Adania Shibli - Atul Joshi
Atul Joshi
Tracing Numbness
In On Learning to Write Again, Palestinian writer Adania Shibli describes receiving an automated phone call from the Israeli Defence Forces that orders her to evacuate her home due to imminent bombing. She writes “it’s the kind of call made by the Israeli army when it is about to bomb a residential building… The moment someone answers the call, they relinquish their ability to accuse the Israeli government of war crimes or crimes against humanity, as they have been « duly warned ».” It’s “yet another moment in which one faces the destruction of the world with numbness.”
Numbness: a loss of feeling in a part of a body, also used to describe other changes in sensation. For Shibli it’s situated in the direct experience of terror and the very real fear for the safety of her family. For me, across the other side of the world, the numbness is different. It’s detached and hence, I tell myself, lesser. It’s the reaction to observing from a distance atrocities that are so constant that the ability to feel has become compromised. In my relative safety, I experience it as a general malaise created by the 24/7 news cycle I’ve become hooked to like a drug, a chemical that I need more of, at higher dosage, to get the same initial hit of outrage, but which refuses to deliver because I have consumed too much.
The 2012 Sandy Hook shooting of twenty children in the USA, the 2015 image of Alan Kurdi, the dead Kurdish boy on Bodrum beach, Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the 2021 reports into the discovery of unmarked mass graves of First Nations children under the pastoral care of boarding schools in Canada. Such brutalities against children hit me hard, although I am not a parent. There is a special despair about witnessing embodiments of innocence and potential being obscenely negated. My go to reaction to cope with this anguish has become the shutting down of any sense of emotion.
This lack of feeling switched on in October when Israel launched the bombardment and siege of Gaza, stopping the supply of food, fuel and other essential commodities, an act that is now described by a panel of United Nations human rights experts as a genocide in the making. Numbness kicked in when hospitals became targets, the death toll surpassed 12,000 and the nightly news started screening footage of children in body bags. How could this happen again, in 2023?
It dawns on me that my state of inaction is relished by the powers that control us. It subdues the ability to act, to question, and silences thought. Yet my body wants to fight this signal of dysfunction, recoils at the scrambling of my ability to identify threat, at the impairment of my judgements about well-being and survival.
Responding to these cues, I re-engage in the best way I know how, through the work of artists who show me the world in its complexity and who, beyond the inexplicable binary need for journalistic ‘balance’, in which cause fascists, dictators and criminals are offered airtime or column inches to justify themselves, enable me to form a view of atrocity and rebuild a sense of feeling.
Shibli’s 2017 novel Minor Detail is one such work. It helps me to understand the ongoing impact of the Nakba, that mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab Israeli war. In two sections, the first of which begins with an army unit setting up camp in the Negev Desert in 1949 and ends with the gang rape and shooting of a young Bedouin girl, the second which charts the attempt by a woman, many years later, to discover the truth of the event and the identity of the girl, Shibli writes, as obliquely as only an artist can do, about borders and transgression, about a poison that once injected can’t be removed, about erasure and about lives lived in a constant state of fear. The symbols and motifs she uses to link both sections, the narrative that drives both parts to their inevitable ends, force me to reckon with history and its ongoing repercussions, to shake off my numbness, in a way that no reportage can do. And with an image that catches my breath, Shibli answers my question, predicting the rise of current events as “like when a clutch of grass is pulled out by the roots, and you think you’ve gotten rid of it entirely, only for grass of the exact same species to grow back in the same spot a quarter of a century later.”
Yet the demand for numbness and silence continues. In October this year Shibli was due to be awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The award ceremony was indefinitely postponed.
Back in her home in Berlin, a few months after that call to evacuate, Shibli wakes and is terrorised by a black shape in her room. She sees that the streetlight has cast the shadow of a pile of books on her windowsill onto the opposite wall. “Perhaps words are like this,” Shibli writes, “they can, for all their smallness, leave a certain trace in the world.”
Shibli, A. (2020). Minor Detail (E. Jaquette, Trans.). Text Publishing. (Originally published 2017).
Shibli, A. (2022, June 13). On Learning to Write Again (W. El-Tamami, Trans.). European Review of Books. https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/on-learning-to-write-again/en
United Nations. (2023, November, 16).
Gaza: UN Experts call on international community to prevent genocide against the Palestinian people. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/gaza-un-experts-call-international-community-prevent-genocide-against
Adania Shibli (1974, Palestine) has been writing novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays, which were published in various anthologies, art books, and literary and cultural magazines in different languages. Her latest novel Minor Detail was published in the US by New Directions in 2020, in a translation by Elisabeth Jacquette, and has been translated into many languages, most recently into German (published by Berenberg Verlag). Minor Detail was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
Taken from New Directions Books
Atul Joshi identifies as he/him, a member of the queer community and a person of colour. He's been shortlisted for the Saturday Paper’s Donald Horne Prize and the Newcastle Writers’ Festival Fresh Ink Prize. His writing has appeared in The Big Issue, Peril Magazine, the Portside Review, Growing up Queer in Australia and the Sydney Review of Books. Born in Myanmar of Indian parents, he is currently a Ph.D. candidate at UTS. @atuljoshiwriter
