Book Specs 📖

• Authors: Adania Shibli (translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette)
• Genre: Historical Fiction, Novella
• Pages: 112 pages (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

One sentence Synopsis🔖

Two part narrative based on the true story of the Nirim Affair, a 1949 gang rape and murder of a young Bedouin-Palestinian girl by the Israeli Defense Force , followed by a fictional account of a Palestinian woman who tries to investigate this incident.

Notes/Thoughts📝

This will require a second and even third read…and dare I say has found a place on my favourites top shelf?! In a little over 100 pages, Shibli builds a multi-layered story that is equal parts harrowing and intriguing.

The author deftly uses repetitive motifs (i.e. the spider/webs/borders/gasoline) to draw correlations between the first and second parts of the novel. Borders is a large theme of the book –‘military ones, geographical ones, physical ones, psychological ones, mental ones’. I cannot put my finger on it yet, but I feel that there is something intentional in the hypnotizing motions of the Israeli soldier’s bedtime routine – it creates something like a box or a border, a rhythm that the reader acclimatizes to, only to violently bulldoze the walls in the next scene. The book is about systemic erasure of Palestinian identity, territorial/human borders, and the question of who gets to tell the final story.

P.S. I’d like to revisit this passage on my second read “Solitude is so forgiving of trespassed borders; it was only thanks to my time spent alone, sitting at my table in the mornings, “working” on something, that I was able to make my discovery.

P.P.S would like to read The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine before re-reading this again for a deeper understanding of Palestine’s occupation from a territorial border perspective.

“Quotes”🗣

“…sometimes it’s inevitable for the past to be forgotten, especially if the present is no less horrific”