History is recorded in real time day by day in chronicles about Gaza that have been dripping with pain and blood since October, but there are times when a book, a single book, can condense reality and also the clash between reason and unreason, between coexistence and aggression, peace and war. The novel A minor detail, Adania Shibli is one of those rare gems that paints the complex from the simple. Awarded by the German association LitProm in an award cancelled at the last Frankfurt fair following the Hamas attack, this 50-year-old Palestinian was able to receive the award given by the cultural club Leteo. The event was held this Tuesday at the Musac in León as part of the Festival Palabra.
“The Frankfurt book fair is very strong and powerful, and the cancellation was an act of violence. But at the same time something interesting happened: readers read from their own privacy and many have given books a place in their lives. Each one has made their choice from their own privacy,” Shibli told EL PAÍS in León.
Her book was first published in Lebanon in 2017 and reached the Palestinian territories almost clandestinely, with photocopies that were passed from hand to hand in the West Bank and Gaza, in a scenario that she describes as one of absolute censorship of Palestinian authors. From there it jumped to several languages —in Spain it is published by Hoja de Lata— and was a finalist for the National Book Award (in the US) and the International Booker Prize (in the UK). It was later when the cancellation and the very serious aggression in Gaza projected her to a dimension that she shuns.
“I try not to make myself visible from that point of view. What is important is the reading, and the incredible thing about literature is that it allows each reader to read the book as they wish. If someone wants to say that my pain is anti-Semitic, that is their reading. My pain is my pain. There are those who do not like to look at what they have created, but that is blindness,” says Shibli.
And the novel is extraordinarily poignant. And pioneering. It narrates the rape and murder of an Arab girl by Israeli soldiers in 1949 in the Negev desert when the Army was trying to ensure its presence to begin colonization. From this event, embroidered with masterful coldness, without question and without us hearing the girl’s voice, a second part begins in which a Palestinian woman tries to find out, decades later, what happened. Shedding light and words on that will in turn illuminate the silences of the present, in an oppressive environment in which words die because they cannot mean what they are. And where Israeli names have been superimposed on Palestinians on maps. Israeli repression passes like a steamroller over the existence of Palestinians separated by the intricate system of walls and areas of different levels of access that have become a nightmare. “The walls have not separated the Palestinians from the Israelis, but the Palestinians from their lands,” she says.
And it is this reality that unites past and present in search of its own definition that she has attempted and achieved with what she describes as her “broken, hesitant and confusing language.” “I know that there are classic narrative structures with their beginning, middle and end, but my way of narrating is broken, hesitant, it is the language of those whom we will never hear,” she clarifies.
Perhaps that is why she is so forthcoming when talking about Germany, where she has lived in recent years and where she has suffered this painful cancellation. “Germany is acting arrogantly, without compassion. For them there is no compassion, there is narcissism. The story is about themselves. And they deny that your pain exists. But I know that my pain exists.”
—Is it arrogance? Or guilt?
—Guilt comes from narcissism. There is a difference between guilt and compassion. They are not able to put themselves in another’s position and that is dangerous.
—Are you surprised that you are accused of anti-Semitism?
—My novel is not anti-anything. I am not. I am pro. My ethics is that of compassion, of caring for the weak.
Adania Shibli was the youngest of several siblings who were older than her and who she watched read and write when she was still unable to. “There was always a mystery about language. I felt that I could make them dream, laugh… and that I was not yet allowed to enter.” Another factor also became a driving force in her writing: “As I began to grow up, I wondered why people were not able to speak forcefully, with confidence, but rather did so in confusion, in a roundabout way, without precision, while others, the Israelis, could. They did speak freely. And I wondered why. My first experience of oppression was in language.”
Shibli gives an example: the separation of the Palestinians into zones arose in the so-called “peace negotiations” that the two sides held 20 years ago, which never resulted in a final agreement. “From then on, the word peace means that we will be beaten again. Now, if you resist, you are a person who is resisting peace. And it creates a feeling that language goes one way and life goes another. They don’t fit together. Like the abuser who tells you that he loves you and you come to the conclusion that if this is love, you don’t want love. If they treat us in a ‘slightly human’ way, they don’t treat us in a human way.”
She has found plenty of humanity and support in Spain, and especially in León, where the Leteo club has added her to other prizewinners such as Paul Auster, Mircea Cărtărescu, Michel Houellebecq, Juan Gelman, Amélie Nothomb and Belén Gopegui. “We have given the award to great writers who sponsored Jewish culture,” said Rafael Saravia, poet and director of the Leteo Club at the award ceremony, which is granted with the support of the León City Council. “But today the Israeli government is committing a genocide that we denounce from the cultural world.” The award, he stressed, goes to a “great writer and great thinker.”
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