{"id":170065,"date":"2025-03-10T10:00:56","date_gmt":"2025-03-10T14:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=170065"},"modified":"2025-03-14T10:48:14","modified_gmt":"2025-03-14T14:48:14","slug":"making-a-claim-on-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/03\/10\/making-a-claim-on-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Making a Claim on Language: A Conversation with Adania Shibli"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div id=\"attachment_170100\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-170100\" class=\"wp-image-170100 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shibli-image.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"818\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shibli-image.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shibli-image-300x245.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/shibli-image-768x628.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-170100\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ADANIA SHIBLI.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><em>The Winter issue of \u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review <em>opens with \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/fiction\/8364\/camouflage-adania-shibli\">Camouflage<\/a>,\u201d a story by Adania Shibli, the first line of which nudges us, ominously, toward a much broader picture: \u201cWe have nothing to do with what\u2019s happening.\u201d And yet what\u2019s happening in the story itself isn\u2019t initially clear. Instead, the scene\u2014in which a Palestinian brother and sister inch forward in their car toward a flying checkpoint in torrential rain\u2014comes 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><em>Shibli, who lives between Berlin and Palestine, where she was born, is the author of plays, short stories, essays, and novels, including <\/em>Touch<em>, <\/em>We Are All Equally Far from Love<em>, and, most recently, <\/em>Minor Detail<em>, 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 <\/em>Review<em> 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 <\/em>The Paris Review<em>. I asked basic questions like \u201cWho is the narrator?\u201d and \u201cBut what is this novel about?\u201d Shibli was gentle but sometimes elliptical in her responses. Following our work on the translation, I sent her a few questions over email.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You once told me, half-jokingly, that you\u2019re \u201cjust a farmer.\u201d Why?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">ADANIA SHIBLI<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2014its source or even its justification\u2014is 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.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2019t look at without feeling defeated. It was hard to imagine that a garden might replace this rocky wilderness around the house.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In \u201cCamouflage,\u201d 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?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">SHIBLI<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As we were editing \u201cCamouflage,\u201d you said at one point that you were \u201cfeeling not ashamed about the text\u201d but that this feeling was \u201conly temporary.\u201d What did you mean?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">SHIBLI<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Perhaps I am sometimes ashamed of claiming a place within language\u2014which 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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What do you see as your role in the translation of your work?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\"><strong>\u00a0<\/strong>SHIBLI<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I see my role as an observer of the text\u2019s gradual and slow departure from Arabic. I hope to maintain the presence of Arabic breathing within the text\u2014though 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\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How has your writing process been affected by the ongoing genocide in Palestine?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">SHIBLI<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2014more 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&#8217;s <em>Prisoner of Love<\/em>, patchwork pieces of the book that Muhammad al-Zaqzouq has been working on in Gaza, and Antonio Gamoneda&#8217;s haunting poems about the killings of civilians under the fascist regime in Spain during the past century.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You told me you spent time writing your forthcoming novel at a nunnery in northern Italy. How was that experience?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400; text-align: center;\">SHIBLI<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It was a cloistered convent. All the nuns were aware that I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><em><span class=\"il\">Max<\/span> <span class=\"il\">Weiss<\/span> is an intellectual and cultural historian of the modern Middle East, a literary translator from the Arabic, and a professor of history at Princeton University.<\/em> <em>He is, most recently, the author of<\/em> Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba&#8217;thist Syria <em>a<\/em><em>nd the translator of\u00a0Alawiya Sobh\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0This Thing Called Love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cIn 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?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2572,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-170065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Making a Claim on Language: A Conversation with Adania Shibli by Max Weiss<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 10, 2025 \u2013 \u201cIn Palestine, the obscurities one encounters are often the only things that can be experienced. 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