August 29, 2020 - Shibli, Nors, Harrigan, Merwin
The first installment of a weekly reading list, books I read during the week or, if the week was busy, books that have stuck with me.
This week, books by Palestinian Adania Shibli, Dane Dorthe Nors, (adopted) Texan historian Stephen Harrigan, and American poet W.S. Merwin.
Minor Detail - Adania Shibli
Minor Details follows a young Ramallah woman as she traces the story of a Bedouin girl who died in the Negev Desert during the Nakba, the forced exodus of Palestinians by occupying Israeli and British forces to establish the state of Israel. The girl’s death is briefly referred to in the debriefing documents of the commander of an Israeli military outpost, she is a minor detail. However, the harrowing truth of her story is rendered in precise, clinical detail in the first section of the book. The second half of the book, following the Ramallan woman decades later, shows the legacy of the Nakba and of Israeli occupation in quotidien detail: the physical and psychological confinement, the terrifying and arbitrary bureaucracy, the daily minutiae amidst insane violence. The minor details, which slowly build like a thousand tiny cuts, appear everywhere, but especially in the maps, the woman consults while navigating betweens occupied territories, maps which show the erasure of Palestinian villages, little dots which contained generations which simply don’t appear on her modern maps. The story is riveting as well, careening between intensity and minutiae moment to moment.
Wilds Swims - Dorthe Nors
I love short stories, maybe because I have the attention span of two gnats scrolling Tik-tok. In Wild Swims, Dorthe Nors writes beautiful stories of longing and wandering by people slow-burning their way through acceptances of their past. Nors plays perfectly on the line between soft despair and whimsical detachment. Very fitting for quiet afternoons.
Big Wonderful Thing (Part One: They Came From The Sky) - Stephen Harrigan
This is a big book. A BIG BOOK. I’ll do this one in parts, especially because historian Stephen Harrigan has nicely partitioned the tome and because I tend to spend more time googling references in history books than reading them. Now, the actual book is so well-written, flows so smoothly with such great voice, each page just sort of flies by. The first section, which spans from the earliest evidence of human settlement in Texas to the arrival of the Comanches and the solidification of the Spanish frontier, balances the struggles of the Spanish colonizers, the atrocities they commited, and the nuances, personalities, and structures of the indigenous peoples whom the Spanish (and the French) only considered worthy of evangelism after a Papal decree force them to. I am loving this book, especially as a Texan who learned a relatively liberal Texas history curriculum.
Separation - W.S. Merwin
I have had this poem stuck in my head for about a year now. It’s one of those rare gems of a sentiment, crystalline in it’s concision.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
I just bought a Merwin collection, so expect a more substantial write-up soon.