Palestinian author ‘Adaniya Shibli’s first work of fiction, Masaas is concerned primarily with the struggle of recovering memories, particularly the earliest memories of childhood. This presentation will examine the ways that Shibli uses both the form and the content of her work to guide the reader through this journey. While the story ostensibly chronicles the early memories of a young girl growing up in the West Bank, Shibli’s project reaches ambitiously beyond a simple portrait. The narrative itself is perforated with uncertainty—the text moves from scene to disconnected scene without any of the traditional apparatus of cause and effect, narrative connectedness, chronological clarity, or a clearly defined physical location. In place of the generalizing, abstract labels typically used to discuss Palestine, Israel, political movements, and social pressures, Shibli leaves only the simple, immediate, physical vocabulary of the child.
While the narrative explores each of the child’s five senses individually through the sections of the book, Shibli’s choice to entitle the work “Masaas/Touch” gestures toward the type of history that she is crafting in this piece. Here the ‘touch’ is an unintentional, passing sensation that hardly registers in the moment it happens, but is forever trapped and obfuscated in memory. Initially, the kaleidoscope of sensation that makes up the narrative is dizzyingly confusing. It is only upon reflection and rereading that the different sensations, moments, memories, and sensations begin to coalesce into a complete picture of a young girl growing up in Palestine. By exploring the peculiarities of the masaas/touch that Shibli chooses as the title for her work, we come to understand both the unique nature of individual memory and the collective memory of a state that struggles to exist.