When Writing Stutters:
Adania Shibli and Zeina Halabi in Conversation
Translated by Sara Mourad
When Writing Stutters:
Adania Shibli and Zeina Halabi in Conversation
Translated by Sara Mourad
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.”
Not only do Adania Shibli’s writings channel the inherent fragmentation in the Palestinian narrative, they also deploy this fragmentation as a methodology of writing. Shibli casts one eye on the Palestinians’ experience with successive and repetitive defeats, and another on the immanent possibilities of what she calls “narrative stuttering,” conceived as repetitions that morph into hesitations, then repetitions, then hesitations again, offering tools to construct sentences as well as characters. Narrative stuttering manifests as a core mode of enunciation in her writing – an enunciative nerve – grasping what language fails to gauge and convey. It is a mechanism to subvert the violence inherent in grand narratives as a means to excavate what has been erased. This is how the past manifests in Shibli’s narrations: fragmented, repeated, truncated.
Shibli’s methodology of excavating speech from erasure, of mining the detail for collective memory, may derive from the moment of her coming into political consciousness, forged as it was between loss and silence. The writer speaks about the moment she understood that the world that seems erased, forgotten, unknown to her today, was once possible and natural – a world whose memory she now feels like the weight of a phantom limb. The memory of that bygone Palestine was first transmitted to her through the silences that hovered over her family throughout her childhood, then it reappeared in pre-Nakba Palestinian literature that evaded Israeli censorship. It was later implanted through the literature that reached Shibli in the form of smuggled and leaked poems, bestowing upon Palestinian literature silence and secrecy.
The Palestinian literary canon, whether it precedes the Nakba or bears witness to it, contributed to the formation of the literary sensibility of the writer who, though conscious of the imprints she bears of consecutive generations of Palestinian writers, remains highly unique, drawing on her own experience of loss, etched as it is in both her speech and silence. This is why reading Minor Detail (2017) as a Nakba novel may not appeal to the writer, she who shields her writing from processes of classification and categorization. But one may insist to read it as a Nakba novel indeed, inasmuch as it is a narrative about loss in the context of settler colonialism in Palestine. And one may add that what makes Minor Detail a contemporary Nakba novel is the literary sensibility of its writer, who sees that minor details “continue to give us access to life in a context where at every moment you are facing destruction.”
An anxious attachment to language manifests across Adania Shibli’s texts and interviews. Concise and cold, her language interrogates the violence underlying the fluent language of power that is confident in its own narrative. In her novels and literary works, Shibli observes the hegemonic and violent power of language, yet in narrating her individual experience, she often speaks about the fragility of her own language and her fear of losing it.
Shibli did not wish to speak much after October 7, describing her silence as a loss of language, as waiting for it. “Sometimes, just as we wait for a beloved’s arrival, I wait for language to come, and I accept this waiting,” says the writer who kept silent following the cancellation of her award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair, while Minor Detail roamed the globe in thirty languages—minus Hebrew—making a mockery out of its author’s silencing.
At the end of our conversation, and in response to a question from the audience about aesthetics in the Palestinian literary canon, Shibli takes refuge in storytelling. The storyteller begins her answer with a question she had read in a text by Walter Benjamin, then proceeds to answer it through the story of the murder of a young Palestinian man, Usayd al-Rimawi, at the hands of the Israeli occupying forces. She relays the story of his death in the language of a news website, which relays the news in the words of Usayd’s family members. She digresses, then returns to narrate; she goes silent, takes a breath, then returns to the story, pulling you along, inside a web of minor details to which no one had paid attention.
“Adania, where are you going with this?” you secretly wonder.
Except that Adania Shibli knows all too well how stories end: At the ultimate moment of Usayd al-Rimawi’s murder, narration crystallizes into theory, as it does in all her writings, free of affect and exaggeration. We are reminded of the novelist’s method of excavating fragmented and ambivalent details that are unmatched in their power to enunciate, minor details whose fragmentation and stuttering point to the literary as a Palestinian experience: “This is the novel,” Shibli concludes her story about Usayd al-Rimawi, “this is Palestinian literature.” The audience, stunned.
— Zeina G. Halabi
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This piece is part of “Transgenerations,” a series of talks and texts by women writers on their search for the discarded traces of the past and their experimentation with forms of retrieval and narration. Inspired by their archival scholarship and work in memoir, biography, and fiction, it showcases modes of writing minor histories that reimagine the past and challenge dominant narratives. The series is curated by Sara Mourad and Rima Rantisi and supported by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut.
