Trans. from Arabic by Elisabeth Jacquette
Of the books I’ve read recently, I’ve been continually compelled by this one. I didn’t enjoy reading it, and I don’t enjoy remembering it; I found it grindingly oppressive in fact. But its achievement is undeniable in its effect. I was more glancingly informed than deeply familiar with the nuances of the conflicts, daily life and history of Israel/Palestine before reading this book. After reading it, I think I have a visceral feel for it.
Minor Detail has two parts, which in many ways mirror each other. In the first part, an Isreali army officer, who has been bitten by a scorpion, presides over extinguishing a Bedouin encampment and subsequently over the humiliation, gang rape and murder of the sole human survivor of the massacre, a teenage girl. Travel through the desert, care for the scorpion bite wound, the pressured machinations of the war machine are all reported in very simple, almost neutral-sounding language that allows the imagination full play in visualizing the events as they unfold and grind, step by step, towards the annihilating conclusion of state-sponsored murder.
In the second part, a woman in Ramallah who found personal resonance in the date of the newspaper report of this rape and murder well after the fact decides to retrace the sequence of events, crossing the zones of allowed activity to eventually find her way to the location of the murder. The mirroring of this piece to the first happens both through objects and through actions: driving in the car, the smell of petrol, the presence of guards, the crossing of borders, trees and plants, the wrapping and unwrapping of either a bite wound or of a piece of gum. The second piece fits (almost too perfectly) to the first like a split piece of granite, leaving little if any room for ambivalence between the two; the reader is squeezed between these two interdependent but definitively oppositional pieces which are separated by time but united by place, context, relentless circumstances and details.
One piece of information I found handy in thinking about this book was hearing the translator discuss the process of translation, and how, in conversation with the author, Shibli was adamant that the language be unadorned rather than descriptive. An example being a verb choice in the first part: the first translation attempt was that the girl was “dragged” from a vehicle, but Shibli preferred that the soldiers “took” her from the vehicle. Thus the violence is inferred but left to the imagination, though it’s clear who was acted upon and who acted, rather than dramatized via language. Understanding this choice compelled me to think about how much violence is already embedded in everyday language in ways that might be in our blind spots. By showing how language – even very simple, seemingly apolitical language, can itself be part of the war machine and still carry its shadows, this book made me a better reader.