Last week the literary association Litprom canceled a celebration for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s book “Minor Detail” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the publishing world’s biggest international book fairs. The novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, was to be honored for having won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literary prize awarded annually to a woman from the developing world. A panel that Shibli, who splits her time between Jerusalem and Berlin, was to be on with her German translator, Günther Orth, was likewise canceled.
In a statement defending the decision, Juergen Boos, the director of the book fair, distanced the organization from the award, saying the prize came from another group, which was now looking for “a suitable format and setting” to honor Shibli elsewhere. He also said that “we strongly condemn Hamas’s barbaric terror war against Israel” and that the fair “has always been about humanity; its focus has always been on peaceful and democratic discourse.” Furthermore, Boos said, the Frankfurt Book Fair “stands with complete solidarity on the side of Israel.”
Some readers, like the festival organizers, may also side entirely with Israel, which was brutally attacked by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. Others may side with Hamas or with the Palestinian people, now under fire by Israeli forces. Still others may have more complicated positions, condemning the actions of Hamas while supporting the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state or supporting Israel while disapproving of the tactics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or its military.
But taking a side in a war does not require taking positions on a work of fiction — no matter the subject matter or the author’s nationality — and that is the effect of the fair organizers’ decision. Canceling a celebration of an author may not be the same thing as banning a book, but the organizers’ decision amounts to demonizing a fiction writer and stifling her viewpoint.
The move sends an unfortunate message to both authors and readers, advancing the false notion that there is a wrong time for certain authors or novels and that now is not the time for Palestinian literature. As if novelists were somehow responsible to or for global conflicts and must be judged in accordance with whatever political events take place at the time of publication.
Even if one chooses a side in this war, literature and the views of fiction writers shouldn’t become collateral damage. It is no more wrong to read the latest novel by the Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad at this moment than it is to read the comic short stories of the Israeli author Etgar Keret. Now may, indeed, be the very moment when it makes sense to consider a creative work that comes from the other side.
Shibli told me she doesn’t fear the effects of Litprom’s and the book fair’s actions so much as she fears what they reflect in terms of political shifts. “It’s alarming to witness this populism attempting to take its hold on literature,” she wrote me in an email. “But literature cannot be in the grip of one group, not when it forges an intimate link with every reader.”
Shibli has not been canceled. Her works are still available in translation from the Arabic. But a chill has been cast. The idea has been thrust out there by the organizers of one of the world’s most prominent annual literary events that her fiction and, by extension, the work of other Palestinian writers are somehow not OK for our moment. And that the work of literary institutions is to reinforce borders rather than enable literature to transcend them.
“Minor Detail” undoubtedly offers sympathies to the Palestinian cause — a perspective that surely won’t be embraced by all readers. It includes the story of a Bedouin girl who was gang raped and murdered by an Israeli Army unit in 1949, an atrocity that has been well documented. One German judge of the prize, Ulrich Noller, resigned from the jury that determined the award last summer, saying the novel serves “anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives” and claiming it not only allowed such readings but also opened up space for them.
This is 2023’s second controversy in which political passions over a war prevailed over the fate of an author’s work. A month after a dispute between Ukrainian and Russian writers over a panel at the PEN World Voices Festival this year, the novelist Elizabeth Gilbert delayed her historical novel set in Siberia in response to online outcry from readers she said were Ukrainian. Gilbert said she made this decision on her own — we don’t know for sure — but in the end, this is another example of a work of fiction’s subject matter being deemed inappropriate for political reasons.
“It is not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert said in a video she posted online at the time. “And I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”
Let’s be clear: Wars cause harm. Novels do not. Literature may raise uncomfortable questions or explore unpopular viewpoints or establish reasons to empathize with a character a reader might otherwise find repugnant. A novel’s story, characters, politics and theme may not appeal to a particular reader. That reader does not have to like those books or read them to begin with. One need not like or agree with the author, either, to appreciate the person’s work.
But novels need not appeal to or appease a political constituency. Those works of fiction written purely as political dogma in disguise tend to suffer the consequences with critics and readers. That said, even overtly political fiction and the novelists who write them should not be subjected to the passions incited by global conflicts.
These are just two examples, but the effects ripple out, generating tension and fear in the wider literary world. Already, there is fallout from the decision in Frankfurt. The Indonesian Publishers Association, the Arab Publishers’ Association, the Emirates Publishers Association and the United Arab Emirates Sharjah Book Authority have pulled out of the festival, which opened on Wednesday.
As the Sharjah Book Authority put it: “We champion the role of culture and books to encourage dialogue and understanding between people. We believe that this role is more important now than ever.” In withdrawing on Tuesday, the Malaysian Education Ministry noted its decision was “in line with the government’s stand to be in solidarity and offer full support for Palestine.”
More than 600 publishers, editors, translators, writers and others in the industry, including Ian McEwan, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright and the Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, have signed an open letter on the ArabLit website.
“The Frankfurt Book Fair has a responsibility,” the letter explains, “to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down.”
In the statement Boos emphasized “peaceful and democratic discourse.” He and the fair’s organizers should then reflect on this: When you shut people out (be it through censorship, bans, social media campaigns, a canceled book celebration or the machinations of an autocratic regime), when people feel judged by or deprived of a voice that expresses their — and our common — humanity, we wall off our minds.
The moment people line up on opposing sides, when their eyes and hearts shut tight accordingly, is precisely when we need literature that challenges our presumed allegiances most.
“‘Adab’ in Arabic means ‘literature’ but also ‘ethics,’” Shibli told me. “Literature as ethics would perhaps open up more possibilities in our imagination on how we could live our lives together, in relation to each other.”
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