Transgenerational Trauma in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail: An Atkinsonian Reading of the Poetics of Affective Transmission

Abstract

The research article investigates the representation of trauma in Palestinian English literature. The Palestinian English literature created by the Palestinian and diasporic writers is rich in trauma. The current study examines how some traumas do not end; they echo as if the past is breathing in present. In Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail(2017), a  silent murder committed in the Negev desert in 1949 resonates decades later in the body, thoughts, and movements of a woman who never witnessed it, revealing how the past continues to breathe inside the present. Through the lens of Meera Atkinson’s The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma (2017), the study argues that Shibli’s mirrored narrative; juxtaposing the assault of a Bedouin girl in 1949 with a present-day Palestinian woman’s obsessive investigation performs the very processes of affective transmission, recurrence, and embodied haunting that Atkinson identifies as central to inherited trauma. In Minor Detail, trauma moves “rhizomatically” through affective channels rather than biological inheritance.The researchers examine how the two narrative halves resonate despite temporal distance. The narrator’s physical fragility and her bodily responses to fear illustrate how Shibli renders inherited trauma somatically; enacting Atkinson’s insistence that transgenerational trauma operates through the body as much as through memory or narrative. Drawing on key textual moments, such as the narrator’s recognition that the girl was killed twenty-five years ago exactly before her birth date, and her admission of the truth that past will never stop chasing her, the researchers demonstrates how Shibli’s formal design performs the very mechanisms Atkinson theorizes: trauma returns not as remembered content but as an insistent echo, a rhythm carried through silence, repetition, and bodily vulnerability. It artistically constructs a poetics of transgenerational trauma revealing how the text transforms historical violence into an affective transmission that binds many generations together, exposing the consistent, gendered, and embodied nature of Palestinian trauma under occupation.