old; my grandfather was killed during the Nakba. I was not told – and that is also part of the silence. Especially during a period when you couldn’t say the word Palestine; it was only accepted in the 1990s, along with the flag. Before that people could get shot while trying to mount it. During a very difficult period in early 2000 in Palestine, the only one who kept me sane was Primo Levi, reading The Drowned and the Saved. When you read those who have suffered, you don’t feel lonely anymore in your suffering.
CS Is Minor Detail also an antidote against that kind of aloneness? It’s not a first-person account of suffering, but a precise observation of two women who have suffered: one as a victim of rape, torture and murder; the other because of her acute empathy for that young woman who died many years before.
AS It’s about our sensitivity to life. That word has almost disappeared, but for me it defines how we relate to others. In capitalism we are always pitched against each other in competition and self-interest. That’s why I really like this idea of the two as a single word: they are always on the margins, and I like that position myself.
CS Your sensitivity even extends to the murderous commander; the reader gets very close to him.
AS And maybe sensitivity brings us closer to our own cruelty, and the normality of brutality: I always ask the question of what kind of terrible things I’m capable of committing. This is a question for any human being, I think. ◉