‘The atrocity photograph can lure us in at the same time as it repels us and makes us want to turn away’ (9), Jay Prosser writes in Picturing Atrocity. Representations of atrocity rarely offer a straightforward reading. We look, Prosser suggests, because ‘We don’t have a choice. We can’t help but see them anyway’ (7). How, then, do we look at atrocity, let alone make sense of it? Where no response seems adequate, it is perhaps more meaningful to consider the questions that representations of atrocity provoke.

How do we regard pain?

As Susan Sontag understands, images ‘cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?’ (117)

Sontag’s 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others reflects on the power of photographs to wound us, touch us, and – if we choose to engage with them – to mobilize us to action. Sontag recognizes photographs as a ‘means of making “real” (or “more real”) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore’ (9). Yet regarding pain, in any active, reparative sense, cannot simply involve a passive form of looking. Sontag writes: ‘Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that “we”? – and nothing “they” can do either – and who are “they”? – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic’ (79)

According to Sontag, it is not the overabundance of images that inures us to what we are shown, but our own passivity: ‘In a world saturated, no, hyper-saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect: we become callous. In the end, such images just make us a little less able to feel, to have our conscience pricked.’ (81)

What is shown? What is seen?

Twenty years on, Sontag’s reflections still ring true. In the direct aftermath of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7 and Israel’s retaliation, and against a backdrop of continuing violence and unrest in the region, questions of looking, seeing, documenting, and mobilizing have become inescapable. Confronted by a constant flow of horrifying images, it is unsurprising that many feel powerless, particularly when the volume and reach of these images is magnified by social media. In a recent op-ed for the New York Times entitled ‘When Everyone Becomes a War Photographer’, Jason Farago discusses the changing role of photography in times of conflict: ‘On our small screens we are now closer to war than ever before. We are farther than ever from making sense of it.’

In other words, what is shown is not the same as what is seen, or what (if anything) is understood. We find ourselves experiencing an overwhelming sense of catastrophe, in which individual faces and stories are paradoxically made less visible, and meaning less locatable. Farago continues: ‘The lesson we are condemned to relearn is that the photograph, and the digital photograph especially, does not just derive its meaning from what it depicts; it comes from how it travels, how it mutates, and who determines the trajectory.’ Ongoing, urgent conversations about how we look thus align with Sontag’s enduring warning: that the pity and disgust that images of atrocity inspire ‘should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown’ (14).

What does it mean (not) to look?

These questions are fundamental to Minor Detail, the 2017 novel by Palestinian author Adania Shibli, translated into English in 2020 by Elisabeth Jaquette. Minor Detail is told in two parts. The first part takes place in 1949; guided by a third-person narrator and based on a true event, the rape and murder of a young Arab Bedouin-Palestinian girl is told from the perspective of an Israeli officer leading a platoon at the border between Israel and Egypt. The second part of the novel is a fictional account set in the modern day of a Palestinian woman in Ramallah who – transfixed by the ‘minor detail’ that she was born 25 years to the day after the crime – tries to investigate the case. Crucially, the atrocity itself is never depicted.

The details of the real atrocity at the centre of Shibli’s novel are documented elsewhere. A single diary entry by David Ben-Gurion from 1949 reads: ‘It was decided and carried out: they washed her, cut her hair, raped her and killed her.’ The case was briefly resurrected in 1956 at the trial of Israeli soldiers and police officers who killed 43 Arab civilians in Kafr Qassem, as part of a wider established precedent that obeying illegal orders was indefensible. When the army documents were declassified and reported on in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2003, the case was again made visible, to the horror and shame of many in Israeli society – but was all too soon overlooked, and absorbed into a broader landscape of brutality.

Why have I chosen to build my project on unseen atrocity around a fictional written narrative? Because Shibli’s representation of atrocity – or rather lack thereof – grapples with vital questions about what it means to document, how we can understand what cannot be seen or shown, and what can be brought to light in the process. But also because Minor Detail, and the storm surrounding it in Europe, has made the fraught relationship between literature and the politics of representation all too visible.

Minor Detail won Germany’s 2023 LiBeraturpreis, an award for female writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world, for its German translation by Günther Orth. However, the prizegiving ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 20 October was postponed indefinitely; the award body LitProm released a statement citing ‘the war started by Hamas’ as their reason for calling off the event, and asserted their intention to make Jewish and Israeli voices 'especially visible at the fair.’ A letter criticising LitProm’s decision was signed by more than 1,500 authors including Nobel prize winners Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk.

What does it mean to document? 
How can we understand what cannot be seen, and what cannot be shown? 
How can a document push back in refusing to satisfy our urge to see?

The sudden visibility of Shibli in Germany brings into sharp relief the novel’s obscuring of the atrocity around which it is based. Where Sontag warns that photographs provide only the ‘initial spark’ for reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering’ (103), Minor Detail has no dramatic moment of crisis, no spark that triggers a flood of compassion, only to let it wane. There is no concretized image of suffering to lure us in; no hypersaturation to contribute to a ‘deadening of feeling’ (Sontag 82). In not depicting the atrocity in visible terms, Shibli pushes back against our passivity. We cannot become apathetic or numb to the horrors if our urge to see them represented is never satisfied.

The novel’s deliberate lack of visual representation is accentuated through techniques of disorientation and obstruction. Throughout the first part, the narrative is sparse, at times alienating. Frequent caesuras break the account into fragments, drawing attention to the unreliability of our designated narrator. All characters are nameless. Our understanding is focalized through the army officer’s limited point of view, which becomes increasingly incoherent as he succumbs to the effects of a poisonous spider bite. The victim is consistently dehumanized and denied subjectivity; she appears in the narrative as a ‘still moaning black mass’ and a ‘motionless body’, denying the reader a visually conceivable figure to which we can direct our sympathy.

