Adania Shibli and Elisabeth Jaquette on Minor Detail

Hi Adania, what has it been like to be longlisted? 

It allowed me to witness mainly from the reactions that reached me, how much literature, and translated literature, still matters to so many people, and that there are so many people out there reading, discussing and sharing thoughts and impressions around literature.  

How would you summarise Minor Detail in one sentence? 

How the fragility of language may not be defeated.

Tell us about the two narrators of the book. 

I like them, as long as they remained in a book. 

How important are minor details to our understanding of past events? 

Taking literary writing away from historical writing, and in view of the colonial attacks on the colonised narratives not being ‘verified’ or ‘accurate’, there remains only fiction as a trusted domain for fictional writing. This is on one hand. On the other, one wonders what is left there for the colonised after the multiple destructions they endure, and which could not be included in an archive, or which the coloniser missed seeing, noting, or articulating, and so destroying or appropriating. These can only be unimportant, minor details that emerge within a language, Arabic in the context of Palestine, that is being attacked, deleted, submerged with spelling and grammatical mistakes by Israeli official laws and non-official practices. It is thus expectedly that such minor details emerging linguistically turn as the ultimate realm for writing, to writing a minor text, which is in truth, need to skip the attention of the powerful. 

With these thoughts in mind while writing the novel, a close friend of mine directed my attention to the work of micro-historian Carlo Ginzburg. That text examines the potential role for minor details in excavating the truth. So it was amusing that the exact tools I came to realise as necessary for writing fiction away from the non-fiction of history, are also adopted by history itself, albeit a microhistory. After the publication of the book, I also became aware of the work of Saidiya Hartman, which felt like holding my writing hand and soothing it, and the fiction it stubbornly held onto as a way to face the violence of writing non-fiction, of writing history.