Zeina Halabi: When I first met you in 2017, the world was completely different – here in Beirut as well as in Europe. Minor Detail had just been published. Since then, the novel has gone through many lives, and has been read at various political junctures. Let’s start from today: Why all the anxiety about Minor Detail?
Adania Shibli: Minor details are disquieting because they are what the oppressor fails to see. The oppressor is always busy negating and attacking that which is at the center. Maybe this moment of attention is akin to spotting tumbleweed, or like when you are walking somewhere and suddenly you find a tree, just like that, coming out of a wall on the third floor. How did you reach this place? How were you able to get there? And how did you penetrate through the cement and asphalt and find your way to life? I imagine that these details, or the minor details, continue to give us access to life in a context where at every moment you are facing destruction. And destruction is not an idea that comes and goes; you face it every day.
Accordingly, there is an attempt to bury any conception of your existence, as you imagine it to be. But the margin and the minor details are what come to your rescue, to help you, to tell you that your place is not in the center, and that the center provides no sanctuary. I think that I am not the only one to feel this, that the margin and the minor details are what allow us to hold ourselves together in the context of Palestine. From the depth of the abyss, of wretchedness and frustration, something is here to remind you that there are other possibilities, other prospects. These are perhaps the minor details that we got accustomed to seeing, making a place for them in our lives.
ZH: What you are saying reminds me of the story “Out of Time” (2015), where you wrote about your coming into political consciousness as a child upon reading a short story by Samira Azzam. You remember how you came across a detail in it that made you understand something about yourself and about the linguistic and political universe in which you were growing up, realizing that something had been erased from it. You say that your concern with detail, with what is minor, began to take shape at that moment.
AS: Of course. Many literary genres were banned until the Oslo agreement. The Israelis used to prohibit them. War is also war on books, war on language, and you face it everywhere and at every moment: in the water and in the trees and in the kinds of books you read. I remember how the texts of Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qassem were banned, and how someone knocked on our door on a cold and dark winter night to distribute Darwish’s poem “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words,” which had just been discussed in the Israeli Knesset. It is striking how readers respond to things the moment they are banned, how the desire to read emerges then, how the moment the text gets repressed is the moment it draws attention, circulating at night, in the dark; that’s how the poem found its way to us.
There were other important moments before this one. There were permissible texts, like Samira Azzam’s stories, which the naïve Israeli censor considered unthreatening to state order and Israeli security. Samira Azzam continued writing about life in Palestine until the moment she was expelled from it, that is in 1948. We were amazed at how, in her stories, we would stumble upon another possible life in Palestine, unlike the shattered one we were witnessing. While reading her texts, you also discover that what you are living is not natural even though it is the only way you know. The moment I read Samira Azzam’s texts I discovered Palestine, and I mean Palestine where in going to work, the only problem one faces is oversleeping, not waiting in the long queue at the checkpoint or getting arrested on the way there. The idea of oversleeping comes to remind you that the obstruction you are living in the present is not natural. These are all questions that cut through this margin that reminds us of what is disregarded, forgotten. And I think that we depend on this margin, that we have no other choice but to hold on to it.
ZH: As if minor details are not only catalysts for awareness, but they also offer a methodology for narrating abstract issues related to language, violence, and the mechanism of their depiction in fiction.
From the depth of the abyss, of wretchedness and frustration, something is here to remind you that there are other possibilities, other prospects. These are perhaps the minor details that we got accustomed to seeing, making a place for them in our lives.
AS: They become your own artistic sensibility, you attend to them all the time as your source of grace. This is when you start realizing that you are here, and that what you are currently living must end, and that there may be other ways to live. And this moment is so important for literature, to exit the boundaries of the real, its limitations, as well as the limitation of History, which does not grant any weight to the minor and marginal. History focuses on what it perceives as central and on those it deems essential. As to all those people who have no place in History, it’s literature that places them at the center. I think that literature alone is capable of containing all the impossibilities that we face in Palestine, including the inability to speak, or the inability to conceive our experience or grasp it in language.
