Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and originally published in Arabic in 2017

cw: discussion of sexual assault, colonial violence, genocide

A relentless, harrowing, tiny novel that is bleak, unpretentious, and very upsetting, especially in light of the ongoing – and in many ways exacerbated – situation that it depicts.

Minor Detail was originally published in 2017 and is written by the Palestinian novelist and essayist Adania Shibli, and although it is a work of fiction, it’s a work of fiction that is about memorialising, historicisation, truth, falsehoods, and explicitly the mythologising used as justifications for the violences, inhumanities, indignities and cruelties perpetrated on behalf of – and in creation of – the geopolitical entity that is the state of Israel.

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Half of this novel takes place in the late 1940s, on a specific set of days in the August of 1949.

A group of Israeli soldiers are in the south of the (then very young) country, “securing the border” against Egypt, and seeking militants (or what they consider militants) in the desert, essentially aiming to execute on site.

The soldiers find a small group of people with camels, murder everyone (including the camels) except for one young woman and one dog, then take the young girl to the their camp, strip and wash her in front of all of the soldiers, and then vast numbers of the men in the platoon – including the commanding officer, who (alongside the narrative of the prisoner) is becoming increasingly unwell following an animal bite on the leg – sexually assault the woman, before taking her into the desert and executing her and burying her in a shallow grave.

This is all narrated from the close third person perspective of the commanding officer, presenting a reader with blunt, evocative, descriptions of the action paired with his ideological attachment to the perpetration of violence, and his dehumanising thoughts of the young women (and the people she was with, who were immediately killed on sight.)

As literature, Minor Detail is genuinely very difficult to read, bluntly depicting inhumanity wrapped in an ideological purity used to permit any ethical indiscretion.

I found this first half of the book so deeply upsetting that I had to take a 24-hour pause before tackling the second half (each half is about 50 pages), and gave myself a balming dose of a Sookie Stackhouse short story or two in between…

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The second half of Minor Detail leaps forward 50, 60, more(?) years into the future, when a young (or possibly middle-aged, or possibly old) woman, who has read [about] a soldier’s report of the incident described in the first half while doing personal research, decides to look into it more, because the date of the death is exactly 25 years to the day before she was born.

Although I’m sure there are indications in the text (including the specifics of the governmental bureaucratic structures that control and limit the lives of Palestinians), there wasn’t anything explicitly that told [me] whether the actions of the second part were taking place in the 1990s or any of the 30 years or so between then and the onslaught of violence that has been perpetuated by the Israeli state following the attacks by Hamas of October 7th 2023.

In the present of the narrative, the internet does exist, but smartphones don’t seem to be mentioned, though that isn’t necessarily because they don’t exist in the world, they could just be absent from the life of the first person narrator…

So, this independent researcher with an office job hires a car using a friendly colleague’s credit card, and crosses through various checkpoints into a part of the country she isn’t legally permitted to access, using the identity card of a different friendly colleague.

Her plan is to journey to the scene of the  violence, and to a couple of museums and archives in the region, in order to try and get more information about this assault and murder which, due to the minor detail of the date, has piqued her interest…

Obviously, there is mild and frequent friction as she manoeuvres through a landscape that is bureaucratically, intentionally, hostile towards her, as well as towards the people whose identities she has borrowed/stolen in order to make the journey… As she gets closer and closer to some kind of understanding of the extreme violence she is pursuing knowledge of, the shadow and the threat of state-sanctioned violence becomes ever closer, while a bleakly inevitable, yet still shocking, denouement approaches as the book’s small yet powerful page count ekes onwards…

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Unlike the kind of protest literature that James Baldwin writes about in his infamous/famous essay ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel‘, this piece of writing here is not lacking in characterisation…

Minor Detail isn’t a hagiography of the perceived victims of the situation that’s being dramatised, and the villains are not cartoon cut-outs lacking in agency and personhood.

This is an incredibly rounded and incredibly resourceful piece of literature, with huge amounts of detailed, evocative, descriptive language of places, settings and actions…

The first half of the novel rolls out in an almost Hemingwayesque prose style with clear, crisp, descriptions of location, motive and action, while the second half feels more like a contemporary creative nonfiction text about someone researching facts.

Nowhere does the novel feel like it’s scoring cheap points or being sensationalistic…

It is a clear, crisp and unpretentious depiction of the gross violence that becomes widespread and normalised when dehumanisation occurs at scale, as is clearly seen in the news reports and social media posts coming out of this part of the world daily for the last couple of years.

Minor Detail is a serious and important read, but it’s also a very gripping piece of literature.

This is absolutely effective politicised writing, in that it clearly and non-ambiguously depicts a political situation with a clear commentary upon it, however, it does not fail as literature by by by by by losing itself and its artfulness and its creativity within that messaging.

This is a significant piece of work, and given the book’s tiiiiiny length, it’s all the more admirable and impressive…

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I think if you’re considering reading Minor Detail, then it absolutely is something worth spending the time to do, and I think if this is something you’re actively avoiding reading then it’s definitely worth considering and exploring the reasons why you might be doing that…

I, for example, avoided reading this for a while as – since I acquired my copy of the book – I was until now always “about to do” international travel, and before that I was working¹ in a generally conservative workplace, so expressing any opinion about the current situation in occupied Palestine felt like very much a risky thing to do. (And I’m not going to read a book and not blog about it. Christ. Of course not.)

