Hello Gentle Reader
A lot of this book reminded me of being a child. Because as we enter the season of spring’s renewal, as the weather turns warm, there is a feeling of nostalgia that fills the body. It echoes in the bones. It courses through the capillaries, veins, and arteries. Sings in the spiral shell of the eardrum. There are so many memories of being a child coming back. Hot chocolate on winter days. Our fingers and toes chilled. The liquid to hot, we would scoop out the marshmallows with our spoons. We would much down on the fluffy bone marrow cylindrical cubes. Other images and memories also come to mind. Mom’s crockpot: old and trustworthy. The cream-white background with the little houses evenly spaced apart around its circular circumference. I remember the blue house the red house, and the brown wintery trees. The spaces in between, where only silence and snow could call home. There’s the thick gravy stew that cooks and bubbles inside of the hearths of the homes. The large cut onions. The expensive stewing meat. Blocks of carrots and other vegetables. They all just sat in the bubbling mud of the gravy. The ingredients were like dried soggy almost transparent leaves of the previous autumn. Frost bitten and decayed by winter. Now mush and stuck in mud, along with sticks that were broken off in winter, and used to scratch and scribble lines in the snow. Who could forget the long walks in the late summer and early autumn, in the farmers’ fields? Gold and cream – a sea of the harvest all around. Dandelions, fox tails, hedge garlic, western salsify, dill, thistles – these are now weeds. Yet back then they were just flowers and plants. We did not discriminate against them. They were the same as the tulip, the daisy’s that sprouted in the back alley, the trees that were large and sentient giants. Yet none compared to the roses. The majestic queen of the flowers. Regal and thorny. Capricious and yet, not malicious. A beauty to behold. It is in the end delightful to go over these moments of a time that has passed. It’s a feeling of time passing and time passed. Yet the memories, and the moments remain there. Though they have drifted with the seeds in the wind. Sailed towards oblivion in a sense; the remnants remain. It’s delightful to look back. Yet though we look through the same window, as we did back then, the world has changed. This change has also infused with us. The reflection: the eyes that look back have also changed. As much as these static moments have been crystallised to the best of one’s ability, they are now unattainable. Nameless characters now pop up. People who have no names, and yet are now lost. Still one cannot give up those memories those moments. Those impressions left not only on us, but what we leave on the environment around us. Where footprints were once ingrained in sold earth. Depressed patches of grass. Where snowball fights took place. Behind sheds and trees where first kisses were delved. The world shapes us, as much as we have shaped it.
Adania Shibli is a Palestine author. A writer from the disputed land of Palestine. A politically ambiguous country that appears to exist in memory, ideology, political desire, and dream. No one can say where Palestine is. Yet it is generally speculated to be the Gaza strip, and the disputed Western Bank. The concept of Palestine is a jam. It is a large sticky formless mass. It rebuffs, being shaped, and yet demands to be recognized. This is the world Adania Shibli has called home. A place that exists on the voice; yet not on the map. A place that is heard and talked about yet appears to not exist. Adania Shibli inhabits this world, and yet in her novel “Touch,” does not deal with it directly. Shibli refuses to be seen as a ‘political production,’ as does her work. It ceases to be categorized. In “Touch,” one is stuck both by how short the work is, and how many volumes it speaks. In “Touch,” poetic vignette’s and impressionistic prose reign supreme. Carefully detailed with a painters touch of understanding of light and colour, and a poets comprehension of emotion and image; and a minimal narrative to bind and hold it all together. Each short chapter, and equally short section of this novella, is held together by the experience of the little girl.
The best part of this entire novella is its visuals. This perhaps the first authors since roughly Jean-Marie Gustav Le Clezio, who uses visual images and poetic sensuality, which mirrors both external and internal landscapes. It shows how rough the world is. How little it changes to the most heartbreaking moments:
“The sky had not changed its silence or its shape or its position after the brother’s soul rose up to it.”
Yet where Jean-Marie Gustav Le Clezio and Adania Shibli, branch away from each other, is that Adania Shibli uses more of an imagist poetic language; and with a painter’s keen sense of colour, shade, depth and understanding of the landscape is keenly able to realize it in a child’s perspective. Allowing for moments of true innocent wisdom to shine. Yet it also allows for true idiosyncratic observations to take shape:
“In the courtyard the little girl yelled, “God damn!”
