Touch begins with a little girl picking up rust beside a water tank. She stretches her hand out towards the sunlight and watches the rust turn to gold. It’s very quiet all around. She pees down her legs. “Touch purrs along like an extended prose poem as Shibli picks up the glinting fragments of the girl’s experience, then turns them over in her hand to see how they refract the light of a world so radically constricted and reduced,” said Kaelen Wilson-Goldie in The National.

The interconnected prose poem-like vignettes are never explicitly portrayed and often appear like a painting, the impressions of which unfold slowly, “their impact permeating throughout the text.” And like a painting, they call for several visits before you can start putting their pieces together.

The girl experiences her life within the framework of five chapters – Colors, Silence, Movement, Language and The Wall, that run along the slim 72 pages of the book. Her ordinary days of growing up and growing out are sometimes light, but mostly intense, weighed down by the gravity of political strife and personal loss that gradually drive her into a solitary, silent existence. She learns to watch and observe and not express. She’s not given a name and a place.

We know that she’s in Palestine primarily because of the mention of The Wall, but the events in the country remain distant. The reader is only aware of it to the extent that the young girl is. She isn’t oblivious to it but is rather naïve to gage the full spectrum of the unrest around her.

Shibli is known to challenge traditional literary conventions in her native Arabic and though her stories and novels are difficult to translate, they have made their way to several languages.

Published in 1999. Translated from the Arabic by Paula Haydar, published in 2010.