Читать книгу No Place for Grief - Lotte Buch Segal - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIntroduction
I merged a little with the void
sitting in a nocturnal room and was filled
with your silence
that trembled in the picture
—Ghada al-Shafi’i
Luma’s husband was killed in an air raid near their house on the outskirts of a major Palestinian city. She heard the bombing and knew immediately that her husband was its most likely target.
Thirteen years have passed since his death. Luma has mourned him, and she could remarry without any social censure, as other widows have done. But she adamantly refuses. The first time we met she told me so, though not in so many words. She revealed her conviction in the slight upward tilt of the chin and click of the tongue that means “no, of course not,” among Palestinians.
Whenever she spoke of her husband’s death, her voice would rise to a higher pitch and her face and cheeks would color. The adrenaline coursing through her body was evident. Talking about his death in its minutest details, Luma recounted how she went through stages of fear, anticipation, and an uncanny sense of knowing that her husband was dead, even before official confirmation. When she was finally certain that her husband had been killed, she descended into a state of desolation.
Luma spoke about his death in a way that conveyed the sorrow of losing a husband in culturally appropriate terms and emphasized her feelings for him. As the wife of a politically active man, she had to put her life on hold when her husband was detained in Israeli prisons, after he had fled and hid preceding his incarceration. Up to his death in 2002, their twelve-year relationship had oscillated between moments of happiness, like their wedding and the birth of their children, and moments of anxiety and hardship during his imprisonment. Luma told me how his first imprisonment occasioned nearly as much grief as his death ten years later. We may even surmise that her husband’s death allowed Luma to reconnect with a certain normalcy, because, in her words, it was not until a year after her husband’s death that life again, or perhaps for the first time, became normal.
When Luma finished her story, she dried her tears, rushed to her kitchen, and proudly brought back two kinds of homemade cake for us to have with our coffee. She said it had done her good to cry.
However, not all kinds of conjugal loss lend themselves so easily to a story of mourning and desire. Luma’s loss—the possibilities and the limitations of how she could express it—instigated my study of the consequences of being in a population, and a kind of marriage, that tend to be cast by Palestinians and academics alike in a language of heroism, perseverance, and national solidarity. I wanted to consider what happens when the emotional remains of being a bereaved wife appear to outweigh the sense of belonging to a collective, and when life in the shadow of heroism is unable to find expression.
One woman, Yara, appears to encapsulate precisely this dilemma. Her husband has been detained since 2001, and Yara herself has also been imprisoned. Yet with seven hundred thousand Palestinians incarcerated in Israel since 1967 (Btselem 2015), the confinement of Yara’s husband is nothing out of the ordinary. Imprisonment is lived, felt, and endured by the vast majority of families in occupied Palestine.
Yara lived next door to a Palestinian friend of mine in an upscale neighborhood of Ramallah. It was a rainy November day in 2007 when we first met. Gently ushering my assistant Rawan and me inside her living room, Yara seemed somewhat uneasy at the prospect of talking about her husband’s confinement, of presuming that her own words mattered as much as her husband’s. I explained that part of my project was to invite women to describe the experience of confinement for those left behind.
To a woman like Yara, the history of the Palestinian resistance movement and its varying intensities are woven into her account of her emotions about her husband’s imprisonment. As she recounted the early phases of resistance, she remembered how, at that time, political men were highly respected among Palestinian people and society.
However, Yara also explained how doubt had slowly but persistently crept into her conviction that she and her husband should devote their lives to politics: “I was thinking, ‘Why are you leaving your house and your wife and your kids; who are you doing this for?’ No one cares anymore.”
Despite these doubts, Yara is still loyal to the cause for which her husband is in prison. This comes through powerfully when she is invited to speak in public. One such occasion illustrates the imbrication of politics and intimate lives to which this book is dedicated. In 2012 yet another international campaign for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel was being launched. A series of meetings on the problem of the Palestinian prisoners followed. Despite the organizer’s expectations, very few people showed up for the meeting. Yara began her talk by emphasizing that she was speaking to raise awareness of the conditions for all Palestinian prisoners and not only for her own husband. She spoke about the large number of people held in detention and their common plight. Through illustrative examples of her husband’s difficulties in prison she voiced her concern about the general issues at stake for the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody. During the talk she subtly reminded the audience that she had not seen her husband for the last six years, as he was being held in isolation. When the floor opened for questions, a woman from a human rights movement asked if Yara would say something about the conditions faced by the prisoners’ family members. Yara recounted the humiliation many families endure when visiting their relatives in prison; how they employ human rights lawyers for years on end in the hope that yet another hearing might lead to their loved one’s release.
