Adania Shibli and the Art to be Found in Silence

Palestinian author Adania Shibli has been hailed as the “most talked about writer on the West Bank” by Ahdaf Soueif, yet an irony emerges from this accolade: her oeuvre and her literary approach prioritise silence over sound. For Shibli, silence is an alive being and bears the capacity to narrate what sound, speech and words cannot. Silence is not a void, but a form of resistance, an aesthetic. An art.

For Palestinians, the relationship between silence and language is not merely literary—it is existential. It is a terrain of constant negotiation, where speech can be both a lifeline and a liability. Shibli’s literature inhabits this paradox. She has spoken of the written word as a silent form, insisting that “silence is the realm within which writing exists.” While many writers build their careers on a steady rhythm of output, Shibli disappears into long silences. Her most recent novel, Minor Detail, surfaced after twelve such years of quiet gestation. “If I am writing a new book, I should remain within that silence”, she said in an interview with Tank magazine in 2021.

In a seminar entitled I’m Not to Speak My Language in 2019, Shibli describes what it means to speak Arabic in the occupied territories—not as an act of presence, but as one of peril. For Palestinians, speech is fraught, even fatal. It is the inverse of Scheherazade’s story, where language preserves life. Here, words risk exposing otherness. They become dangerous, surveilled, weaponised. Language is no longer a site of beauty or connection, but a battleground.

In a context where language has been stripped of its beauty, innately politicised and weaponised to exclude, silence becomes ironically powerful. Silence bears the capacity to splinter the hegemony of this singular, dominant discourse spread historically and globally used to justify apartheid and genocide in the name of security. 

When speech is no longer neutral, silence becomes subversive.

In his seminal Archive Fever (1995:43) Jacques Derrida poses a fundamental question: “How does one in general prove an absence of archive?”, Shibli’s answer lies not in filling that absence, but in preserving it—through the silences that perforate her prose, through what remains unsaid. Her novels hum with what is withheld – making audible the erasures, the historical violence, and the epistemological control that shape mainstream discourses.

Shibli’s Palestinian protagonists are unnamed, their inner lives often inaccessible. They rarely speak. They exist in silence—not as passive figures, but as spectral presences that resist the demand for legibility.

Colonial power thrives on silencing, but Shibli reclaims silence as a chosen act. When silence is no longer imposed, but embraced, it is transformed. It becomes audible. It insists on its own resonance. It refuses the spectacle of suffering, refuses to turn pain into narrative currency.

The question that lingers at the end of each of Shibli’s novels is but what words emerge after silence? In her oeuvre, silence is not a void. It is an ellipsis—an invocation of the silences that run through national archives, through news headlines, through the fractured history of a people rendered marginal. Her work speaks by not speaking.

Her short story Silence (2006) tells of a young girl who loses her hearing after an illness. Palestine is never named, but it trembles between every line. The child finds refuge in her newfound quietude. 

Silence becomes her sanctuary, allowing her to sink into inner dialogue, to contemplate its texture. She 
wonders why God is silent, whether God is greater than silence. Her condition mirrors the Palestinian condition: “Silence is the little girl’s eternal guard. A small space of silence.” In that smallness lies a vast world of meaning.

Touch (2010), in many ways, reads as a continuation—an epilogue—to Silence. Set on the West Bank in 1982, its only anchor in time and place is a single direct reference. Again, the protagonist is a young girl, and again, her inner world unfolds through sensation rather than narration. Shibli eschews the conventional structure of historical fiction. Instead of reconstructing memory, she disassembles it. 

Questions hang unanswered, silences deepen. Who shaped this child’s world? What will she become? The novel reads less as narrative than as extended poem, pulsing with the poetry of quietness.

Shibli’s latest novel Minor Detail  (2017) is a literary counterarchive. Its two-part structure refracts the past and the present through a shared absence. Part One recounts, with cold precision, the 1949 rape and murder of an unnamed Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers. Part Two, set in the present, follows a Palestinian woman whose obsessive pursuit of that event leads to her own silencing. Both sections end not with resolution, but with the echo of silence—a silence that grows, reverberates, transcends the bounds of the page.

In Minor Detail, Shibli builds an archive not of documents, but of absences. The desert itself becomes a witness, a medium of memory. In an article for Asymptote in 2024, Alex Tan wrote that the novel’s desert is “an archive possessed of its own music,” capable of ingesting screams, memories, and forgotten histories into its silence. Despite the sensory chaos—dogs barking, gunshots, a woman screaming—speech is absent. Words are withheld. And it is precisely through this withholding that Shibli dismantles the illusion of neutrality in official histories.

Silence becomes the condition through which memory survives. It pulses across time, across borders, across languages. It is what remains when archives are burned, when history is rewritten, when bodies vanish. And in Shibli’s work, it insists on being heard.

History is woven not only through what is said, but through what is deliberately unsaid. Colonial archives are strung together by silence—not the silence of absence, but the silence of erasure. Yet this silence, reclaimed, becomes a roar. In Shibli’s hands, literature does not fill the gap; it guards it. It amplifies it. It proves, as Derrida urged, that absence can indeed be archived.

To choose silence, for Adania Shibli and for Palestinians, is not to surrender. It is to resist—on their own terms. It is to write without performing, to exist without explanation. It is, in the clearest sense, an art.