May’s Book.
Minor Detail is a story set in Palestine. The first half of the novel takes place in 1949, after the Nakba, while the second unfolds in the 21st century. In the latter, the protagonist, a nameless woman living in Ramallah, describes in detail her daily routine under occupation. That routine is disrupted when she comes across a report about an incident that occurred on the day of her birth, 25 years earlier, in the Negev region: a young Bedouin girl was raped, shot, and buried in the sand. A ‘minor’ detail in history, as the narrator calls it, in history, yet it carries the weight of the tragic occupation and discrimination the indigenous people of that land would face for the years to come. “The date in which it occurred cannot be more than a coincidence. Besides, sometimes it’s inevitable for the past to be forgotten, especially if the present is no less horrific.”
The novel concludes with an abrupt scene. Yet, what unfolds isn’t surprising, just heartbreakingly familiar in the context of Palestinian suffering. The ending feels incomplete, and yet it brings the novel to a hauntingly complete close. To not give anything away, I just want to mention that it painfully ties with the fate of this young Bedouin girl. It goes back to the beginning, two women at different times, both subject to dehumanisation in the eyes of the oppressor. The author manages to evoke claustrophobia through the setting and the character’s inner world. It truly encapsulates the everyday fear Palestinians (wherever they reside) go through. Reading this novel was a struggle, not because of its prose, but because of how closely it reflects the harsh realities of oppression in the Palestinian territories. The woman in the second part speaks in first person, yet maintains a distance from the reader. This allows us to empathize with her but only to a certain extent, not because we can’t see the horrors that befall its people, but we in the West can’t rationalize the violence Palestinians have endured for generations. I kept asking myself: how do they, in the face of so much pain, keep going? Her emotional detachment made sense to me: there’s too much destruction to assimilate.
The longer I followed her story, the more I could visualize her and the world around her. Adania Shibli writes at a deliberate, slow pace, building a sense of heaviness between each sentence, intentionally shaping the scenes that continue to unfold. She mentions the Palestinian villages that once existed throughout the southern part of what once was Palestine. The only way the protagonist could see where they had been was through an old map, from before 1948. That image stayed with me. A simple map becomes a form of remembrance; it serves as a testament to the families who once lived there, cared for olive trees, and tended their land. Now, there’s barely anything left. It’s been occupied by settlement communities, or the area belongs to the desert once again.
