Academy Dialogue: Adania Shibli and Eva Menasse
Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail intertwines the fates of two Palestinian women: a Bedouin girl, who is violated by Israeli soldiers in 1949, and a young woman in the present who traces details of the girl‘s story. Eva Menasse reads excerpts from Shibli's novel before the two authors engage in a conversation about the central themes of the book: the limits of narration, and violence and erasure over the course of time in Palestine and beyond. Shibli describes a Palestinian narration—shaped by experiencing Palestine through fragments and ruptures—as an act of dysfluency and "stutter”. Shibli's novels are characterized by working with anti-narrative structures- cracks that emerge from a literary narrative whose beginning and end are blurred in the linguistic turmoil of decades of political oppression and military occupation.