On grieving abstractions, between climate grief and Palestine

A book review of Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, and Immemorial by Lauren Markham.

Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli and Immemorial by Lauren Markham, seem far and away opposites in form and subject: The first a haunting novella of a 1949 incident by Israeli soldiers and a woman in Ramallah obsessively re-tracing it years later. The second, published last year, a collection of essays on climate grief, language, and memorials. But read together, they teach us how to properly mourn for a tragedy that has yet to end.

Minor Detail follows two stories, set a quarter century apart, starting in the southwest part of the Negev with a commander and his platoon sent to “cleanse it of any remaining Arabs”. They’re uniformed and unnamed, their insignificance serving only to underscore the audacity of their task. Their job is to make clean, to make believe. They must create the land with no people. Shibli invites us to bear witness to this mapping and erasing, their strategy clear: That which taints their image they must destroy. When a group of Arabs and camels interrupt their alleged barren land, they are indiscriminately shot. When the commander gets bit from a desert spider, no critter in the barracks is safe. Control, control, squash everything below your boots and muffle the screams of the kidnapped Bedouin Palestinian girl. How many objects of conquest must they neutralize and eradicate to make them clean?

The second half of Minor Detail follows a Palestinian woman years later venturing into newly decreed Area C to investigate the incident that has since been written up in the local newspaper. She goes by way of rental car and a borrowed identity card, past new checkpoints across her ancestral land and through demolished villages she once knew. Importantly, not kindred nor duty propels her—and the adventure becomes a form of mourning. She is a blabbering, frantic mess and on as much of a personal journey to overcome her anxieties as she is a physical one, and a hostile one at that. It is relatable and pitiful and generationally traumatic.

It was only after reading Markham’s Immemorial, back to back with Shibli’s Minor Detail, could I conceptualize the novel for what it was: A memorial for Palestine. When Markham asks, “Do memorials have to be bolted to the ground, fixed into space?” Shibli answers with a ritual across time—retracing the steps of a stranger, who was assaulted and killed 25 years ago to the day of the unnamed protagonist’s birth. As if in conversation, Markham offers a term for this, spatial storytelling, and Shibli brings it to life. Rituals are needed to metabolize grief.

In snippets of essay, memoir, and cultural criticism, Immemorial asks how to mourn for a world that is changing. Memorials are the space for grieving a person, a symbol, an event, or an era as it transitions from object to memory. Universally, they are a form of mythmaking, since reifying something forever transforms She, too, is on a personal journey, to find the language appropriate to grieve an indeterminate future.

Markham writes:

If grief is the cavernous emotion nearly ubiquitous to life, and mourning is the ritualized enactment of that feeling, then a memorial seemed to offer a space for both the feeling and its enactment to be made communally manifest to the physical world… Part of the trouble with metabolizing climate grief is that to do so requires grieving many abstractions at once.

Indeed, confronting the emotional weight of the climate crisis requires some abstraction. We litigate over for whom or how one should grieve. In the climate world, we choose tangible symbols in efforts to appeal to the masses—polar bears, rain forests, coral reefs—or argue about who is centered: Island nations being drowned, countries with unlivable air quality, or the disenfranchised in dense, urban areas. Yet it never feels quite satisfying. Complex systems don’t provide closure.

It is hard not to see the same debates play out with the war in Gaza. Who we honor with monuments, with vows of silence, with our prayers speaks clearly to our collective posture on the issue. Here too, language fails us: It is not enough to mourn, you must mourn correctly. Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet and author of Perfect Victims, speaks to this bind, “But how many hours have you wasted defending against ad hominem attacks… or assuaging the paranoias of strawman arguments…or debunking equivocations…The very quality of propaganda—illogic—is precisely its strongest suit, because it is a distraction.” By design, these conflicts are treated as overly complex and illegible to obscure accountability and delay action. Once abstracted, with or without consent, Palestine becomes impossible to grieve.

Adania Shibli knows this. By its very title, Minor Detail grounds us away from a politicized abstraction to focus our mourning. It is no surprise then, they are painful details to read. As if to embody the blindfolded, kidnapped Bedouin, its passages operate almost entirely on non-visual senses: The sterile soap they force her to use, the fear-sweat of struggle and shame, the gasoline pungent in her hair from lice treatment. The screaming, the dog barking, the silence. It makes us squirm in our own morality and mortality, but I believe that is the point. It is not unusual to hear that the book has been started and not finished. That the atrocity described in Minor Detail is true is besides the point. There are a thousand past we have never memorialized, and a thousand more to come.

Another issue with memorials is purpose. Markahm says, “The function of memorial is to write a backward story, paradoxically, towards the future.” In other words, form follows function. Focusing on the Vietnam War memorial, controversial in design but powerful in practice, Markham explores what the architect Maya Lin did in crafting “both a physical and psychic space for feeling”. A visitor needs to get up close to the large and imposing black slab of names to read any one in particular, and thus finds oneself surrounded by immense loss. A memorial worth a thousand words.

In Minor Detail, form follows function through its deliberate symmetry across the book. Every repeated phrase screamed this violence is happening, again and again, decades later, history repeating itself, without end. In the first story, in 1949, the dog barks when the captive is being assaulted, a witness and whistleblower to tragedy; The second story opens with a dog howling from beyond the house and across a generation, who then returns at key moments throughout her journey as a warning and protector. No less uncanny: The through-line of cleanliness, first as a weaponized ritual, paired in the second with a clutching for control. Or the use of maps—to impose a new reality by the Israelis, and in the second to rediscover one. Each parallel chosen with exact precision: The same gasoline-covered hair, the same layers of dust from the open windows, the same camels, the same hose coiled in equal-sized rings. Like a mirror or time machine or déjà vu, each detail rings in your ears long after the last page is done. What we sanctify as remembrance for Palestine is damning: The occupation carries on. The dogs keep barking.

Throughout Immemorial, Markham returns to a key idea: Memorials serve to provide a space for collective grieving. The “collective” part of “collective grieving” is crucial: It’s how we build our shared history and memory. She suggests they inherently become a “battleground for truth”, and we have seen this play out both for the climate crisis and the genocide in Palestine. In Minor Detail, we see this truth battle take center stage: Our protagonist visits a small museum exhibit, in what might be a Kibbutz-style village on the land where the incident we just read about had occurred. She talks with a well-meaning curator, who espouses the epic confrontation that Israeli soldiers fought, the tireless days of righteous battle and triumph. This fabrication serves a specific purpose, as all memorials do. It makes us witnessing the physical act of memorial our protagonist in Ramallah undertook, tracing the steps to a tee, that much more critical. Minor Detail, itself a memorial that bridges private and public grief, becomes a perfect example for how to reground the abstraction. We haven’t yet cracked—culturally, emotionally—how to mourn for what could have been of a stable climate, or of a free Palestine, busy as we are watching those futures being dismantled in real-time. But Shibli has: We, the readers of Minor Detail, get to close the book and think: We see you, we hear you, we remember you.