![]() ![]() ![]() A few shepherds with their livestock on a distant hill. Clothes hung out to dry behind a gas station, the driver of a slow vehicle I overtake, a thorn acacia tree standing alone in the fields, an old mastic tree. Little details drift along the length of the road, furtively hinting at a presence. After a disappearance, that’s when the fly returns to hover over the painting. It’s been a long time since I’ve passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right. The road is nearly perfectly straight, but even so, I keep glancing at the Israeli map unfurled across the seat next to me, fearing that I may get lost in the folds of a scene which fills me with a great feeling of alienation, seeing all the changes that have befallen it. The car cuts through the landscape at high speed. Minor Detail was translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, the Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974, holds a PhD from the University of East London, and has published three novels in Arabic. The following is excerpted from Adania Shibli's, Minor Detail, a novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people. ![]()
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