I’m very much guilty of doing nothing, continuing to be silent, which is a thing that many of us do, and though (of course) lots of people don’t do that… Lots of people do go on marches and they do repeatedly post publicly offering support to the victims of colonial violence (which is what is occurring, ultimately), regardless of the repercussions this may have, socio-culturally and economically/professionally, for them as individuals…

I think it remains very difficult to be open and honest about this topic in the UK, especially given the current government’s chosen ties and trade with the Israeli government, which is the party currently perpetuating violence on a huge scale, violence which seems to be imminently about to expedite and exacerbate even further with the ascension of an extreme and increasingly erratic right-wing demagogue in the White House of the United States…

If you have opinions that aren’t socially conservative, and aren’t staunchly pro-establishment, the UK is increasingly a place where it feels uncomfortable to be…

The UK, and the internet, too…

Online, the right wing is in absolute ascendance, with multiple social media platforms that used to be [almost] sources of hope and solidarity having been subsumed and turned into deeply pro-establishment propaganda tools…

It’s quite upsetting, now, to browse these spaces, that once were full of expressions of joy and optimism and progressive action and activity, and to see them now overwhelmed by bot-farmed and also (despicably) human fascist commentary and bigotry…

It’s distressing to have to confront the reality that huge amounts of people globally, internationally, are – for wont of a better word – cretins who now lack a sense of shame or embarrassment for their deeply, deeply, deeply inhumane opinions…

…

The internet isn’t a “free” place anymore, and it probably never was, but it used to feeeeeeel like a place where maybe freedom was possible, where freedom was maybe around the corner… That has all gone…

The hopefulness of these social media platforms has evaporated, as the establishment and the hugely affluent capitalist class has successfully eroded the optimism of the wider world…

With the rich-poor gap widening exponentially and governments all over the world failing to limit this societal destruction, it is difficult to see any meaningful source of hope in world at large at this point…

Just… The loss of things like maintaining vocal commitments to environmental practises is shocking, and even though those promises were maybe not sincere and even though what was promised was likely far less than what the world would actually need to recover from the carnage that we, as a species, have written on this planet since the industrial Revolution, the fact that it used to be an established norm that governments accepted change was needed, and now they don’t, is hard. Is nasty. Is upsetting…

…

It’s a dark time, and the options that we have while living through it seem to be: a) to capitulate and become inhumane and fall in and conform with the aggressive life- and joy-hating right-wing, b) to withdraw and be silent and hope for moments of joy in private spaces, or c) to find other people who don’t want to give up and work for and fight for something better, in a meaningful way. We need meaningful political acts that facilitate change. Yes.

But, unfortunately, the online spaces where people used to connect, are no longer spaces where that sense of connection is able to be found, so for people who never managed to build solid “real life” communities in the past, it will (and has) become increasingly difficult to find those in the future, though the optimist anarchist in me is sure that there is networking and organisation going on, and it’s all very much happening offline now. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that organising isn’t happening at all… Maybe everyone who thinks that genocide is unacceptable is silently sad and playing on their phone and posting occasional thoughts to a micro-audience, rather than doing anything meaningful or constructive about it…

Can I, personally, affect any change in the world? I don’t think I can, certainly not without building community and connections, which I’m never going to find on the corrupted apps on my phone or if I never go anywhere except parks, free museums and amateur comedy gigs…

Also, like, no one is going to be reading this post who has a changeable opinion about the genocide that’s ongoing in the Middle East…

No one would have slogged through almost two thousand words of a bald, millennial, literary lifestyle blogger, poet and amateur comedian meandering around political commentary unless either a) they broadly agree with my opinions/understanding, or b) they’re looking for unacceptable opinions of mine to point at in contempt at a later point, which will only ever happen if I ever accidentally write or perform something that anyone outside of my small small tiny tiny audience ends up liking…. (or they’re a troll, but I don’t get many of those any more.)

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It’s not a good time to be in the world, if you’re someone who thinks kindness and care and community and cohesion are more important than blunt materialistic acquisitiveness.

If you think artistic expression, literature, beauty and collaboration are more important than innovative generative AI or whatever, then it’s a difficult time to exist in the world…

It’s a hard time, but it’s a lot easier for someone like me, silent, alone, haunting South London, than it is for someone who is part of a demographic group currently the victim of a genocide.

People like me, people like you… people like us reading more, knowing more, seeing more, ultimately doesn’t help to stop it…

We all fucking know what’s happening.

Our governments fucking know what’s happening, and nothing is being done, nothing good is being done, fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

It’s a hard time.

It’s a really hard time.

Minor Detail is a fucking brilliant novel.

Sorry I have no hopeful ending here…

Order Minor Detail direct from Fitzcarraldo via this link.

1. It’s hard to remember I used to have a job!? Being a full time carer to the baby (my baby) while idling attempting stand up comedy once or twice a week feels (for now at least) so much more… believable… coherent(?)… as a personal routine… I feel like I’m almost able to not feel like I have a burgeoning sense of integrity… ↩︎