Documenting the unarchivable: Minor Detail and the archive of senses

ABSTRACTThis article is a close reading of Adania Shibli’s Tafṣīl thānawī (Minor Detail), focusing on the novel’s poetic techniques of narrating Palestinian history. This article shows how, in order to break away from the reliance on perpetrators’ testimonies, Shibli creates a repository of unverifiable, seemingly negligible details that ultimately construct the historical event as a continuous phenomenon that lasts until today. Once accessible via present realities, the authoritative archive is rendered unnecessary. Privileging description over action, Tafṣīl thānawī turns minor, tangible details into indispensable pieces of the historical puzzle. This article illuminates why Tafṣīl thānawī does not simply embody the voice of the colonized, but challenges what we deem worth documenting and inserts into the historical discourse the sights, smells, and sounds of undocumented experiences. As such, Shibli provides an alternative method of documenting the past, one that classifies the unarchivable: sensory experiences and a vanishing landscape.KEYWORDS: Palestinian literaturePalestinian historyAdania Shiblicolonial archivessexual violence in Israel/PalestineTafṣīl thānawī (Minor Detail) Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. I am working with the Arabic original. However, all quotations in the article are from Elisabeth Jaquette’s English translation, Minor Detail (Shibli Citation2020).2. I thank the participants of the 2022 seminar of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows of the Hebrew University and the Van Leer Institute Workshop “Is There an Israeli History without Palestinian History?” for their significant contributions to this article.3. For other examples of historiography of Palestinians based on oral testimonies, see, Dina Matar (Citation2010) and Rosemarie M. Esber (Citation2008).4. Nora Parr (Citation2018) convincingly critiques this widespread depiction of trauma narrative.5. Fatima Aamir (Citation2022) and Shir Alon (Citation2019) also compare Hartman’s “Venus” to Shibli’s work.Additional informationNotes on contributorsElla ElbazElla Elbaz is an assistant professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. She completed her PhD at Stanford University and has published in The Journal of Arabic Literature and Dibur on Palestinian and Israeli contemporary cultures. Her upcoming book, titled Future Perfect, explores speculative fiction and art from Palestine and Israel.