Listening to Adania Shibli, one feels herself in the presence of a storyteller like no other. The writer begins by diving into an idea and supplements it with a story in which she summons thinkers and turns them into fictional characters, then casts a light on marginal figures that places them at the core of the historical event. Shibli effortlessly moves between the written and the aural, between abstraction and narration, and she does it ever so playfully, ultimately distilling narrative into theory.
Adania Shibli mines the minor details that have been dropped, by chance or design, from the grand narratives of defeat, and which have receded into silence, settling in the most concealed spaces, like the body and its affects, language and its violence. Shibli started exploring the power of minor details, and of the silence surrounding them, in her plays, essays, and fiction, most notably in her first two novels Touch (2001, Trans. Paula Haydar) and We Are All Equally Far From Love (2003, Trans. Paul Starkey). There, she casts a suspicious gaze on the fluency of narration, on the cohesion of authoritarian narrative structures and their propensity for violence. Against this narrative fluency, the writer adopted fragmentation (التشظّي) as a phenomenological device: “As we experience Palestine in fragments, we come to learn how to write with this fragmentation.”
