Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: 24 Hour Relief

      April 21, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      A Cure for Loneliness: Review of Monica Fambrough’s Softcover

      April 21, 2021

      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: 24 Hour Relief

      April 21, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      A Cure for Loneliness: Review of Monica Fambrough’s Softcover

      April 21, 2021

      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Review

Review: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

written by Guest Contributor July 30, 2020

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
New Directions Publishing, May 2020
144 pages / Bookshop / Amazon

 

“The borders imposed between things here are many and you absolutely must pay attention to them, to navigate them,” says the nameless female narrator in Palestinian writer, Adania Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail. This attention, the narrator informs, “ultimately protects you from the perilous consequences.” In a novel exploring the excavation of Palestinian narratives, the consequences are almost always perilous.

Minor Detail is Shibli’s third book length work, and is translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jacquette for New Directions. Borders — the real kind in Occupied Palestine, as well as the metaphorical demarcations between historical memory and displacement — haunt time and space in this compelling work. Minor Detail does something crafty: the narrative speaks forward while simultaneously looking back, reminding the reader that the excavation of memory is politicized and dangerous. History is present everywhere, but remains sequestered, inaccessible. The Palestinian narrator trespasses into institutionalized Israeli history and confronts a narrative defined by what is omitted.

The slim novel offers two contiguous accounts; it begins with the third person rumination of an Israeli general in the Negev in 1949. The second half of the novel moves inward, to a first person point-of-view from a Palestinian woman. Most of the proper nouns in the novel belong to cities, settlements, and Palestinian villages, including the disappeared villages from pre-1948. These geographies become clues, carrying contested historical weight in a land tethered to God and covenant, depending on who is telling the story.

Minor Detail opens a year after Israel obtained statehood and after the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians during the Catastrophe, or Nakba, in May of 1948. A group of Jewish soldiers are patrolling the Negez for Bedouin intruders. The general tells the men that “no one has more right to this area than us, after they [Arabs] left it abandoned for so long, after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals.”

A small group of Bedouins standing “motionless by the spring” are killed. The two survivors, a yelping dog and a young girl, are seized and taken to the make-shift desert camp. The young woman faces multiple humiliations: she is stripped naked, doused with petrol, then soaped and hosed down in front of the male soldiers. Several days later, she is gang raped, murdered and buried in the desert by the soldiers.

The Palestinian narrator in the near present-day discovers this incident through an Israeli newspaper article. She is compelled by one minor detail: the incident took place exactly 25 years to the day before her birth. Unable to let this casual connection subside, she is determined to learn more about the murdered girl and prepares to navigate the complexities of traveling from the West Bank into Israel.

Boundaries, she repeatedly reminds the reader, cause her to overreact. She prepares to cross numerous boundaries in search of this lost story. She knows the plan is reckless. Indeed, reclamation of memory, the nameless narrative hints, comes with those “inevitable perilous consequences.” Sometimes, she is filled with self-doubt. Yet, she crosses multiple checkpoints with her borrowed ID, and embarks on a journey overwhelmed by the discrepancies between the Israeli and Palestinian maps she uses to navigate.

Once she leaves East Jerusalem, Israel is experienced through the lack of boundaries. There are no checkpoints. She visits a military history museum in Tel Aviv. She casually opens an unattended gate at a kibbutz settlement where she later stays overnight in a guest house. She travels unfettered outside of the Occupied Territories, no longer subject to Palestinian-only roads. Eventually, she locates the original site of the crime, and perhaps the ghost of the dead girl, as well as the perilous consequences she understood would greet her.

In the first half of the novel, the general is unable to look at the festering insect wound on his thigh; a wound that leaves him increasingly ill and foul smelling. This odor he blames on the Bedouin girl he has moved into his tent. The Negev is an infection that will rot him from within. The contemporary narrator is followed by a yapping dog that reappears everywhere she goes in the Negev; a canine familiar barking out the mark of time.

No character is named in the novel. Direct dialogue is sparse, and Shibli’s writing is economical, yet dense. Daily life, and the associated internal musings, are weighty objects. The Palestinian narrative recounts everyday horrors, like how one must open the windows in Ramallah when a nearby building is being bombed by the Israelis, or else the window will shatter. Yet, to open the windows means dust from the blast will intrude. Intrusion is everywhere, even in the measured cadence of how Shibli writes the Palestinian narrator’s reflections: “..the situation like this for such a long that that there aren’t many people alive today who remember little details about what life was like before all this, details as small as rotten lettuce in an otherwise closed vegetable market.”

In many conversations about Palestine and Israel, political ideologies often define the human experience of Occupation and effectively obscure personal Palestinian stories. Indeed; memory, longing and victimization are sometimes weaponized by both to claim historical narratives. In Minor Detail, the story is propelled by reclamation, not defamation. The Occupation is an ugly, constant pulse, but the Palestinian narrator experiences space through her own agency and historical curiosity. Until of course, a minor detail gets in the way.

The two perspectives in Minor Detail suggests that Israel is imprisoned by the inability to honestly confront Palestinian existence. The novel opens with a first line acknowledging this reality: “Nothing moved but the mirage.” Shibli’s excavation of unearth buried Palestinian history suggests it is time for Israel to consider the rest of the story.

 


Deonna Kelli Sayed is an internationally published author with essays and short stories featured in Love, Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, Everywhere Stories, Vol. 3: Short Fiction From a Small Planet, and New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims (forthcoming). She works for the North Carolina Writers’ Network and is the PEN America N.C. Piedmont Representative.

Review: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli was last modified: July 26th, 2020 by Guest Contributor
0 comment
1
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Guest Contributor

Entropy posts are often submitted to us by our fantastic readers & guest contributors. We'd love to receive a contribution from you too. Submission Guidelines.

previous post
Restoration
next post
The Birds: Fledgling

You may also like

Ghost Music or Plangency: The Organic Momentum of Matthew Cooperman’s Spool

June 20, 2016

Tangerine (2015), Sean Baker

June 21, 2017

Session Report: Roots and Education

August 19, 2015

Review: PR for Poets by Jeannine Hall Gailey

October 10, 2019
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • parri Loved the article. Beautifully captured..stay strong. Something must await for you at the end of this path..

    How Bodybuilding Ruined My Life ·  April 2, 2021

  • Waterlily Heartbreaking, real, and often so vivid. Parents, family, the pain and the damage we carry for them and from them. There is a black void where bits and pieces of our soul take leave to as we watch our...

    Descansos ·  April 2, 2021

  • Neo G I hsve to check this out! Is that doom on the cover!!

    Dskillz Harris & Chile_madd – The Next Episode ·  March 28, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • COVID-19
  • Literacy Narrative
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • Food and Covid-19
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top