Adania Shibli (JP/Anggie Angela)

Through her stories, Adania Shibli highlights the many difficult situations that have become a part of Palestinians’ daily lives.

Silence, or a lack of words, can be thought of as antithetical to literature. When silence reigns and nothing is said, how will we get our points across?

When Palestinian writer Adania Shibli talked about silence on the main stage of the Jakarta International Literary Festival (JILF), it came as quite the surprise. However, silence is oftentimes a form of refuge for people in Palestine.

In an increasingly hostile world, every minute detail can and will be politicized, in one way or another. 

For Palestinians, this effect is amplified. Shibli said in her keynote speech titled “I Am Not to Speak My Language” that speaking Arabic was far too often avoided when in the presence of Hebrew speakers.

Speaking to The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of JILF, Shibli said that life in Palestine was “a constant challenge” at every level, even with the simplest things like taking a stroll.

“If you want to go with a friend just for a nice walk, it’s actually not possible because it will always be interrupted by something. There’s always this niceness disappearing with appropriation of land, new streets and settlements,” she
recalled.

When you then decide to go for the not-so-nice walk, Shibli continued, some places are even impossible to get to, like the sea for instance. While she can go, some of her friends do not possess the permits to do so.

“It’s a life filled with obstacles not because they came naturally, but they are being forced on you. And then you have to live with these obstacles; how you can outsmart, manage or ignore them.”

With more than 600 checkpoints dotting the landlocked West Bank and the constant heightened sense of alertness, Shibli said that these obstacles in turn influenced her writings.

Shibli’s writings are often drawn from her experiences as a Palestinian. Her novels Masaas (Touch) and Kulluna Ba’id bethat al Miqdar aan el-Hub (We Are All Equally Far From Love) landed her the Qattan Young Writer’s Award-Palestine in 2001 and 2003 respectively.

The author often has her characters endure problems that are faced by Palestinians on a daily basis. For instance, one character wakes up for work and finds himself turned away at a checkpoint, before trying another and finding it closed.

“There’s always this kind of repetition I’m interested in, as this repetition can affect the way you write. Are you going to continue writing in repeated sentences like the way you move, or in a smaller circle that prevents your character from moving in bigger places,” Shibli said, adding that some scenes were so limited that the characters were confined to one room.

“In the context of Palestine, your experiences are being limited in a certain way, so the challenge is [that] sometimes you cannot write about your character going to the sea or a character that moves freely, because you never know this feeling.”

Shibli described the literary scene in Palestine as having thrived in the last two decades. She herself has given writing workshops to emerging writers, who she said were “a source for hope”.

While hope still blooms, the challenges still remain, and this is no more apparent than in publishing. There are no publishing houses in Palestine, and books are not allowed to enter the territory.

Shibli’s publishers are based in Lebanon, and the same is true for many other writers in the area. Still, the books cannot be bought in Palestine, as she said that the Israeli authorities simply did not allow books to enter, resulting in a lack of bookshops.

Public libraries still exist but their inventories are dated and limited. In the void of new books, the internet serves as the lifeline for many Palestinians.

“You see the role of the internet, how it’s helping people to still continue connecting to others despite attempts to prevent this connection.”  

Shibli prefers to see her identities as an author and a Palestinian as two separate things due to the different challenges they pose.

“As a Palestinian, there’s always the sense of responsibility. What can be done more? What can you do more?

“There’s this sense of fatigue because you have to do more and more, but you don’t know what you can do, and it makes you sometimes feel more helpless.

“Writing actually challenges that, because with writing I never question this domain because I know that it’s what maintains my humanity and probably the humanity of others,” she said, adding that writing was done out of her relationship and fascination with the Arabic language.

Shibli, who earned her PhD in media and cultural studies from the University of East London, is engaged in academic research and has taught part-time at Birzeit University’s Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies since 2013.

“The younger generation, I think they are the most hopeful and the most critical in Palestine. And the space of the university is probably the last place where you can thrive, away from your family and before you create your own family. It’s a space in between where young Palestinians can practice, can explore, can question, can be the most free despite their limitations,” she said.

As the conversation drew to a close and the clichéd closing question of “What is your hope for the future?” was rolled out, Shibli insisted that the question, rather than viewing it as a cliché, was an important one that she always considered.

“It pains me to see injustice, to see inequality and deprivation. So, of course, I would dream of a world where people are not forced to live in a certain way, are not prevented from living. 

“What I really hope for the world is a shift [in looking at] differences, how we can see a difference not as an attack on us, but rather as something that enriches us. [...] I think literature would be a great place to notice that, to give it a voice, if that voice has been silenced.”

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