History does not have this sensibility to make space for people who have an incomplete story, one that is fragmented, full of gaps and moments of suspended awareness, a desire not to know, or belated awareness. Literature allows this shattered story to exist, particularly at the moment when you lose your ability to speak fluently. How are you to speak fluently about that which is meant to destroy you? Part of this destruction and shattering that you are experiencing is the destruction of language and of your ability to narrate. The moment you begin to aspire for narrative completeness, you are also leaving your own experience. Literature, on the other hand, makes space for this. I feel that Palestine showed me a different place and form for literature.
ZH: I would like to discuss play as a distinctive feature in your narratives. We encounter most female characters approaching some kind of border, attempting to trespass military checkpoints or to sabotage institutions they are prohibited from entering. This brings me to a scene in Minor Detail, when the narrator reaches the building of the Israeli archive and begins to watch a reel of the construction of a settlement, then she starts to play with the video, to mess with it: she plays it and rewinds it all the way back to the beginning, as if she is watching the construction of the settlement, then enjoying the scenes of its dismantlement. She uses her fingers to experience, even if momentarily, even as mere play, the possibility of an alternative future.
There is a sense that your characters are not alone in messing with these borders, and that you, as a writer, are also messing with the reader’s expectations of the traditional novel, of the limits of language, through ellipses and abridgements. Tell us about play: How do characters play in your novels? And you, as a novelist, who do you play with?
AS: Maybe it’s the words that play. In writing, you are never fully conscious. I prefer the kinds of writing that I practice when I no longer exist, for language is also what we have in common, what lives amongst us, the invisible relation between us. In writing, you are generally making space for this invisible relationship, so it comes to light. You are therefore not in charge, nor are you at the center in the process of writing. I know that, when I write, I become nothing, and the idea that there is a writer whose name appears on the novel is a scam, because these are all words that lived with others and because of them. Every text is collectively written. The only difference between me and this collectivity is that I have decided to spend my time from morning until noon to do this. But this language is everyone’s, and no one can claim private ownership.
I also want to return to something I mentioned in passing: imagination. I know that we can look at it as a bourgeois practice. In moments of boredom, we start to imagine; but imagination is necessary, even vital, in the life of anyone facing oppression, in Palestine and beyond. Imagination in our personal life is a necessary moment to resist reality and its ways. And I think herein lies literature. It takes up this imaginative space. And herein lies our ability to imagine, and the ability of language and literature to create a place where we exist and a place for us in existence. This is perhaps why we always return to literature, we always return to that moment when reality tries to eliminate our place in it, so we enter a domain that is necessary for us to persist in this reality. How do we move forward in this unknown? How do we experience it? Literature and art make the unknown intimate.
History focuses on what it perceives as central and on those it deems essential. As to all those people who have no place in History, it’s literature that places them at the center. I think that literature alone is capable of containing all the impossibilities that we face in Palestine, including the inability to speak, or the inability to conceive our experience or grasp it in language.
ZH: There is a coldness with words in your narrative language. Your sentences are brief and choice of words precise. Sometimes the sentences evoke the language of forensic reports, as though they are describing the scene of a crime, avoiding any slippage into affect. While affect is absent in your texts and short stories, this doesn’t mean that emotion is also absent; in fact, its trace remains evident despite the absence of affect. Can you speak to this paradox?
AS: I would like to return to We Are All Equally Far From Love, which talks about love, or the absence of love. The novel was written between 2000 and 2004. At the time, there was the second Intifada and the multiple Israeli invasions that followed. I didn’t notice this detail until a friend read the text and said: “You wrote a text about love during that period.” Why love? Why love during that time specifically? In reality, this was neither about love nor feelings, but about their absence. You are in a place where everything is directed to destroy you, in a daily and ordinary manner, through strategies that exist in thousands of details. But you cannot fall apart every time you confront or observe them. And this eventually numbs your capacity to feel. What this means is that the cost of avoiding feeling the effect of this destruction on your senses is that you kill all your feelings. Because you cannot kill a feeling in the morning and return to it in the afternoon. You are performing a daily exercise to murder feelings. So how can you love? Or how do you fail at loving? There are particular contexts where you can love in general, like loving, supporting, and helping strangers; but to love and be attached to one thing, this is almost impossible because you need to prevent your soul from feeling.
