The theme of International Women’s Day 2021 is #ChooseToChallenge. Rawan Althunyan challenges us to read the work of Palestinian author Adania Shibli, who invites us to think about women who don’t have the voice to speak, or who are threatened with violence when they do.
What does it mean to write and speak in a language of your own without fear of being harmed or misunderstood? A language that does not shape you but is shaped by you? These questions are what we find in the writings of Adania Shibli, particularly her translated short story ‘Silence’, which I invite you to open your ears and eyes to this International Women’s Day.
Shibli is a Palestinian academic, novelist and short story writer born in Palestine in 1974 and based in Berlin. She received her PhD from the University of East London in Media and Cultural Studies. She was recognized in the Hay Literature Festival’s Beirut 39 selections, which featured 39 Arab authors under 40 years of age. Shibli has written three novels and a play, The Error, which was presented in England and the US; her recent novel Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, was shortlisted in the US National Books Awards 2020 for translated literature.
She spent 12 quiet years working on this novel. Indeed, silence in Shibli’s writings has attracted the attention of her readers. In an interview, she was asked about the scarcity of her produced works compared to other writers. Her answer was that it takes her time to shape the language in which she writes (Arabic) to achieve the meaning and influence she aims for, and that she needs a period of silence afterwards to erase the effect of the previous work on her. For her, silence is a ritual to be able to write and express. It is never an absence but a space of possibilities.
In another interview, Shibli mentioned that translating her narratives is painful to her, but it would be selfish not to share them as she herself enjoys translated literatures. It is painful as she has an intimate relationship with Arabic and weaves her narratives with its cadence and shape of text in mind. She views language as a living body which has agency. It is no wonder she carefully chooses her translators and interviews them before approving them.
Certainly, being a Palestinian who has lived in Palestine and experienced political oppression and violence has formed her peculiar relationship to silence. It is hard not to notice that her characters are mostly nameless. She attributes this to her personal experience in Palestine where Arabic names and using Arabic summons fear and threat to the speaker. Language and naming become sensitive and life threatening, a form of violence. Silence is a shield of protection in this harsh situation.
For her, silence is a ritual to be able to write and express. It is never an absence but a space of possibilities.
It is interesting to recount here the argument of naming within the study of sexism in language. Cheris Kramarae states that ‘those who have the power to name the world are in position to influence reality.’ However, the namelessness used in Shibli’s works function as a power, a touch of universality. Shibli puts Kramarae’s statement into question.
In ‘Silence’, translated by the novelist and academic Randa Jarrar, Shibli portrays the world of a nameless girl who suffers from a severe ear infection. Sound is tangible and painful to this girl. Silence is her comfort, a paradisiac space. The noisiness of the world and the girl’s household does not stop unless at times of prayer, which adds another dimension to the experience of silence to this girl, a dimension of holiness and sanctity. Silence is multifaceted in the story and reigns over sound, which is rendered as a catalyst for silence in some parts of the story. It develops to inhabit the breakage of communication in the girl’s life. It is alienating and isolating, and it grows with her. This does not deny silence the function of a space of comfort; it is rather paradoxical.
What attracts me to this story is how Shibli explores silence and pushes it to its extreme limits as a bodily impairment which worsens over time, blurring the lines between the psychological and the physical. The psychological experience of reading this story is hauntingly identifiable, especially for women, in our ‘noisy world’ where having your voice heard is important to live decently. In such a world of hegemonic discourses, I find Shibli’s employment of silence in her writings a sincere expression of self and a counter discourse to hegemony and oppression however practiced. I highly recommend reading this petit treat!
Read ‘Silence’ by Adania Shibli, translated by Randa Jarrar, for free on Words without Borders.
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