Ultimately, the attempt to restore agency to someone we’ve seen previously described as a “still-moaning black mass”, heard only screaming in a language unknown to her persecutors, proves a dead end. While this more conversational segment generates suspense about the novel’s wider purpose, interest also lies in its portrait of everyday life under occupation: what it’s like, say, when soldiers blow up the building next to your office to get at targets hiding inside, and you find yourself bothered most of all by the dust blowing on to your desk. Haunted by a newspaper report on the crimes we’ve just read about, she’s unable to shake off the idea of somehow telling the story from the victim’s point of view – a project that leads her to embark on a risky road trip south, through long-razed villages, towards a site well beyond the zone permitted by her ID card.
Halfway through, the novel loosens up to give us the first-person testimony of a nervy insomniac (also unnamed) in present-day Ramallah. Then he lifted her shirt above the chest and lay his body on top of hers.” The language, as light on judgment as a stage direction, is highly disconcerting. In Elisabeth Jaquette’s translation from the original Arabic, events are recorded minutely but without emotion, not least when the officer seizes the only survivor, a young woman, and takes her back to the camp: “He brought his left hand back and held her by the throat, closed his right hand into a fist, and flung it at her face. Focusing on action, with no room for thoughts or feelings, or even names, the novel’s third-person narration sticks to the viewpoint of the officer in charge, with barely any speech, and none that isn’t his. While the impassivity of the language generates a measure of dark humour, it’s mainly a source of between-the-lines horror.
“The soldiers moved through the spot of green surrounded by endless, barren sand dunes, combing the area for weapons. Long, uneventful days are broken when a patrol unit stumbles upon a group of nomads and instantly shoots them dead. Shibli, a Palestinian writer based in Berlin, starts with an account of an Israeli platoon setting up camp at the desert border with Egypt. The difficulty of portraying the atrocity lies at the heart of a highly sophisticated narrative that pitilessly explores the limits of empathy and the desire to right (or write) historical wrongs by giving voice to the voiceless.
I n Adania Shibli’s third novel, a young Arab woman is raped and murdered by Israeli troops in 1949.
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