The following question is: How do you recover your ability to feel when you work on a particular text? How can this suppressed feeling reemerge? To reemerge through its absence? I don’t think I see this as coldness in my texts, but I see it as it should be, or how the relationship between words should be. Because if you are not cold, you will be destroyed, you will collapse, and you must not, lest you meet the same fate as words.
ZH: I would like to talk about your story “This Sea is Mohammad al-Khatib’s” (2017), where you tell the story of a young man named Mohammad al-Khatib who traveled from al-Khalil to Yafa and drowned in its sea. In the story, you narrate all the potential routes by which the Khalili young man arrived to Yafa, despite Israeli checkpoints and obstacles, as well as all the ways he was embraced by the sea. One possibility, and a second, and a third, and a repetition of the moment of encounter between the young man and the sea forbidden to him.
In the English translation of the story, I was drawn to a piece by the Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid from his series Screenshots (2016), in which he recreates images of violence from the Syrian town of Idlib in embroideries, tatriz. His work made me think of embroidery as a practice.
I am aware that the contexts of the story of Mohammad al-Khatib and of Abdel Hamid’s scenes are different and that the artistic medium in each is distinct too. But there is something very detail oriented in the craft of embroidery, tatriz, in the sense of writing through repetition and accepting possible imperfections in the narrative. I was also drawn to the difficulty of tatriz, of rendering, one stitch at a time, the moment of cruelty. And this made me wonder, what does she who is embroidering such a cruel scene feel? And what about tatriz as a method of writing that is based on precision and repetition, with the tacit acceptance of the story’s possible imperfections?
AS: Majd Abdel Hamid relies a lot on tatriz to redraw photographed scenes, prolonging the moment through his practice, extending it further and further. It is not the moment of the photograph, but the moment through which you experience every part of this image, through the motion of your hand. I find the works of Majd Abdel Hamid fascinating, maybe because we both see that Palestine teaches us to practice our art. We do not write about Palestine or visualize Palestine; it is Palestine who teaches us how to write and how to practice our art. The tools she provides lead us back to the ethics she has created for us. Although the technological world and the industrial revolution drove us to this moment of narcissism and focus on self-interest above all, and although we experience the losses of others in relation to ours, the slowness that we can still practice reconfigures our relationship to the world in which we experience this time.
I would like to return here to the origins of the modern novel as a literary form. The novel appeared in the nineteenth century in Europe with the idea that there is a society to imagine, and that people move inside it in a particular time, a time that has a beginning, middle, and end, as noted in Benedict Anderson’s text, which leads to the following conundrum: How are we to imagine our society in a congruent literary form? What is your imagination capable of in a place like Palestine? How is it possible for you to imagine this relationship to place and society?
First, it is not a relationship that is imposed from the top, nor is it intellectually or ideologically ordained. You return to it, in its perpetually threatened existence, as a visceral attachment, from which you learn without imposing. And I see that this also applies to the relationship between nature and culture in the context of Palestine as well as in other oppressed contexts: We do not impose culture on nature, and yet, there is a certain intimacy between the two. There is, then, an intimate relationship with Palestine not as geography or nation, but as an ethical standpoint that provides us with the means or that teaches us how to be in the world, and how to write in the world. As we experience Palestine in fragments, we come to learn how to write with this fragmentation.
For me, Palestine is a teacher. She personally taught me how to observe, and that observation is an ethical standpoint, not just for the sake of reporting to others, but in order to relate. Palestine also orients you to writing without copying the methods of those who hurt and oppress you. You watch the spokespeople of the Israeli government speaking so fluently, from beginning to end, because they always have a complete story. So how am I to trust this narrative structure that erases me all the time? And so, this is a form of narration that does not aim to erase but rather to engender a new sensibility and sensitiveness to the world, a new way of relating to it. It is a relationship in which you will not reproduce the violence inherent in authoritative narrative, clear as it is, that doesn't stutter or stumble, and whose power is self-assured and pain-free, exploiting any pain it might feel as a means to rearrange its narration.
ZH: It is noteworthy that most of your characters are nameless, and that they move in spaces that are not clearly identified. We see them floundering with paranoia, so we realize that they live under surveillance. We see them performing their obsessive-compulsive habits, so we realize that they are the witnesses of a history of unspeakable violence. We see them investigating an incident, so we realize that this is the scene of a crime. Despite the absence of any clear markers of space and time, we know we are in Palestine.
