Adania Shibli’s sparse, unnerving, and haunting novella Minor Detail is a story divided in two seemingly distinct acts, past and present. The event that binds the book’s temporal halves is the Nakba. This term means catastrophe in Arabic and describes the Palestinian experience of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, which saw over seven hundred thousand people displaced and exiled from their homes. In the Anglo-American context, the Nakba (when recognized at all) is presented in mainstream discourse as a singular episode confined to the past. Shibli’s sharp prose, however, refuses this static notion of history. The one hundred five pages of Minor Detail track over half a century of expansion and dispossession wherein Israel’s borders grow via war, illegal settlements, bulldozing of Palestinian villages, and the normalized, quotidian brutal policing of Palestinian lives. Shibli uses seemingly inconsequential particulars—a dog barking, a child selling candy at a military checkpoint, the bureaucratic nightmare of a Palestinian renting a car—to outline the psychic toll and material conditions of living under the ever-unfolding Nakba. This novella does not let us forget that the past is always present in minor details and that minutiae can be a matter of life and death.
The first half of the book follows an IDF battalion in 1949, a year after Israel’s War of Independence, as they seek to push the young state’s borders further south, and in the process brutally rape and murder a young Bedouin woman. The battalion is led by a commander who is committed to “cleansing the Negev of enemies” even at the cost of denying how detrimental such ethnic cleansing is to his own well-being. This pathological denial takes the form of a venomous and necrotizing spider bite on the commander’s thigh that he attempts to will away. The first half concludes with this ongoing denial of spreading rot. The second half begins over half a century later and centers on a female protagonist as she seeks to visit the site where the battalion committed their war crime. The maps she has, however, are for villages that no longer exist and for territories that are no longer part of Palestine. In Minor Detail’s world of shifting borders, the past cannot be simply denied; it bleeds into the present at every turn.
Minor Detail is Shibli’s third novel and was written over the span of twelve years. Upon release in 2020, it was nominated for a National Book Award. Shibli’s taut narrative weaves the past and present into a porous web across which the Nakba continues to advance. The ongoing expansion of borders means criminalizing those whom the border means to exclude. As the theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay writes, “if the woman is killed it is because a foreign border has been erected against her in a way that transforms her murder into an affirmation of her own guilt and illegality.” Minor Detail is ultimately a story about two women who are separated by time, education, class, and social position but whose existence is determined by the continued expansion of the same border against their very being.
Born in Palestine in 1974 and currently based in Berlin, Shibli speaks multiple languages, including English, but writes solely in Arabic. The power of language and its careful application is an animating ethos of her work. In an interview with Mireille Juchau in BOMB, Shibli describes what it means for her to write in Arabic, explaining that her mother tongue “is the space of the most intimate freedom I have ever experienced in my life.” Paradoxically, this freedom enables her to vividly capture the confining pressure of living under occupation, while simultaneously illustrating the porous nature of borders, be they physical, psychic, or social. As the novella’s title suggests, Shibli has a talent for rendering the banal, trivial, day-to-day realities of the grotesque and cruel through a careful focus on seemingly inconsequential details. Take a moment in the second half when the protagonist’s colleagues, going about their workday, must tape all the windows in their office to keep flying shards from harming them as a nearby Israeli bombing campaign shakes the building. The workers accomplish this task as if it were one more line on a to-do list. Taping a window so flying glass doesn’t impale someone during a bombing has become normalized in the routine of the characters’ lives. It doesn’t even warrant more than a passing thought. This snapshot, among others, forces us to ask: if the Nakba was truly in the past, then why must Palestinians protect themselves from IDF bombs in the here and now? Shibli’s language transforms the small and specific act of taping windows into a concrete symbol of an existential and material catastrophe.
Elisabeth Jaquette’s translation elegantly channels the horror and the surprising levity of Shibli’s prose from Arabic into English. This book is a brutal exploration of both the colonial mind and those forced to navigate its whims. What makes it bearable is the grim, ironic amusement Shibli finds in desperate or hopeless situations. Effective only when the person whose neck is in the noose makes the joke, gallows humor reminds readers that we are only temporarily and conditionally spared the attention of the executioner. Dark humor becomes a tool through which Shibli carves out the psychic and social elements of the book. For instance, the unnamed protagonist of the second half is a neurotic woman whose main anxiety in life is unintentionally crossing boundaries. As she explains, “the borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences” (54). Yet, like a moth to flame, she cannot help but cross them in almost every instance. In some circumstances, this inability to hold the line can be absurd, such as when a child street vendor at a military checkpoint talks her into buying chewing gum even though she firmly insists she does not want or need it. The dialogue operates like a satirical back-and-forth bit that inverts normative hierarchies of child and adult responsibilities. This is a world where quick-witted children push candy on defeated adults to make ends meet, and the adults purchase the candy to soothe themselves as they move through potentially deadly thresholds outside of their control. In this moment the boundary that separates childhood from adulthood dissolves: children are forced to navigate the worries of adults and adults are infantilized by colonial power.
