During the acceptance of Freedom of Expression Prize from the Norwegian Writers Union last year, Palestinian writer and easiest Adania Shibili talked about her and all Palestinian’s struggle. Her speech takes us to the suffering of of Palestinians as a whole and it is heart wrenching. Read what she has to say;
Every time I hear the phrase “freedom of speech,” I feel as perplexed as a nocturnal animal suddenly blinded by light. Where does freedom of speech begin, and where does it end? When does it begin, and when does it end?
I ask these questions as a Palestinian, someone raised in a place where freedom of expression—like freedom of existence—belong to some but not to others, and the others are us: the Palestinians. Even words like “Palestinians” and “Palestine” have often been banned.
This ban made the lack of access to freedom of expression something deeply personal to me, as well as to other Palestinian writers. It became a daily companion in the writing process. The fact that my fellow writer, Musab Abu Toha, and I have never met—have never even been able to have a free conversation—is testament to that reality. He has been locked inside Gaza most of his life, while I have been barred from entering Gaza since 2000.
Minor Detail By Adania Shibli
In Minor Detail, Adania Shibli weaves two parallel stories—a 1949 murder of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers, and a young woman’s later obsession with uncovering the crime—showing how the past relentlessly shadows the present.
Finalist for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
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In this sense, freedom—including freedom of expression—has appeared to us as a distant neighbor, residing in a castle surrounded by fences and blinding bright lights, a castle that we Palestinians have not been permitted to enter.
I realized some of this already as a child: there were words I could say and words I could not. Language quickly revealed itself to be a mysterious, perhaps dangerous terrain. It demanded attention and care; it was never just a tool for communication. Instead, language contained, it seemed, the very secret of life.
Thus, under conditions where one could say some things but not others, the absence of freedom of speech gradually transformed into the freedom of writing. The realization that written language could circumvent the obstacles to free expression—and open a space for freedom of imagination—came after a series of literary encounters.
One such encounter was tied to a debate in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in the late 1980s. The parliamentarians unanimously decided to ban a recent poem by Mahmoud Darwish. Around the same time, one evening, there was a timid knock on our family’s front door. In the darkness stood someone, handing out pamphlets containing Darwish’s banned poems. Palestinian literature—Darwish’s poems and beyond—was treated as contraband, as dangerous as pornography, forbidden in homes and schools alike.
Touch by Adania Shibli
Touch follows the youngest of nine sisters in a Palestinian family, where small, everyday experiences carry the weight of national tragedy. With a language both natural and estranged, Adania Shibli reshapes modern Arabic fiction, capturing how ordinary moments ripple outward with inevitable consequence.
Young Writer’s Award–Palestine BY A. M. Qattan Foundation
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Another earlier experience had already shown me literature’s profound power in the face of censorship and erasure. In the early 1980s, in an elementary school Arabic literature class, I encountered it again. At that time—and to some extent even today—the Palestinian curriculum had to be approved by Israeli authorities. They permitted texts from various Arab countries but banned those from Palestine itself, fearing even indirect references to the Palestinian cause.
Only one text slipped through: Time and Man, a short story by Samira Azzam, deemed “harmless” by the censors. Published in 1963, it tells of a young man preparing for his first day of work. He sets his alarm for 4:00 a.m. to catch his train. Each day, just as the bell rings, there’s a knock at his door. An old man, whom he doesn’t know, appears and vanishes into the night. This happens every morning until the young man no longer bothers with his alarm. Many months later, he learns that the old man lost his own son—who had slipped and fallen under the wheels of the train after arriving late—and now wakes up the company’s workers to spare them the same fate.
On the surface, the story seemed simple enough to escape the censors’ scrutiny. But for me, it awakened a profound awareness. Were there once Palestinian workers who commuted by train, without passing through checkpoints? Were they ever late simply because they overslept, not because they were held up for hours at military crossings? Was there once a Palestine where life was normal, even in its banality and tragedy?
This simple text etched a deep longing into my young mind: a yearning for everything that had been—the normal, the banal, the tragic—and a refusal to accept the blurred, violent existence we have been relegated to since 1948, when our very being was recast as a “problem.”
Against the harsh realities, against censorship’s erasures, literature revealed another world—and another path.
These experiences remain with me today, reminders of the extraordinary possibilities that literature holds, even in monstrous times.
I thank you, and I thank the Norwegian Writers’ Association, for awarding this prize to Musab Abu Toha and me. I thank you for honoring literature—and for honoring writers who, against all odds, continue to trust in its power to show us a path away from the one paved by the monsters.