Palestine itself appears in glimpses, as in a scene from Touch where a student is expelled for writing “Palestine” on his ruler, which is the sole word that indicates the geographic space of the narrative. And though Palestine is not linked to a clearly defined place, it is a ghostly presence that hovers over the narration across your novels. While we cannot fully grasp it, we know it exists through the anxiety that permeates both characters and place. What about Palestine as a present-absentee in your narration? How does it disappear and when does it become present?
AS: I always imagine writing with a language and words that refuse avowal. I am not referring here to language or words that are banned in writing, as this would mean that they accept oppression. Rather, it is the words themselves that refuse to appear, which may reveal another relationship. Where does this word want to appear? I imagine that herein lies the difference between silence and silencing. What does this absence allow if I confront it, not as a form of oppression, but as a condition of possibility for so many other things that we do not know?
A case in point are the decimated villages near my hometown in the lower Jaleel, villages like Loubieh, al-Shajara, and Sirin that we used to visit frequently when we were young. These villages were the realm of our childhood. Except that their names were not written anywhere, so how do you find your way there? There is something that guides you there that has no place in language. You invent a whole relationship to it. When you go to these decimated villages, you find fig trees and vineyards. We started looking after the grapes and figs as they must be harvested before the arrival of disease-carrying insects, which kill the trees. This is part of caring for that which has survived erasure, all while remaining undetected by the Israeli authorities.
Parents don’t tell you that we are going to these decimated villages whose inhabitants were displaced. They don’t tell us that its people were expelled by force. We were only told that we were going to Sirin, Loubieh, and Al-Shajara to take care of the trees, to play among their ruins, only to discover later that Naji al-Ali was from the village of al-Shajara. Hey Naji al-Ali, I spent my entire childhood playing in your land, and I didn’t know, and I didn’t know you yet.When Naji al-Ali’s drawings reached us, we felt that there was something we knew without being certain of what it is, and that there were remains of stones to look for and to imagine, in their place, a room or a street, learning life as we played, bringing it back to these decimated villages.
You feel it as a moment of theater. It is there that we learnt this first exercise in theater. This is not the theater you go to at five in the evening on a Saturday, but theater as a way of occupying space. You pay attention to erasure and absence, how they encapsulate your whole being in a different way, unlike the one we are used to in this familiar existence. And this is what opens for you many possibilities for existing. This is why I repeat that I do not write about Palestine. I write from and with Palestine. Here I would like to note that these things were not obvious to me when I was writing Minor Detail. They were questions or unclear motivations. Now I speak with wisdom after having finished the work, but I was not so wise when I wrote the text.
ZH: As you speak about language, I am thinking of your relationship to language, which seems a bit anxious. You say that you started worrying about your own language after October 7, and you talk about your recurrent anxiety of it fading away as a result of Israeli politics of erasure. In your novels, we notice a total absence of the vernacular, especially in dialogues. In addition to this anxiety about language, there is a certain anxiety from language. In your play “A Wall for All” (2012), you also imagine the way in which language can embody violence and hegemony, turning into a weapon of terror, as we see in Minor Detail, particularly in the speech of the Israeli commander that precipitates the rape. Tell us about your anxious relationship to language and your fear of and for it.
AS: Anxiety brings us back to the question: Can we, the ones who stutter, emulate eloquent speech? Can our language, marginalized and broken as it is, match the violent language of the oppressor? And what narrative are we, the ones stuttering, capable of creating in writing? There are two central questions behind the two parts of Minor Detail: How can a text that is whole, coherent, and self-assured exist alongside another that doesn’t know where to begin? Who is really capable of writing a coherent text?
We laugh about this often in Palestine. Try asking a Palestinian what happened to them in the last couple of days. They will not start with the two days, they may begin ten years ago, or thirty, or eighty, or from the eighteenth century…don’t go all the way back there, we don’t have time for this. You don’t really know where it all started, nor where it all ends. There is an overwhelming chaos that leaves you unable to grasp the moment of beginning; and this is the stutter, this is loss in language, in narration. How are you to narrate your story? Where do you begin? We are talking about October 7. But what if we want to begin in 2021, or 2014, or even before, in 2007 or 2000, 1987, or rather in 1982…This is what narrative stuttering is about.
