Title & author
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Synopsis
When reading Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s award-winning novella, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, readers see laid bare the ongoing, systemic, and generational brutality of the Israeli government against Palestinians. Minor details weave the book’s two parts together, showcasing how despite the attempt to erase history, to erase the Israeli government’s current violence against Palestinians, the world can’t.
Who should read this book
Fans of Enter Ghost and Celestial Bodies
What we’re thinking about
Minor details that make a complete picture
Trigger warning(s)
Sexual assault, physical violence (gun violence), colonization, genocide, Islamophobia, racism, sexism (see more)
“History versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past…There is no reliable literary or journalistic or scholarly history available to them, to help them, because they are living in a society and a system in which the conquerors write the narrative of their lives. They are spoken of and written about – objects of history, not subjects within it. Therefore not only is the major preoccupation of the central characters that of reconstituting and recollecting a usable past…but also the narrative strategy the plot formation turns on the stress of remembering, its inevitability, the chances for liberation that lie within the process.” — Toni Morrison on Beloved
When reading Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s award-winning novella, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, readers see laid bare the ongoing, systemic, and generational brutality of the Israeli government against Palestinians. Divided into two parts—the first from the perspective of an Israeli soldier and his comrades who rape and murder a Palestinian woman, in the year following the Nakba, the second years later as a young woman in Ramallah learns of this “minor detail” erased by historical narratives and seeks to learn more—the perspectives are completely different; and yet, minor details weave them together, showcasing how despite the attempt to erase history, to erase the Israeli government’s current violence against Palestinians, the world can’t.
Minor Detail brings to mind Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory,” or, as she wrote, “as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past.” As the unnamed protagonist heads on her journey to learn more about the young woman murdered in 1949, she attempts to reassemble this past with what she knows and those around her know. “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,” (Shibli, 60). But while the narrator “find[s] no details, neither major nor minor, to denounce the crime that occurred here twenty-five years to the day before I was born,” readers are shown the connections (96). We see echoes between Part One and Two, minor details that serve to connect the time periods: imagery of grass pulled out by the roots, barking dogs, spiders, camels—until finally they completely merge at the book’s climax on the final pages. This knowledge, plus what the narrator provides of everyday life in Ramallah, Gaza, and beyond, reassembles the picture. We see the past in the present.
“There are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence” (63). In focusing on these minor details, Shibli crafts a story of censorship and reveal, one that pulls back the curtains on the Israeli government’s history and present, and their attempts to cover the atrocities they’ve committed and continue to commit. These atrocities are not simply the ones that we might see in the news, but the every day—the erasure of city and street names, of checkpoints, of wiping away the real history of a young girl brutally raped, murdered, and buried by the military. And maybe, in that inevitability of discovery and remembering, Shibli creates a path forward for the readers’—and maybe even the protagonist’s—liberation.
“There are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence.”
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Minor Detail is just over 100 pages. How does the length of the novel impact the story?
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