Just like the children said in the schoolyard.”
What is most accomplished about this novella though is how it borders on the line between both prose poem, and a narrative. It eschews both concepts equally. Perhaps Shibli realizes that if she wrote this in a series of poems, following the approved line structure and use of a more metre and rhythm imitating the ticks of a metronome, the work would be ghettoized. Poetry is often pushed aside; and is an exclusive art form, that over the years has been taught to hate in school, because it is both something that cannot be taught, as a unified black or white concept, because it is always open to interpretation; and yet students are often told to adhere to one interpretation. Not to mention that at times the rules of poetry writing were constrained, and more refined and locked in shackles of form, beat and rhythm. Not allowing for true artistic freedom to take shape. Everything would be perfectly manicured. All to the point that the poem became a constrained archaic form of cryptic association of words and images. Yet if Adania Shibli, used strict narrative and prose work, the political subtleties and ideological issues, would be at the forefront, and she would therefore fall into the trap of discussing what is expected of her. In these regards, Adania Shibli, puts one foot in each tradition. She takes the unified whole of a narrative, and the image based language of poetry, and creates impressionistic vignettes, that carry the weight of the entire novella, and are infused with the perceptions of a child. That being said, the authors voice is a light shade that covers the text. Like the shadow of the little girls hand over the tadpoles in the pond. Rather than making it believable that the observations of the child are realistic; the child is merely the vessel, in which the events unfold around, and whose own unique brand of observations as her own and the authors are infused.
The casual observations are often tinged with personal solitude. Being the youngest sister of nine, there are very few and rare moments, when she is at the centre of attention. She is constantly pushed aside. A number, in a larger sum, in a crowded household. Yet it is this alienation and solitude that allow for her to have moments of happiness. Moments when she falls in love, argues with her siblings, and tries to understand the world around her, and her own place in it:
“And there, from the edge of the mountain, the sky stretched pit to the distant fields, while the sun was about to disappear, dragging behind it a long ray of purple, the last colour of the day.”
Moments of true beauty however, are also infused with the incomprehensible violence of the ideologies and politics. Such as the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the foreignness of the word Palestine itself:
“The girl tried to understand the meaning of the words Sabra and Shatila. Maybe they were one word. The word Palestine was unclear, expect that it was forbidden. The color of the green board resembled that color of cactus.”
Yet this is what also makes this novella so stunning is its attempt not at indoctrinating the reader into a specific ideology or political thought. It recounts this tragedy as incomprehensible. As unwarranted, as an act of pure atrocious malice. Where the goal was death and destruction, with no winning survivor or causality. Were in the end it is nothing more than another chapter in the concept of the human tragedy. Yet it is the language of this novella: simple minimal and pure that rings true through and through:
“Sometimes colors disappeared from nature, and all that remained was green on the mountain, yellow on the hay, and blue on the sky in summer. Before the end of the spring, the green and red crayons got used up because there were so many anemones, yet it seemed the pink crayon would last through many winters.”
The most minute and minimal details, offer the greatest sensations. Silence, the sea, colours, movements; how flakes of rust turn to gold, the feeling of grass, a secret kiss on the older shepherd boys lips, playing a game with a friend – all these sensations become the daily life of this little girl. All of these sounds become the soundtrack to her life. She is entirely human. She fights with her siblings, she plays, she tries to understand the world around her, and her own place in it. With such minimal knowledge of the outside world, and her basic attempts at trying to understand language as not only spoken but written and the power of the written and the spoken, all lead to a sense of wonder. The world for her appears endless and abundant. A place of vivid colour, and endless noises and moments of silence. Yet a place where the sky is still the same overhead.
One cannot express enough how intimately beautiful this novella is. Each scene is expressive; and impressions that run deeper than the words on the page. It’s a short book, yet weighty. It’ll be something that one needs to re-read countlessly to capture the moments of beauty again, but also begin to understand further the work itself as a whole. The fact that it is so short and minimal is somewhat of a drawback. There is a desire for more; an explanation, something. Yet in time after digestion and re-reading, it becomes more and more apparent. In all a wonderful lovely book. That is not overtly political, and more intimately detailed in the poetic universe of this little girl.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
M. Mary
(I would like to Note Gentle Reader, this review as written in the beginning of spring and the late winter period)