Then you take a serious look at clear discourse and wonder: If we had spoken with such clarity, would we be in a similar position? If we want to follow the victim, how will our language be? And what kind of narration will this engender? As we see in the world of forensic investigation, when a crime takes place, they usually follow its trail through the criminal’s perspective, because they alone survived the crime. If we imagine refusing to walk in the criminal’s footsteps, choosing instead the point that makes us recover the crime from the perspective of the victim, what would the story be then? This is the relationship between the novel’s two parts and the relationship of language between them. The two chapters have many words in common, and yet each derives from a different language, a different threshold, a different moment: to face the same place, crime, and criminal, but in the second part, to observe how time has passed and occupied these words, and how words, in turn, experienced time and were transformed by it. We might imagine the expression “Man, not the tank, shall prevail” (which appears in the Israeli commander’s speech in Minor Detail) returning today. If we are to use it today, in our time, with all the sorrow it carries, without the propaganda and heroism it claims, but rather with pain and sadness, it might perhaps carry the hope that humans will prevail.
ZH: I would like to discuss your role as a writer today by returning to an interview that Mahmoud Darwish gave shortly before his death, where he says that “to be Palestinian is not an occupation or a slogan.” He adds that the Palestinian poet, or any poet who writes under political pressure today, faces another kind of pressure, which is that of readers’ expectations. In other words, poets must perform two tasks: to be loyal to their role and their readers’ expectations while at the same time being loyal to their own poetic project. The difficulty lies in maintaining the balance.
Back to the current moment, to the Frankfurt Book Fair affair that started weeks after October 7. Your readers expected you to make a statement as an Arab writer facing silencing in Europe, or as a Palestinian writer being silenced, or as a writer from the Global South being silenced, or in any other capacity to denounce these silencing attempts.
But we noticed that you remained totally silent in the early days that followed. Even when you did address the incident in your interviews or articles, it was to raise questions rather than to make a statement. And in response to attempts at reading Minor Detail as a narrative of a true incident, you said that “A novel is a fictional endeavor” and that it bears no connection to reality. In facing this balancing act that Darwish spoke about, it seemed as if you were striving to distance your novel and your persona as a writer from the current moment of catastrophe.
I wonder, how long can you maintain this distance? And how can you maintain it when you have readers who find in your works an exit from reality, or the epistemological and aesthetic tools to deal with it? And how long can you protect your writing from the gaze of an Other who sees it as Southern literature, a literature of color, of accents? To what extent are you able to shield your writing, especially in a time of genocide, from getting entangled with the historical moment?
AS: Perhaps I should start by clarifying that I do not see myself as a writer. I write, that is all. And I write because this is the only way I have found towards life, and we may each find a certain way to it, including confrontation with its violence. Violence does not necessarily occur at the hands of colonial or occupation forces; it may be present in our personal lives, and we may each have our own way of confronting it. As for me, language has always refused any relationship of violence between us.
Generally speaking, it is not hard for me to let down the expectations of others. I have no qualms about it. The other’s expectations do not concern me. I try to forge relationships with others grounded in care and support. There is something authoritarian about expectations that I don’t wish to have with other people, nor with myself; I am not sure if I expect anything from myself. If I expect it, then I am doing it. There is no gap between the two.
And I have tried to understand why language deserted me, and continues to desert me, even as I return to speaking. I speak about everything, but there is one thing I cannot speak about, and will not be able to speak about, maybe because language refuses to be exploited by me, or to be used for ulterior motives. In my relationship with language there’s always been love. I love language and I hope that it loves me back. In this love, I don’t abuse language to go places. Sometimes, just as we wait for a beloved’s arrival, I wait for language to come, and I accept this waiting.
I am still amazed by people’s ability to speak with such lucidity. And I still wonder: When will I be able to express myself so clearly? And it may not happen. For years. And I return here to those who want to begin from the eighteenth century, I follow them and we remain stuck in the eighteenth century. But now I understand that language refuses to bend to my desire or to be exploited for other ends. When I made this discovery, I discovered that it is impossible for me to force my language to be here for me simply because I want to explain what is going on around me to others, or to be as fluent as everyone else, saying “Hey language, you must submit yourself to me.”
