I’m so clumsy this is exactly the kind of border I cannot trespass. Damn! What did I just do! After I pass through the intersection, I pull over on the side of the road to catch my breath, and a numbness extends into every part of me, making me feel heavy. During a brief glance at its rippling surface under the midday sun, I realize suddenly, but too late, that I’m driving through a red light, into a four-way intersection where each road has three lanes, and that all the cars are jolting to a stop to let me go through. And now the sea, not the signs, begins to lead me toward the city, and as I drive on this bleak road, passing factories and auto repair shops, I cannot resist glancing at its trembling blueness every few seconds, until I almost cause an accident. The sea! There it is, in real life, after years of absence, years in which it was nothing more than pale blue on a map. From there, I’ll turn left onto Salama Road, where I’ll continue toward Yafa, or “Yafo,” as the signs directing me there declare, until the horizon materializes as a blue line.
I look back at the Israeli map for a moment, to check that I should take the Kibbutz Galuyot exit to the right, and a moment later it’s announced by several giant signs, just as new high-rise buildings emerge from the horizon. A few shepherds with their livestock on a distant hill.
#Minor details driver
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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