Translator’s Afterword
Touch
by Adania Shibli
translated by Paula Haydar
With a vibrant new voice and unique narrative style, Adania Shibli creates in Touch a strange yet familiar world seen through the eyes of an unnamed female narrator who has the heightened sensory perception of a trauma victim or an autistic child. In structure and style, this lyrical novella breaks away from the tradition of modern Arabic fiction.Touch is structured according to five main sections. The first four are perceived through a specific sensory filter and are titled accordingly: Colors, Silence, Movement, and Language. Within these four main sections are eight vignettes in which the child develops into a young woman of marrying age. As we read from one vignette to the next, scenes and images overlap and reappear, so that the story flows forward and rolls back like a series of ocean waves. The fifth and last main section, The Wall, is a one-page finale describing the last moments before the girl, now a young bride, leaves her family and her home in order to start her new married life.
Shibli’s narrative style is new to the Arabic literary tradition, yet it shares a number of characteristics with the objectivist style of writing popular in France and Spain and later in the United States in the 1950s. A detached narrator, devoid of emotion, observes the world as if through a camera lens. Readers are left to draw conclusions about the characters’ feelings based on linguistic and other descriptive details.
The idea of an unreliable narrator is not new to fiction writing, but Shibli’s unnamed female narrator in Touch is more than unreliable; she is impaired. In fact, she displays a number of characteristics associated with autism, such as difficulty with social interaction, difficulty with verbal and non-verbal communication, obsessive interests and thoughts, a reduced ability to empathize, and a heightened sensitivity to sound, touch, and other sensory stimulation. She has difficulty with social interaction at home, at school, in her neighborhood, and she has immense difficulty comprehending people when they speak, whether her own parents or siblings, her classmates, her teachers, or commentators on the news. She has similar problems with nonverbal communication, as when she struggles with her sister in the bath, or in the game of “evol” with the neighbor, which often ends abruptly because she hurts him. She has a strong tendency to focus on the superficial aspects of things, using one sensory perception at a time. Over the course of the novel, the same events—the brother’s death and the wedding—are filtered through different sensory lenses. Her heightened perceptions seem to crowd out possibilities of understanding or empathizing with other people. While observing her mother weep over her dead son, the girl notices her mother’s tears and bracelets rather than her grief; when the laborer family’s father hangs himself, she notices the way he swings in the breeze rather than feeling sadness or shock or caring for the other members of his family or even her own. Her extreme sensitivity to sound, touch, and other sensory stimulation pervades the novella and provides its structure.
An impaired narrator makes for a compelling hook. In contrast with the protagonist’s lack of emotion, readers can easily empathize with her and feel her loneliness and frustration; readers are able to grope around with her in her isolated world and observe that world with intensity and detachment, trying to make connections between colors and sounds and movements without knowing the right words.
Ironically perhaps, Shibli creates the world of the language-impaired protagonist by employing a number of key linguistic features into her narrative style. These include numerous examples of ambiguous pronoun references, absence of personal pronouns in reference to family relationships, absence of dialogue, preponderance of passive verb forms or absence of agency, repetition of images, construction of parallels via word association or sensory association that often forge a union of opposites or contradictions, and the introduction of made-up words.
The language of the narrator follows its own, internally generated set of rules, which becomes clear with the mention of the game of “evol” in the opening chapter. Readers stumble over this reference, whether in Arabic or English. In Arabic, the game is called “bahla” a non-existent word, not the name of an actual children’s game. The intended meaning becomes clear much later in the novel when we discover this word is “al-hub” (love) spelled backwards, a word the narrator has invented to keep the game a secret. In this way, Shibli constructs an idiosyncratic language system that functions outside society and social norms. When the meaning of bahla, which is mentioned a number of times, is finally revealed to the reader, that revelation is gratifying. For the translator, it was fortuitous to be able to cast this frustration-cum-gratification into English by introducing “evol” or “love” spelled backwards, especially since “evol” also does not spell a real word and yet resembles the word “evil,” adding an element of darkness and mystique.
