Minor Detail

When driving into a military checkpoint is a funny story, nothing worse.

I need a better system for my To Be Read list because I cannot rely on myself. I started Minor Detail by Adania Shibli with the entirely erroneous notion that it was about still birth. It is not. It’s about the rape and murder of a Palestinian woman by Israeli soldiers in 1948 and then, twenty five years later, a woman’s quest to find out what happened. In the second half of the book, the Palestinian woman is driving around Israel, trying to follow her various historic and modern maps, navigating numerous checkpoints and military zones. She knows that the ramifications of being pulled over are potentially catastrophic for her and others.

(The hill I will die on is that books don’t have to be kept pristine, and you can write in the back of Minor Detail if you don’t have any paper to practice fractions with your daughter. Bonus points for publishers that give you a couple of blank pages.)

I am acutely aware of how, by luck of birth, I have rarely had to fear checkpoints, or worry that my right to be in a country will be questioned. There’s an ease and arrogance that comes with having my passport and my skin colour. The closest I’ve come to proper discussions with armed soldiers has been entirely self-inflicted tension.

My husband James and I lived in Syria almost twenty years ago and we (he) were obsessed with this book called The Monuments of Syria. It had information about all the big historical sites - of which there are many - but also hundreds of smaller ones. It had instructions like: follow this road out of Damascus for 8.7km, take the turning by the river, and look up to your left by the third bridge. That was how, after a confusing discussion with a shepherd, we found a Roman aqueduct on the side of a hill.

James wanted us to look for another Roman ruin - maybe a cistern, or some other infrastructure - and we drove out of Damascus with our trusty guidebook. As we drove along increasingly quiet rural roads, we met a checkpoint surrounded by soldiers. We stopped. They asked why we were trying to drive into a military training area. James spoke Arabic and tried to explain about the Roman ruin and the book and they got more and more suspicious. You have a book that tells you, in precise detail, how to get to the military facility? You have diplomatic IDs but you’re driving a hired Peugeot 206? None of it made sense to them, and the main soldier disappeared into a building with our IDs, The Monuments of Syria and a scowl while we were watched by his colleagues. A tense while later, we were told to go back to Damascus.

For us, almost immediately, it became a funny story rather than a moment of terror. In fact, I can’t recall ever feeling true fear at a border or from soldiers. When we were nervous at American immigration last year, it turned out the border guard was a writer too, and more keen to talk to me about his short stories than my political social media posts. But I could feel the visceral fear of Shibli’s narrator, and I believed it.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (paperback)

The Monuments of Syria by Ross Burns (second-hand)