In other instances, the protagonist’s malleability can be harrowing. A situation that was darkly amusing a sentence ago can swiftly transform to one of sorrow. Lost in thought while walking, the protagonist enters a barely marked military base after missing the “Do Not Enter” sign. Her transgression is met with cocked rifles held by Israeli officers who do not need to ask questions. In a world where a person is suspicious by virtue of existing, the boundaries between one’s interiority and physical environment must be vigilantly aligned and maintained. Getting lost in thought can result in “perilous consequences” such as maiming or death (54). The obligation to constantly pay attention to this multiplicity of borders—between nations, but also between languages, people, and states of being and belonging—is a setup for failure, at times comedic and at others deadly. Shibli explores national borders not just as physical manifestations of the state but social and psychic processes and divisions. Borders, after all, are erected to define who belongs and who does not.
The ultimate boundary this book grapples with is the one between life and death. Minor Detail forces us to confront fundamental questions of political sovereignty: not just who shall live and who shall die, but how shall they live and how will they die. In the first half of the novella, a young woman and her dog are momentarily spared from the slaughter by the commander’s cruel mercy as he contemplates the possibility of her assimilation. The battalion dress her as their own and keep her confined while they decide her fate. Dressed like a soldier, the Bedouin woman looks like one of them, yet she cannot speak their language. This ultimately marks her as too foreign to belong. Her body is disposed of in an unmarked grave of sand. Her burial site becomes the foundation upon which a new world will be built. From the perspective of the battalion’s state-building mission, this is the cost of Progress. The past, however, tends to refuse its linear temporal borders and disobey the imperative that things get better with time.
In the second half of Minor Detail, Israel’s borders have expanded in all directions and continue growing unabated. The protagonist lives in the reality of the new world the commander fought to build. She is educated, reads and speaks in Hebrew in addition to Arabic, lives alone in Ramallah, and works at an office. Her life seems stable, mundane, and routine. She represents one progressive arc of Israel’s civilizing mission: in a span of fifty years, the figure of the Palestinian Arab went from an illiterate dirty Bedouin woman chasing camels to an orderly, well-read, and well-kept professional. Yet her seemingly stable existence is punctured by the ever-expanding borders of occupation. Machine guns, helicopters, and bombs are white noise in the background of her daily life. Children must work to help their families survive. Crimes of ethnic cleansing, both past and present, surround her. The protagonist learns of the Bedouin women’s execution nearly fifty years ago from a Hebrew-language newspaper at her kitchen table. The war crime took place on the day the protagonist was born, though twenty-five years earlier. These dates act as another border between one woman’s life and another’s death. Their lives could not be more different, separated by time and circumstance. But these differences do not change either woman’s fate. The protagonist’s ability to speak Hebrew and her assimilation into a narrative of Progress cannot save her. She is executed by the IDF on the same spot as the Bedouin woman. What these two women have in common, then, is that both are ultimately marked for exclusion because they exist. Their very existence impedes the expanding borders of a settler colonial state.
Further solidifying these women’s fates as obstructions to be eliminated is the fact that neither is given a name. Indeed, none of the characters in Minor Detail are named. This is the case for both perpetrator and victim alike. Names are granted only to landscapes and places. The catch is that, as borders shift, so do the names of various sites. What was once a Palestinian village is now an Israeli gated community. The protagonist drives around with maps that are outdated almost as soon as they are made, in an attempt to find the site of the crime. But the site of the crime is everywhere that has been transformed. This process of land expropriation and displacement is what it means for the Nakba to be a transhistorical political project. Shibli’s choice to keep the characters unnamed and list the changing names of places emphasizes that these characters are not singular individuals but fragments that reflect the larger whole of settler-colonial society and the temporal narratives it wields like a weapon. Past and present are layered over each other across the landscape like a palimpsest that reveals Israel’s colonial trajectory. The characters navigate the ever-expanding material, temporal, and psychic borders that shape a nation-state by focusing on minor details. The particulars, however, are a double-edged sword: on one hand, they allow us to unearth the past; on the other, they sentence us to be buried by it.