Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (2017) is a powerful work of historical fiction that interrogates memory, violence, and silence within the context of the Palestinian experience. This paper examines the traumatic psyche of the unnamed female protagonist in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, situating the novel within the intersecting frameworks of trauma studies, historical fiction, and Palestinian narrative discourse. Minor Detail is a minimalist yet unsettling novel that revisits a silenced historical incident from 1949 and traces its psychological reverberations into the present. Rather than representing trauma through overt emotional expression or dramatic narration, Shibli constructs it through absence, restraint, repetition, and silence. This study argues that trauma in the novel functions not merely as an individual psychological condition but as a collective and intergenerational experience shaped by historical erasure, political violence, and unresolved injustice. The novel is structured in two distinct yet interconnected parts. The first recounts the abduction and killing of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in a detached, clinical tone that mirrors the bureaucratic indifference of official history. The second part follows an unnamed Palestinian woman in the present who becomes obsessively drawn to a minor archival reference to that event. The protagonist’s psychological disturbance emerges from her engagement with fragmented historical records, illustrating Cathy Caruth’s notion that trauma is experienced belatedly and returns in repetitive, unresolved forms. Central to this analysis is the concept of intergenerational trauma. Although the protagonist did not witness the original violence, she bears its psychological weight through silence, absence, and partial narratives. Her compulsive need to document and retrace the event reflects an unconscious
attempt to restore narrative coherence to a deliberately marginalised history. Obsession and repetition further reveal trauma’s destabilising effects, gradually eroding her sense of safety and selfhood. The abstract also explores the embodiment of trauma through hyper vigilance, fear, and bodily response as the protagonist navigates checkpoints, borders, and surveilled spaces. Her
fractured identity and persistent displacement underscore trauma’s existential dimension. Ultimately, Minor Detail presents trauma as an ongoing condition, demonstrating how unacknowledged histories continue to wound the present and transform human suffering into an enduring psychological reality.
Publication Date: 2026-06-23