I want to record some thoughts on the experience of reading Minor Detail, a novel by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. I read the book over two days, which was quite fast for a slow reader like me. It's a compelling read. I could finish it in a day, but I also wanted to absorb it well as I read it. The novel is divided into two parts: one about the gang rape and murder of a Palestinian woman by Israeli soldiers in 1949, and the other about another Palestinian woman who has read about the incident, this "minor detail," which happens to have taken place over twenty years before she was born. This latter character is preoccupied by the incident and decides to investigate it further by borrowing her friend's identity card to be able to pass through checkpoints and visit the museums and archives in areas forbidden to Palestinians like herself. She was killed in the same area where the Palestinian woman in the first part was killed.
The two parts are written in different, seemingly contrasting, styles. I understand it was intentional to write them this way. The first one is "easier" to read and flows well. It speaks a lot about the reader (me) by admitting that. Poetic, descriptive, clear, almost familiar. It's written in the third person. The second part is a chore to go through. Long sentences that evoke the anxiety and indecision of the protagonist. It's written in the first person, sometimes in sort of a stream-of-consciousness mode. Worth comparing the differences between the two styles, despite the "similarities" of their "ending," the many elements that exist in both stories, clearly devised by the author. Likely the unsettling quality comes from its being written in the first person, as we are put in her state of mind; as opposed to the woman in the first part whose feelings we don't have access to.
This idea of being disturbed by a "minor detail" is something I can relate to with regard to my dissertation research on rape in Philippine cinema. How rape is considered minor, unimportant, relegated to footnotes, whatever. And the second woman's search for it, her efforts, her confusion and anxiety, her adventure, her indecisiveness, her illusions... god. It's just, like her, I simply want to do it. Not for anything. Just for knowledge? For wanting to know, to know more. But for what? I don't know. It's the impulse, the drive. Obviously it's not like I'm getting myself killed by doing this. Goes to show how our lives as academics/writers are not like the people we write about, the people who are actually out there, living in the midst of a genocide.
I'll reread it. For now, these two passages:
"And again, a group of soldiers capture a girl, rape her, then kill her, twenty-five years to the day before I was born; this minor detail, which others might not give a second thought, will stay with me forever; in spite of myself and how hard I try to forget it, the truth of it will never stop chasing me, given how fragile I am, as weak as the trees out there past the windowpane. There may in fact be nothing more important than this little detail, if one wants to arrive at the complete truth, which, by leaving out the girl's story, the article does not reveal." (65, 66)
"I lie there on the sand, allowing my feeling of helplessness to shift into feelings of deep loneliness. I am here in vain. I haven't found anything I've been searching for, and this journey hasn't added anything to what I knew about the incident when I started out. Loneliness gradually turns to anxiety, as the sunlight fades and night begins to fall." (97)
