Jessica Whyte

Adania Shibli, Minor Detail. Trans. Elisabeth Jaquette. (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020)

Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail is a novel made of two stories of violence and domination, separated by more than six decades. In the first, set during the Palestinian Nakba, a terrible crime is committed against a girl by soldiers sent to ‘cleanse’ the Negev of remaining ‘Arabs’. This ‘incident’, the Palestinian narrator of the second story notes, is the kind that ‘happens so often that I’ve never paid them much attention before.’ Yet, she does pay attention to this one because of a ‘minor detail’: it took place exactly twenty-five years before her birth. As she begins an obsessive quest to discover the truth of this ‘incident’, she crosses borders—‘military ones, geographical ones, physical ones, psychological ones, mental ones’. With the aid of a Jerusalem ID card borrowed from a colleague, she travels across the Qalandia checkpoint from Ramallah in a rented car, guided by two maps, one populated by the towns and villages of Palestine before 1948 and another, produced by the Israeli tourism ministry, of the highways that lead her to military museums and settlement archives from which the details she is seeking have been erased. Like the narrator, who searches fruitlessly for details of the incident even as its violence pursues her, Shibli’s novella disrupts the border that demarcates past from present. Through an accumulation of minor details, Minor Detail confronts the way the violence of Israel’s founding haunts and structures the lives of those who continue to live subject to its occupation. 

Máiréad Enright

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Said the Dead (Faber & Faber, 2026)

I recently read Said The Dead by the Cork poet and writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa. It is a kind of history drawn from the archives of Cork City’s former ‘lunatic asylum’. It brings back the stories of women who lived and died there in the nineteenth century. I know the building well – it looms on the hill over Western Road, in Cork, a few minutes’ walk from where I went to law school.  In the book, Ní Ghríofa reflects on her experience in the archives as someone who is not read as a professional historian or academic researcher. Maybe not a professional, but certainly a maker of beautiful histories. I found this book one of the most compelling I’ve ever read on archival research, and on the difficulties of retelling what remains of the stories of institutionalised people. Here is a paragraph from Said The Dead. It is about the expectation that we should never use the real names of the dead we find ourselves writing about. I shared it with a colleague as soon as I read it, because we are undertaking work of that difficult kind together (and because once upon a time, I patiently changed a woman’s name all the way through a long academic article only to find, when the thing was published, I had made a slip. Her real first name had emerged, just once, to haunt the text. Ní Ghríofa’s book helped me to understand that mistake, and to wonder if it was something else after all). The paragraph begins as an archivist interrupts the author while she has been patiently copying out quotes from long-dead women’s medical records, alongside their real names. I am transcribing from the picture I took on my phone because, as happens with wonderful books, I have already given my copy away.

Listen – ethically speaking – it’s just – a pause. Then – if you want to continue here, you have to promise you’ll change the names. Every one of them. OK?

            It’s the rules. Patient anonymity.

            She didn’t know what to say.

            Do you understand me?

            She blushed. No one else here would make such a foolish error.

            So you’ll change the names?

            She would have given anything to hold on to the keys to the other world.

            She gave her word.

Outside, it felt far too bright. 

Stumbling across the road with her loose notes she held Bridget’s words close as she fell into the car. That rule was all wrong. Bridget wouldn’t want her name taken from her. Bridget wouldn’t like that at all. ‘If you won’t give me my liberty, by the Lord God, I’ll stick a knife through your heart’. To delete her name would be to steal from the dead. […] Their words meant so much. Their lives, too: their defiance, their strength, their pain, their joy, their rage, their names. Their beautiful names.

                        She had promised to betray them.