The narrator’s intense isolation has led her to make up words no one else knows. They are her words, her world. Later on, she becomes ostracized for writing the words “I am a donkey,” on the board at school. The chain of linguistic associations she makes prior to writing that sentence are another good example of how her procedure for assigning meanings to words is carried out in a social vacuum, without the benefit of the filter provided by normal social relationships and interactions. She begins with fragments of words she hears on the news. After much trial and error she finally pieces together the phrase “Sabra and Shatila.” But she has no knowledge of what the news report contains, because she does not comprehend the conversation of her parents or her classmates as they react in horror to the news of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. No one has taken the time to explain anything to her, either. She has no knowledge of the existence of refugee camps with those names. To her, Sabra sounds like the familiar Arabic word sabr or subbar (cactus), and Shatila sounds like shatla (seedling). At school she spots a cactus plant, but it suddenly gets hidden behind a donkey standing in her way. In her mind, the words are all connected, and when she stands in front of the green board, its color reminds her of cactus, which reminds her of the donkey, and as she has done once before in an earlier scene when she “writes all the words she knows” on the fogged-up classroom window, she merely writes down the words she knows on the board. “I am a donkey.” She doesn’t realize the horrible significance of putting those words together, because she has had no linguistic interaction with anyone. She simply does not understand. Our narrator has words with no context, contexts with no words, and her only recourse is to connect the words she does know to things that exist within her own private world. In effect, she reacts to each new word the way readers react to “evol.” Later, when she becomes immersed into the world of books, she describes her strategy for comprehending unfamiliar words: she imagines something and quickly sticks the word to it before some other word’s meaning takes over.
Not surprisingly, dialogue has little place in Touch’s unique linguistic world. What little quoted speech does appear in the latter sections of the novella cannot be considered dialogue, in the sense that each instance is yet another example of the narrator’s inability to comprehend and communicate, or it involves language being used to ostracize her. For example, when she asks her brother where her father has gone, he tells her “to Tallouzia,” somewhere akin to Timbuktu or Nowhere Land. Not understanding her brother’s joke, she tries to figure out, in her idiosyncratic way of measuring time by counting passing cars, how long it will take for her father to go to Tallouzia and back. Her brother continues teasing her with nonsense rhymes, badgers her more by telling her her father has gone to buy her a bicycle but he (her brother) is going to destroy it by riding it with his “so big” body. When she begins to walk away in humiliation and frustration, her brother fires off one last insult telling her he saw a pigeon “poop on her head.” Later that night, in revenge, the girl uses language when she prays to God, begging Him to make her brother die. How terrifying when indeed her brother dies the next day. This is the ultimate violence possible, and it has come through words. It is no wonder when, in a later scene, after her sister reluctantly “feeds” her and then tries to block her entrance into the mother’s bedroom, the girl is unable to speak up for herself. “She tried to say something, but the words disappeared and the letters were no longer arranged like before” (63). She resorts, instead, to physical violence and grabs her sister’s hair.
Whether present or absent, language and sounds are a constant source of pain and punishment in a lonely world of clouded perceptions and callous relationships. She relates to her sisters as numbers in a sequence, interchangeable people she observes from afar. She never refers to family members as “my” mother or “my” brother, but rather “the” father and “the seventh sister,” like actors on a foreign stage whose performance she watches without comprehending a single word. As suggested by the title, the girl is constantly groping around in the world, forever trying to touch and be touched, to connect, to feel, to be accepted.
