Bedouin

ʿAdanīyah Shiblī (1974- Palestine) – Tafṣīl Thānawī (2017, English Trans. Minor Detail, 2020). In 2004, the nameless female narrator from Ramallah discovers a 1949 gang rape and murder of a Bedouin girl at the Nerim military outpost at a time when the newly-established Israeli state annexes more territory (reference). She becomes determined to find the girl’s grave and, when searching for more documentation, encounters the obstacles and dangers of accessing Israeli (military) archives (reference). The novel connects present day Palestine the period before the Nakbah, highlighting the silence that surrounds past atrocities and continues to the present (reference). It also portrays the silenced expulsion of the marginalized and often stigmatized Bedouin communities of the Negev Desert, who were forcibly removed from their ancestral encampments (reference) (also in 1940 – 1950: Nakbah).