Making a Claim on Language: A Conversation with Adania Shibli

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ADANIA SHIBLI.

The Winter issue of  The Paris Review opens with “Camouflage,” a story by Adania Shibli, the first line of which nudges us, ominously, toward a much broader picture: “We have nothing to do with what’s happening.” And yet what’s happening in the story itself isn’t initially clear. Instead, the scene—in which a Palestinian brother and sister inch forward in their car toward a flying checkpoint in torrential rain—comes into focus slowly, with a masterful control that transforms that obscurity itself into a way of illustrating the dread, tension, and uncertainty of living under the control of the Israeli authorities and military.

Shibli, who lives between Berlin and Palestine, where she was born, is the author of plays, short stories, essays, and novels, including Touch, We Are All Equally Far from Love, and, most recently, Minor Detail, which was first published in Arabic in 2017 and translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2020. It was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature, longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, and awarded the LiBeraturpreis in 2023. When I met Shibli in Berlin in the fall of 2024, there was a stack of papers on her desk that amounted to the most recent draft of a new novel written in Arabic. The Review had commissioned me to translate its opening pages, but Shibli, apparently keen to protect my innocence, or my confusion, was adamant that I not read beyond them. Over a home-cooked meal, she and I spoke about how I might want to approach the translation that would appear in The Paris Review. I asked basic questions like “Who is the narrator?” and “But what is this novel about?” Shibli was gentle but sometimes elliptical in her responses. Following our work on the translation, I sent her a few questions over email.

INTERVIEWER

You once told me, half-jokingly, that you’re “just a farmer.” Why?

ADANIA SHIBLI

You witness the trust that Palestinian farmers have in trees and in the land despite the colonial violence they face every single day of their farming lives as Israeli authorities, military, and settlers see to it that trees are uprooted, crops attacked with pesticides, and farmers killed. Then you have to ask how this trust—its source or even its justification—is any different from the trust that sleepwalkers have in the night. Writers also move through the field of language guided by that trust, but ever more slowly.

My family built a house in a remote, unpopulated area many years before I was born. The land around it was rocky. Anyone could see the large rocks surging out of the soil, just a few centimeters beneath the surface. In brief, it was a harsh and vicious plot of land, one you couldn’t look at without feeling defeated. It was hard to imagine that a garden might replace this rocky wilderness around the house.

But my mother worked this land every day, every few weeks creating patches of a garden that was half a square meter, sometimes a quarter of a square meter, and which looked so lonely and meaningless amid the rocks surrounding them. As a kid watching her, I would always look out at how much wild land remained around our house. Now the house is surrounded by flowers, plants, vegetables, and fruit trees. Her quiet work every morning is the closest physical approximation I can think of to the writing process I engage with every day, working until a text can survive completely on its own.

INTERVIEWER

In “Camouflage,” you introduce the reader to a scene full of deep feeling, but the characters are obscured. In fact, the entire scene is a bog of obscurities. Why?

SHIBLI

In Palestine, the obscurities one encounters are often the only things that can be experienced. How is one to transform that from a destructive force into an intimate way of being in the world, unknowing and incomplete?

INTERVIEWER

As we were editing “Camouflage,” you said at one point that you were “feeling not ashamed about the text” but that this feeling was “only temporary.” What did you mean?

SHIBLI

Perhaps I am sometimes ashamed of claiming a place within language—which everyone has the right to claim. Every time we utter or write a word, we are making a claim on language, but I often fear I’m claiming a bit too much from language by writing fiction. Now that the manuscript for the novel is close to reaching my publisher in Beirut, Dar Al Adab, the feeling of shame has changed into a feeling of regret and alienation.

INTERVIEWER

What do you see as your role in the translation of your work?

 SHIBLI

I see my role as an observer of the text’s gradual and slow departure from Arabic. I hope to maintain the presence of Arabic breathing within the text—though not by leaving Arabic words untranslated, which I find to be Orientalizing. Arabized terms often fail to be dissociated from a colonial encounter, but I do try to maintain an invisible connection with the language by working with a translator. The Arabic language is so precise that one can go mad with it—the precision offered by the language can be detected in the tens of synonyms that a given word may have. Even God has ninety-nine names, each one pointing to a specific feeling and action of that same God. From here the question becomes how to bring to the reader in another language that precision, based on a tiny, hardly articulable difference that Arabic carries.

INTERVIEWER

How has your writing process been affected by the ongoing genocide in Palestine?

SHIBLI

The illusion that language could be a shield against the monstrous was, for me, among the first to be shattered and destroyed. Language is not immune to acts of genocide and annihilation. It too can be destroyed, become unable to endure, get lost. I had never felt myself to be a master of language—more that language had mastered me. And accepting its brokenness, its actual feebleness, has allowed me to continue working through decades of the pain and injury inflicted on Palestine. Continuing to write the novel while acknowledging all this has, in a way, prevented the destroyed and the pain from turning into an abandoned wasteland, a defeat of the soul. I search through the rubble for that which can be held on to. Other writers have guided me throughout. I have turned to Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love, patchwork pieces of the book that Muhammad al-Zaqzouq has been working on in Gaza, and Antonio Gamoneda’s haunting poems about the killings of civilians under the fascist regime in Spain during the past century.

INTERVIEWER

You told me you spent time writing your forthcoming novel at a nunnery in northern Italy. How was that experience?

SHIBLI

It was a cloistered convent. All the nuns were aware that I’m an atheist. They gave me a room and offered me three meals per day, all of which were homemade, as well as vegetables and fruit from their garden. This meant that I had no reason to leave my room except for mealtimes and an afternoon walk. The sisters would wake at five to begin their singing prayers, which I could hear as I woke up and began working. I was not permitted inside the convent and my balcony door was protected by bars, preventing me from going out onto the balcony. It was like an inverted prison. I was imprisoned in the outside world, while remaining very close to the nuns. They brought me my meals through an opening above a counter. They also read all my books and short stories that are available in Italian.

There was one time, just one time, when they allowed me inside with them. They wanted to discuss some questions with me they had about the texts they had read. We communicated using English and French, sometimes German. We also listened to the birds, which became part of our conversation. To allow me into their sacred sanctuary was the greatest trust anyone has ever showed me because of my writing.