The girl’s powerlessness is reinforced stylistically with verb forms that mark a notable absence of human agency. “All that reached her were the sounds of the hand searching inside the second drawer and the jingle of gold bracelets on the wrist”(24). “A weak sound emerged, carrying the good tidings of weeping across the house’s silence” (25). “Calm lingered in the classroom, joined by the cold that came in through the door. The cold caused bodies to move involuntarily, and a few moments later so did a chair, then a desk and a mouth and so on. But everything came into stillness again when the teacher’s head reappeared in the door. The head disappeared again…” (41). She tends not to look at people’s faces, either, an expression of submission and powerlessness. For example, when the painters arrive, she observes, “The first foot appeared and landed on the dirt, then the second foot, until there were eight” (27). And late at night she recognizes her mother in the darkness by her rotten toenail. Many of her observations take place in mirrors, a perfect manifestation of a passive, objective point of view. “The big mirror stood there in the middle of the sitting room revealing the beauty of whatever went on in front of it” (45). There does not appear to be any hope for improvement in the girl’s isolation even at the end of the novel when, once again, she views the events of the world through the car’s rear view mirror. This time she watches her sisters and her home fade into the distance as she begins her married life. The groom, interestingly, is nowhere in sight.
Although the question of Palestine does not figure directly in the novel (with the exception of the classroom punishment for writing the word on the back of a ruler and the fragments of words referring to the massacre of Sabra and Shatila) it looms largely in the background and in the very structure of the story. The unnamed young female heroine represents the Palestinian child born into a violent and unwelcoming world that permits her torment and abuse—both physically and verbally. She is forced out, powerless to change things, and protects herself by detaching and distancing herself from her own heart. She is reduced to living a subhuman existence within an uninterested and ever-deteriorating world, the product of war, of brutal occupation, of oppression and denial of basic human rights and dignity.
Indeed, when we add to the character of the narrator the very important detail of her Palestinian identity, suddenly everything takes on a new level of meaning. From the very beginning of the novel, we are made to notice the way things change—for the worse—over time. The rust-covered water storage tank, for example, wasn’t always that way; it all started with one little speck that spread and spread until it touched the whole surface. And the girl is similarly covered in coarse brown wool. Later on we notice the deterioration of the house paint, “The peeling of the house paint was at its peak, yet no one noticed, having gotten used to the gradual transformation of colors” (11). One can’t help connecting this image, which crops up again in the description of the plastic container the sisters use for bathing that was once blue and has now turned white from so much bumping and scraping, with the Palestinian condition. The recurring images are analogous to the world’s gradual growing accustomed to the occupation of Palestine, to the torturing and killing of Palestinians, and the outside world’s general loss of interest in the Palestinian people over time. When the little girl attempts to straighten “the chaos of the crooked necktie” in the picture of her dead brother, her inevitable failure to change what has been captured forever in a snapshot (the past) is representative of the Palestinians’ powerlessness to right the wrongs of the past. Such violent images dominate nearly every section of every chapter of this novella. Peeling paint resembles a “burnt hand,” a red ribbon resembles an ambulance light, her dreams are filled with violent stabbings, demolished buildings, and withered grapevines. Even God seems to have forsaken them, unfurling the darkness “whichever way He likes” and failing to come to them when they wait.
Translating Adania Shibli’s Touch was a challenge and an adventure. One of the greatest difficutliesto resist the desire to fill in the blanks, so to speak, and interpret ambiguous scenes and descriptions for the reader. This I felt strongly when I considered adding an asterisk to the first mention of “evol” just to say, “Wait, you’ll find out what it means soon enough!” But Touch’s greatest strength might be its openness to interpretation, which stems directly from its lack of linguistic transparency, making it in many ways more akin to poetry than traditional narrative prose. Touch sends readers on an imaginative adventure jam-packed with colors, sounds, movement, and language, all of which bombard us with numerous meanings on many different levels. Parallel images, ambiguous pronoun references, and contradictory ideas and words make multiple readings possible. In order to allow English readers to share this same experience, I often chose in favor of more literal translation choices, even if the result sounded strange or even jarring at times. This was a conscious choice for the sake of properly representing the original work.
One of Shibli’s great accomplishments in Touch was to reinvent language and introduce a fresh narrative style that forces readers to be active participants in producing the work’s meaning. After working so closely with this novella and growing accustomed to finding surprises around every corner, other writing suddenly seems, well, a bit dull. Surely this is an indication of having come into contact with a great piece of literature.