Adania Shibli Quotes

I’m fascinated by what borders try to prevent, and why. And sometimes by how their meaning and the perception of them shifts from one situation to another.

I’m not striving for abstraction, but precision—where the words that want to be in the text can find their place in it.

It is within such structures that I feel a grand narrative can exist, like a dictatorship—solid, like the worst tyrant.

Linguistic erasure on maps is where you first experience the betrayal of language; the erasure of Palestine from the map continues today. Your linguistic consciousness from an early age is built on reading these omissions. This is something I think I’ve been concerned with since the first text I wrote.

I’m open to where life leads me.

People may gain from literature what they cannot get from their own lives. It’s not escapism but rather a kind of openness.

If you are listening, it becomes so natural that you care, and you create a connection of care toward others that is not limited to the borders of the nation-state

As one lives in a place that seems like a punishment for a crime they didn’t commit, it raises harsh questions in relation to simple ideas like justice, or it’s absence, at an early age...maybe the realization of the repeated injustice that one cannot escape in the context of Palestine was the first force to push me early on into literature.

In the last twenty years, the separation between Palestinians and Israelis has become much more severe than before. You feel the inequality. You feel the privileges—it’s how the state works in a racist system, how certain groups are privileged over others. The question why it should be like this comes up at an early age—to a child, the situation is just incomprehensible. You are surprised—how could this be? Is there something wrong with me?

I only write fiction in Arabic because this language is a witch—an amazing, funny, crazy, generous, and forgiving witch. It has allowed me everything. It is the space of the most intimate freedom I have ever experienced in my life.

to “think about” Palestine is already a position of privilege that I would not like to engage with. My concern with Palestine is a personal one, not a literary one. It forms my literature; but my literature is never about Palestine. It is rather within and from Palestine as a condition of injustice; of the normalization of pain and degradation.

this landscape has an alliance with language; they exist together and actually can haunt you, despite any attempt at their erasure.

I am for polyphony: there can be many, many different languages. Considering all these current divisions between ethnicities and religions, it’s madness to have a state, and I really don’t understand the joy in forcing people together.

I always ask myself what kind of terrible things I could commit. This is a question for any human being.

Differences between people are used to commit injustice—that was an early lesson about racism.