A relationship based on demand and order does not exist in this love that I feel towards language, which is grounded in mutual care. All I have to do is wait, wait for language to appear. I suspect that writing, writing with silence, and the perpetual return to writing, is my only way with language. I don’t want to create expectations such as that I am an eloquent speaker, and that I will now tell people everything in a clear manner, like a flight attendant. No. I am unable to do this. I write and I erase, I write and erase. This may take years. It took me twelve years to finish writing my novel [Minor Detail], and I only finished it because my publisher, Dar el-Adab, informed me: There’s no more room for any changes.
“This is the novel, this is Palestinian literature”
I read a text by Walter Benjamin in which he asks: When you witness murder, what do you do?
The question has chased me since.
Two months ago, in a village called Deir Ghassana near Ramallah, a young man named Usayd was killed one night. I read about his murder in The Guardian, in a typical news report: what happened, where it happened, who entered the village…there were confrontations and Usayd was killed. The report was clear and short, following a logical sequence of events (silence).
Then I started searching through a very bad Palestinian newspaper that I love to read, not sure why. You can’t read anything in it because it is overwhelmingly chaotic — a visual and linguistic mess — but I love to read it. I feel at ease with this chaos even though it does not relay the news, but gathers it from other sources, and news is always old. I told myself that they must have written about Usayd, so I started searching through endless pages for the news of Usayd’s murder. I found it. But I found it in the culture section, not in the news section. Strange. Why was Usayd in the culture section? Here we return to what makes Palestinian literature.
They took the testimonies of everyone who was around Usayd before his murder: His mother says, “He wanted to go to the mountain, so I asked him what would you like to eat? He said that he liked this dish, so we started baking…” All these details that have absolutely no place in a news report. Then his father says that a year ago Usayd was up to I don’t know what, then says how beautiful the springtime weather was when Usayd went to the mountain. Then the brother says that Usayd went to the mountain with his friends to have a barbecue and when they returned after midnight, the (Israeli) army was trying to enter the village; and usually when the army enters, young men go outside and try to resist it. Then Usayd’s friends describe how they were standing on the rooftops of the buildings overlooking the square, they start describing the bakery, and once more, a never-ending barrage of details; and how Usayd’s brother saw him running towards a young man who was being shot. The young man falls to the ground.
The question returns here: If you saw someone getting murdered, what do you do? Usayd who had just returned from the barbecue runs (long silence), he runs to help the young man who was killed. Usayd’s brother cannot help him. So Usayd is killed. But they continue the story, how they went to the doctor, and how the doctor told them that he cannot help him…all these endless details, and yet no one knows what happened to Usayd. So the newspaper ran the story in the culture section.
This is the novel, this is Palestinian literature. Here’s where I learn from Palestine. Not from those narratives that claim the victim speaks clearly, and not from narratives such as The Guardian’s that know exactly what happened as they try to deliver the full story. Rather, I learn from the people who were with Usayd, those who don’t know what to say, and even from this Palestinian newspaper that doesn’t know what to do with this text so it runs it under culture, treating it as a cultural text. The moment we get closer to pain, we end up in the culture section.
Sara Mourad
Sara Mourad is a writer, teacher, and scholar. She is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut, and her research explores the constitution of dominant and counter-cultural discourses on gender, sexuality, and the family at the threshold of private and public life. Her work has appeared in a number of academic journals, edited volumes, and media platforms. She is currently working on her first monograph, an intimate history of debt and inheritance in postwar Lebanon.
Zeina G. Halabi
Zeina G. Halabi is a writer, editor, and scholar specializing in modern Arabic literature. Her research delves into the contemporary legacy of 20th-century emancipatory traditions, texts, and figures, with a particular focus on Egypt and the Levant. She is the author of The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation (2017). Currently, she serves as a Research Associate at the Orient Institute in Beirut and is the Arabic editor for Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal.
Adania Shibli
Adania Shibli (Palestine, 1974) is the author of novels, plays, short stories, and narrative essays. Her novels Touch and We Are All Equally Far from Love were both awarded the Qattan Young Writer's Award - Palestine. Her latest novel Minor Detail was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2020 and nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2021. Shibli has taught and engaged in research in different universities in Europe, as well as at Birzeit University, Palestine.
Nour Debian
Nour Debian is a multidisciplinary artist born and based in Beirut, Lebanon. Her work includes paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and books. Using found objects and images, as well as personal belongings and handmade items, she draws inspiration from the space of home, notably the bedroom, to explore intimate themes such as nostalgia, shame, and sexual fantasies.
