Adania Shibli: “The Most-Talked-About Writer on the
West Bank”
ubud
writers & readers
festival 2007
September 25 - 30, 2007
www.ubudwritersfestival.com
What does it take to be the most-talked-about young writer
in Palestine? At the age of only 33, Adania Shibli is a making
waves in Middle-Eastern literature with her sensitive accounts
of life in the West Bank. Based in Ramallah, Shibli has twice
been given the Young Writer’s Award-Palestine by the
A.M. Qattan Foundation and is one of the most-promising new
voices from this region.
This year’s Ubud Writers & Readers Festival is highlighting
writers and journalists from the Middle-East, in order to
represent an honest viewpoint about this highly volatile part
of the world. Having little knowledge about Middle-eastern
writers, I jumped on the internet and started googling and
found Adania Shibli, with an email address to match! I wrote
a humble note, asking if she would like to appear at our Festival
and if I was on the right track with her address. Her speedy
response went like this….. “yes you are on the
right track, and I’m very delighted with your invitation.
I’d be more than honored to join for the festival for
this year.”
And so, the lines of communication were flung open and we
have slowly become friends via sweet cyber space. She has
given me contacts to a whole host of passionate writers and
I feel honoured to be embraced by this warm, Arabian literary
circle. I also feel a little ignorant about the Israeli-Palestine
situation and was surprised when Adania told me she holds
an Israeli passport.
“How does that make you feel,” I asked shyly.
“Well we start with the passport. It is not strange
how it feels, but a detail of an injustice. It is, in a way,
not much different from seeing a land that I have grown up
with, knowing every bit of its fields and curves… which
is appropriated, occupied again by Israeli authorities…with
the passport I’m given, it is an attempt of appropriation,
which is a mere sign of lack of injustice, deprivation etc,
but this does not prevent from me relating to that landscape
I have grown up with as being mine, neither do I have doubts
on my identity, so these appropriations are a sign of something,
a reality we are all living in but not succumbing to, and
there comes this life-long damn resistance. Anyway…..”
In an interview with Adania, Egyptian author, Adhaf Soiuef,
described her as “the current most-talked-about young
writer on the West Bank. Slight and tomboyish in jeans and
cropped hair, she whizzed me around the streets of Ramallah
in a small white car. She is from Al-Jalil (the Galilee) but
says she cannot live in the “completely consumer society”
of an Israeli city. She works with young artists in a Palestinian
cultural foundation.”
When asked by Ahdaf if the occupation affects her writing,
Adania answered;
“Yes, it affects my writing. I can’t work for
very long. It’s as though concentration becomes claustrophobic.
The situation controls you. It affects you like a fever; it’s
always there. It’s very hard to concentrate on one thing.
I find myself trying to work on several projects at once.”
Shibli describes sitting in front of a man “who’s
talking about how a missile hit his car and killed his wife
and his three children and I am taking in the details of how
much gray he’s got in his hair. That’s fiction.
Reality now is too frightening, impossible to grasp. Yet you
could say that fiction becomes a kind of perversion.”
Ahdaf Souief asked several Palestinian writers about the future.
“My poems now,” said award-winning writer, Mourid
Barghouti, “seem to be all about death. But then half
the numbers in my phone book no longer answer.”
Palestinian writers, on the whole, agree that in some ways
they are in a less difficult position than Israelis. As writer,
Hassan Khader puts it, he may have problems with his passport
but he has none with his identity.
Following is an excerpt from Adania Shibli’s short story,
“Performing with Many Particles of Dust”. Translated
from Arabic by Yasmeen Hanoosh. It is a study of a young woman’s
day: she goes to the post office in Jerusalem to send a parcel,
visits a friend in Ramallah, and considers whether to buy
meat. That’s all. But it takes the concentration of
a tight-rope artist to maintain enough neutrality (or cool)
to get through the day without mishap and it leaves you exhausted
as you share the minutiae of the characters thoughts, counterthoughts
and metathoughts.
The first thing you notice while waiting at a checkpoint is
the car beside you: is it ahead of you or are you ahead of
it and on that becomes dependent your hopes and despair. If
you are ahead, you will experience a euphoria that might stay
with you the entire day: today I am lucky, from the start.
And if the car is ahead of you, your internal breakdown begins.
What, do you signal in the other direction to follow the car
in the faster lane, or do you wait until your lane moves and
you advance ahead of that car! And from that point on the
breakdown would only become more severe, and you would not
be able to hide it any longer. Nobody can. Nobody crosses
Qalandia checkpoint without a nervous breakdown, at least
a minor one.
And you wait.
And you watch.
Watching is the easiest thing to do. You even have the freedom
to watch everything. You will learn the makes of all the cars
around, which are more common, which less, does the car carry
the symbol “IL” or not, is the license plate green
or yellow, is the driver a man or a woman, if it is a woman,
is she wearing a headscarf or not, her age and level of attraction,
and if it is a man, does he wear sunglasses, is he cute, is
there a wedding ring on his finger, is he returning glances?
Then you forget all about him, with the slightest indication
that the car line in which you are taking part has moved,
even if it is merely the disappearance of the brake lights
from the car in front of you.
I myself gave up on the idea of crossing the checkpoint by
car. In the first place, I do not have one. Once or twice
I borrowed a friend’s car, then a misunderstanding arose
between us and we stopped being friends. So I cross with hundreds
of others on a dusty side-path.
I am truly excited about including Adania Shibli and other
writers and journalists from the Middle East in this year’s
Festival and can only imagine we will witness some hot debates
and fiery discussions on what is surely one of the world’s
most troubled and tormented regions.
Award-winning Egyptian author, Ahdaf Souief will be appearing
at the 2008 Festival.
Interview taken from IslamOnLine.Net
Please visit www.ubudwritersfestival.com
for more information.