At times when details of the atrocity are close to becoming visible, Shibli pivots suddenly from vision to other senses. Overpowering smells and the constant sound of a barking dog distort our interpretation of events, tempting us with a visual complement that is constantly denied. The climax of the story is simultaneously granted and denied narrative space, insofar as we realize what is happening, but are unable to access a clear depiction of it: 'With his right hand covering her mouth, and his left hand clutching her right breast, the bed’s squeaking drifted up over the stillness of dawn, then increased and intensified, accompanied again by the dog’s howling. And after the squeaking finally ceased, the loud howling outside the door continued for a long time' (45). The participle clause that opens this fragment should point to a portrayal of the human interaction, but instead focuses on the scene’s non-human elements, intensifying the disconnect between the readers’ narrative positioning and the incident itself.

The representation of the murder is similarly indirect: ‘The girl was wailing as she ran away, then she fell to the sand before the sound of the gunshot was heard. Silence prevailed again’ (53). The passive description of the killing again severs the subject from the act. Although we assume that we have witnessed her death, the consequence of the gunshot remains ambiguous. Any hope of further detail is precluded by a silence that masks the remaining visible traces of the atrocity committed.

When our vision is obscured, what is brought to light?

Shibli’s novel thus prompts us to consider to what extent silence and obscurity can serve as forms of documentation. What responsibilities do we have as witnesses to horror, seen or unseen? What is enlightened when our vision is obscured? If no clear answer is provided, what other questions should we be asking?

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Shibli spoke about the (im)possibility of representation: ‘In Palestine-Israel, I, like many others, grew up realising language is not merely a tool for communication. It often hides rather than articulates, holding between its silence endless possibilities not concerned with expression. […] Literature, for me, is the only place that accepts silence.’

The continuous exchange between hiding and articulating, between what is seen and what is not, is crucial to the second part of the novel. Just as the first part refuses to depict the atrocity, the second part is unwilling to stage the paradigmatic moment of discovery in the narrator’s hunt for the true story of what happened to the girl. The narrator is fascinated by one ‘minor detail’ that she sees in a newspaper, that ‘The incident took place on a morning that would coincide, exactly a quarter of a century later, with the morning of my birth’ (62).

The fragmented narrative of the first part is replaced by repetitive, meandering sentences that mirror the narrator’s stammer and distracted thought process. The second part of the novel pushes back against the desire of both the reader and narrator that a coherent representation of events could emerge from the available details. Libraries and state archives, sources of ‘official’ information, consistently prove to be dead ends in the narrator’s investigation; it is necessarily impossible that something, or someone, may be found ‘who might hold a detail that could help me uncover the incident as experienced by the girl. And finally arrive at the whole truth’ (109). 

After all, revealing the ‘whole truth’ would be meaningless. To make the unseen visible would not allow us to make sense of the atrocity, nor would it encourage us to move beyond the mere shock that its revelation would elicit. Returning to Sontag: ‘Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn't, one can not look’ (65). Shibli’s refusal to show and to shock leaves us unsatisfied. 

What do we do with that dissatisfaction? Perhaps it is a reaction with more longevity than shock, pity, or disgust. It compels us to engage, to ask more questions about the conditions of power that cultivate atrocity, to think further about the interdependence of what we can see and what we cannot. For the atrocity and its wider significance are visible to the reader, if we choose to look further. The sensory mirroring that permeates the end of the novel – the smell of spilled gasoline, the barking of a dog – draws our attention to the cyclical nature and inevitability of violence, and suggests that other details may be shared between the parallel stories in ways that were not visible before. The novel’s devastation lies in its subtly. Only we as readers can perceive the correspondences between the past horrors committed against the girl and the fate to which the second narrator is condemned decades later. With different levels of understanding and from different points of view, we bear witness to both. The challenge lies in sustaining our response, and carrying it beyond the pages of the book – to representations of atrocity we see in news sources, official accounts and beyond. Shibli’s novel is more than a mere pricking of conscience; it demands a commitment.

What now?

Sontag criticizes those who are perennially surprised that depravity exists. Images of atrocity, she writes, clearly state: ‘This is what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget’ (115). Sontag and Shibli agree: the horrors are not going to abate. Shibli’s novel, louder now in the wake of its silencing and more visible after its obscuring, compels us to reflect, to sustain the emotional responses that we experience, to ask more questions, and thereby moves us to commit to a deeper understanding of how we regard atrocity. Sontag’s instruction: ‘Let the atrocious images haunt us’ (115). Shibli’s response? Let atrocity remain unseen, and keep us from looking away. 

Works cited

Batchen, Geoffrey, Miller, Nancy K., Prosser, J., eds. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. Reaktion Books, 2012.

Farago, Jason. “When Everyone Becomes a War Photographer.” The New York Times, 12 Oct. 2023. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/arts/design/war-photos-israel-gaza.html.

Freeman, John. “‘In the Last Four Weeks Language Has Deserted Me’: Adania Shibli on Being Shut Down.” The Guardian, 9 Nov. 2023. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/09/palestinian-author-adania-shibli-frankfurt-book-fair.

Shibli, Adania. Minor Detail. Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2003.

An Open Letter in Support of Adania Shibli From More Than 350 Writers, Editors, and Publishers ‹ Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/an-open-letter-in-support-of-adania-shibli-from-more-than-350-writers-editors-and-publishers/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2023.

The Winner 2023 / Litprom. https://www.litprom.de/en/best-books/liberaturpreis/the-winner-2023/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2023.