MINOR DETAILS, MAJOR RIFTS
The present is forever haunted by the past in Palestine and Israel; Adania Shibli's political novel tells it like it is and makes us think about how time collapses in the face of human tragedy.
Minor Detail is set in the Negev desert where vast stretches of barren hills rise up “in layers up to the sky, trembling silently under the heft of the mirage, while the harsh afternoon sunlight blurred the outlines of the pale yellow ridges.” Many moons ago, I wrote about a Hebrew novel called The Tunnel by a prolific writer by name A. B. Yehoshua which is set in Tel Aviv; where The Tunnel is an entertaining novel told with so much pathos and humor, this week’s pick by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette) is grim and unrelenting. The forbidding landscape of the Negev desert is matched only by the intimidating demeanor of the officer described in the novella who is always on a hunt for Arabs in the oppressive August heat. The man’s obsessive compulsions show up in how he cleans himself in the heat, a regimen that is described in excruciating detail repeatedly in the opening six pages.
He took a towel from his kit bag, dipped it in the water he had poured into the bowl, and used it to wipe the sweat from his face. He rinsed the towel, then took off his shirt and wiped his armpits. He put his shirt back on, buttoned it up, then rinsed the towel thoroughly and hung it on one of the old nails that remained in the wall. Then he took the bowl outside, poured the dirty water onto the sand, went back into the room, put the bowl in the corner with the rest of his belongings and left.
We don’t know who exactly this man is but we do get to know him very well right away. All we understand is that he is an officer operating in the Israeli forces in August 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the “Nakba” that led to the displacement and expulsion of some 700, 000 Arabs.
Prone to obliterating anything he hates with all of his being, this rabid officer is on a rampage. The author is masterful in her descriptions of this psychopath, and as he goes about acting on his hate, we begin to feel revulsion and horror. Some pages of this work are so repugnant that I shut the book and could only return to it a few hours later.
Inside his hut in the soldier’s camp, we find the officer stomping over beetles and spiders. Outside his hut, he’s on the prowl for Arabs and while he shoots most people on sight, he chooses to spare one woman. He takes her hostage, this girl who, by and by, becomes the receptacle of the man’s hatred and many men’s sexual savagery.
In the meanwhile, he has been bitten in his thigh by some animal in the dead of the night. As the wound festers, the flesh around it putrefies and it lets off a stink that causes him to gag and double up in cramps. We watch a man who is severely infected but won’t admit defeat to his body.
The stink of the Israeli officer’s suppurating wound and the viscosity of the Arab woman’s saliva are the external manifestation of the mutual distrust and hatred of one people towards another. Particularly heartbreaking and horrifying is the scene in which he hoses the woman down to clean her and then hands her some soap to clean herself. Minutes after that her scalp is cleaned with kerosene to eliminate any lice, and then she’s shorn of most of her hair. Minor Detail uses the symbolism of odor, infection and bodily fluids with such remarkable skill that the smells reach us through the page.
Pitted against the officer’s point of view in the first half of the novella is another perspective, one from a Palestinian woman behind barbed wires in the present day. We’re now inside the head of a woman in Ramallah who seems paranoid in her own way, just like the Israeli officer in the year 1949.
By the way, I hope I didn’t cause any awkwardness when I mentioned the incident with the soldier, or the checkpoint, or when I reveal that we are living under occupation here. Gun shots and military vehicle sirens, and sometimes the sound of helicopters, warplanes, and shelling, the subsequent wail of ambulances; not only do these noises preceded breaking news reports, but now they have to compete with the dog’s barking, too. And the situation has been like this for such a long time that there aren’t many people alive today who remember little details about what life was like before all this….
Many decades later, this young woman becomes obsessed by the newspaper story of the rape and murder and ultimate burial of an Arab woman in the sands of the Negev exactly twenty-five years to the day before she herself was born. As we follow this self-motivated sleuth on her journey to the burial site of that woman in 1949, we begin to realize several things. For those of us who whine about traffic on our daily commute, imagine having to pass through check points as part of daily life in Gaza. One passage was exceptionally enlightening on life with such barricades.
“Many people from Area A don’t even consider going to Area B. In recent years, I haven’t even gone as far as Qalandiya checkpoint, which separates Area A and Area B, so how can I even think of going to a place so far that it’s almost in Area D?
We watch the woman borrow an id card from her friend and have another friend rent a car for her and then she’s off on a chase of the burial ground of the Arab woman from the past. The rest of the story takes us through Negev and we listen to her lament about all the places that are now lost to time. Entire villages have been razed to the ground or renamed in another language.
The car cuts through the landscape at high speed. The road is nearly perfectly straight, but even so, I keep glancing at the Israeli map unfurled across the seat next to me, fearing that I may get lost in the folds of a scene which fills me with a great feeling of alienation, seeing all the changes that have befallen it. It’s been a long time since I’ve passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right.
As she perseveres to locate the burial space of the woman, we watch history repeat itself in a horrific sequence of events. Decades after the crime, in a land where the same insecurities have soaked in, nothing has changed. It’s clear that peace will only arrive here in the center of a mirage.
The book’s author, Adania Shibli, is a Palestinian novelist and essayist who lives in Berlin and Jerusalem. In a moving piece for The Guardian that I’ve linked to above, Shibli expresses what language means to her. Imagine waking up to a day when one’s mother tongue isn’t accessible anymore in the places it thrived in.
At the end of one year of yet another Israel Palestine conflict, Minor Detail is a deeply disturbing read. The author’s decision to not ascribe a name to the Israeli or the Palestinian in this work is a telling major detail for it’s, after all,. the story of everyone in that troubled region. I close this post with a moving passage on how the woman in the novella uses several maps simply to make sense of her whereabouts. It’s a poignant reminder of the futility of returning to the past and seeking redress for old grievances.
First, I open the Israeli one and try to determine my position, relying on the number that appeared on the last sign I saw along the road. It seems I simply have to drive on a straight course, albeit a short one, and I’ll soon reach my next destination, which appears on the map as a small black dot, practically the only one in a vast area of yellow. Next, I pick up the map showing the country until 1948, but I snap it shut as horror rushes over me. Palestinian villages which on the Israeli map appear to have been swallowed by a yellow sea, appear on this one by the dozen, their names practically leaping off the page.
Thanks for this review, Kalpana.