On Processing Palestine
Finding it impossible to process everything that’s happening in Palestine right now, I turned to literature. Specifically, to Adania Shibli, Palestine-born novelist and essayist.
It was a news piece on the cancellation of “an awards ceremony due to honour” Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair that initially caught my attention. You see, Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail was longlisted for the International Booker prize and had won Germany’s 2023 LiBeraturpreis. Why was just the awards ceremony (but not the book fair) abruptly cancelled? “Due to the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering”. Watch Slavoj Žižek’s incisive criticism of Frankfurt Book Fair’s decision to cancel the event: https://youtu.be/xIE4Sp_o6wA?si=O13KpKayoPFPd5zo
It led me to pick up Minor Detail, set in the 1948 unravelling of the Nakba. The novel recounts the horrifying tales of brutality by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians.
@european_review and @wasafirimag were also kind enough to remove two of Adania’s writings from behind the paywall and make them accessible for all.
“So what, eh?” Or in pacha Malayalam. “Ayinnu?”
I still pretty much feel as hopeless as I did when I started reading Adania. In “On Learning to Write Again”, Adania also questions the point of words and writing when everything around you crumbles. But she adds: “Words can, for all their smallness, leave a certain trace in the world, as did this faint light emanating from the streetlamps. This faint light, which has left its trace stealthily and quietly in the room, seems at that hour of the night, like a lesson in learning to write again.”
