In an interview, Adania Shibli said that her starting point for writing Minor Detail was a question about language. How do you write from within (as opposed to about) the conditions of occupation—what kind of language and literature is possible?
The fracturing and silencing of language is explicit in the way dialogue is used in the novel. We are told that the woman in the second part of the novel speaks with a stutter. In addition, there is no real dialogue in the whole novel except at two moments, when speeches are given by the officer to his troops in the first part, and by a museum official in the second part where he erases the crime by saying that the Bedouin girl had been killed by her own people. The only people who can speak, in both instances, are those with power: seamless speech therefore is only possible in an official capacity for explanation and justification.
And he begins speaking in a voice so calm and clear, so untouched by stuttering, stammering, or rambling, that it feels as if he is smoothly unraveling a delicate thread, one which cannot easily be cut.
Language failure and inarticulation, Shibli suggests, is a condition of living under occupation, and writing from within oppression reveals the limits of language and its capacity to tell a coherent story. This is reflected in the structure of the novel itself; in its avoidance of linear structure and dialogue, in its adoption of a form that involves repetitions and mirroring. In the architecture of the novel there is no seamless beginning, middle and end, just like perhaps there is no beginning and end to crimes in the context of an occupation.
How do you write from within (as opposed to about) the conditions of occupation—what kind of language and literature is possible?
The novel renders absence and erasure in language, similar to the way that narrator in the second part uses two maps to navigate, one from before 1948, and the other an Israeli map where all the Palestinian villages have been removed. The spaces and silences around what is said, the significance of which words are chosen, is heightened. You can feel this in the preciseness of the actions described (the daily routine of the officer, the actions of the female narrator), but also what is not fully described—the violence.
In a novel that is specifically interrogating what kind of language is possible from within conditions of oppression, it is interesting to reflect on how the words as well as the silences were translated from the Arabic into English by translator Elisabeth Jaquette. The language in English is sparse, clear, and consistent in its repetitions. The translator also consistently employs the recurring images and motifs in both sections of the novel.
Tellingly, both the author Adania Shibli and translator Elisabeth Jaquette have stated in separate interviews that they found the translation process intensive. Shibli states that the text ‘came with an added burden for the translator because the language had been formulated by a specific experience—in this case, the ways it was violated by colonization and oppression’. In this sense I can’t help wondering what might have been lost in translation from Arabic to English by an American translator, and what could have been gained by a translator from a similar background. In Kitchen Table Translation, Madhu Kaza discusses translators who identify as being part of an immigrant diaspora and how they might bring a particular set of concerns and questions to translation that is distinct from the mainstream literary translation establishment which is overwhelmingly white. She asks, what can the act of translation become when it is not only language that is translated, but a translated self? When the movement of texts coincide with the movement of bodies, where ‘issues of language and culture necessarily collide with questions about politics, history, race and imperialism—the very contexts of migration and diaspora.’
Reading works in translation, we are also crossing borders, and something inevitably gets lost along the way.
Lina Mounzer, in translating first-person accounts by Syrian women living under siege and war, wonders how to convey to English readers the sense of urgency particular to wartime conditions. She speaks of how her own personal experiences of war in Lebanon makes her aware of language when she translates from the Syrian texts into English:
It reshapes your vocabulary. It becomes part of your language. A barrel will no longer ever be a barrel again; shrapnel will always explode from it. The word mustard will forevermore carry a whiff of gas, rashing your skin, smarting your eyes.
At times I felt that the translation I was reading in Minor Detail was missing something, but not being able to read Arabic, it’s hard to know precisely what. It makes me curious about the process of translation that occurred here, what questions were asked, what concerns. And it’s hard also to know what, if anything, could mitigate this—perhaps leaving some words in Arabic, or having a translator’s note, of which the book has neither.
In the end, perhaps the text itself in English is an example of the untranslatability of war, of oppression, of occupation—what is language capable of in the face of such violence? Perhaps it’s a testament to the novel’s own point about the impossibilities of bearing witness, and language’s failure to do so. Perhaps it is also an example of the act of translation itself being both one of language and of silence. Reading works in translation, we are also crossing borders, and something inevitably gets lost along the way.
Minor Detail is available now at your local independent bookseller.
