Enduring Palestine

This chapter considers the ways in which Adania Shibli’s Touch, an imagistic novella, offers a haptic understanding of the Palestinian experience of violence. Whereas much of the recent literature emerging about Palestine/Israel takes a contextually direct approach, setting their stories amid concurrent events, Touch broaches Palestinian subjectivity in a more unorthodox fashion, breaking new ground in the Palestinian literary canon. Rather than foregrounding the bloody violence endemic to the First Intifada milieu, Shibli’s novella gives an intimate portrayal of childhood and adolescence as discreetly violent. This focus on the private allows the reader to discover how the violence of living under occupation is present in seemingly innocuous, yet irreparably damaging ways.