When a woman asked a more personal question, “What about you?” Yara’s voice suddenly fell. She was quiet for a while, took a deep breath, and then gestured toward me and said, “ask her, Lotte knows.” Given that I was neither an activist member of the host organization nor a regular participant in these meetings, the woman looked at me with a somewhat puzzled expression and urged Yara to continue talking. Yara then began speaking again in a more pensive tone of voice. Whereas her talk about the prisoners, the Israeli penal system, and the conflict at large was coherent, persuasive, and well rehearsed, it seemed to me that the words she needed to talk about her own experience were not readily at hand. At least not in the context of a political meeting on the cause of the Palestinians and more specifically the release of the prisoners. She did not say anything personal about how it felt to be her. Instead, she subtly changed the subject to that of the effect of her and her husband’s confinement on their children. She could not hold back her tears as she spoke about her daughter’s psychological distress and the ensuing difficulties of finding her a suitable spouse. This part of Yara’s story was not rehearsed. And in contrast to the evocative force of Yara’s political speech, the more personal revelations did not elicit any reaction from the audience. Neither the activists in the solidarity movement nor the members of the audience responded to what Yara confessed. While I am speculating here, the audience seemed simply unable to take in the full extent of her experience—that even though she continued to be politically active, she was expressing doubt about the worth of the struggle. Judging from the lack of response in the meeting to Yara’s more personal account in contrast to the clear acknowledgment of the political struggle, her experiences seemed relevant to the attendees only to the extent that she could represent the brave but suffering wife of the prisoner, and thus contribute to the political cause.
It is not that Yara’s predicament is ignored by distant or intimate witnesses. For instance, the leader of the professional organization in which Yara’s daughter works told me that they do what they can in the workplace to support her, not only as the child of a heroic detainee but also as a human being who is marked by the episodic imprisonment that both her father and mother have been through since her early childhood. During my conversation with Yara on that rainy November day in Ramallah, she seemed most distraught when speaking about the effect that her and her husband’s detention may have had on their children.
Grieving in Private
What do Luma’s and Yara’s stories each tell us about absent spouses and the ways in which they can and cannot be mourned in both the private and public lives of Palestinians? These small glimpses of conjugal life, or lack thereof, help reveal how the death or indefinite absence of a spouse suffuses many Palestinian relationships. My interest here is not only in the sadness that the women express over such a loss but also in how this is braided with a disenchantment with politics and a feeling of unbearable loss for many activists wrought by their participation in the Palestinian cause. This is not to say that the language of suffering and loss is unimportant or irrelevant in the history of the Palestinian national movement. The notion of the martyr, for example, is central to Palestinian iconography and political discourse. The figure of the victim has also played a central role in Palestinian human rights practices. However, the dominant ways in which loss and suffering have been framed have, I argue, effectively excluded the experience of many Palestinians.
For Yara, the losses she has had to endure are not easily expressed or publicly received within the repertoire of stories that women tell about loss in Palestine. Her loss does not lend itself well to the process of mourning, and to the relief that mourning can potentially bring. Her sorrow simply has to be borne in private anguish. To the martyr’s widow Luma, in contrast, the language of mourning, such as her lamentations, allows her both to inhabit and admit to feelings of love and desire in a way that is socially accepted, insofar as these feelings are directed toward her deceased husband. In Yara’s case, however, there is no available language by which to express the grief that invades her being. Her grief includes not only the continual loss of her husband but also her doubt about the roles she has filled and continues to fill in the Palestinian political community, as a committed activist, a female ex-detainee, and the proud wife of a hero.
A core argument of this book is that the language of a hopeful future for the Palestinian project almost requires blocking out the full extent of what it feels like to be in Yara’s position. A result of this is therefore a loss of language regarding marital separation that is not caused by death, among other inarticulable losses.
The predominant line of scholarship on Palestinian adversity would propose one of two things. Either that women like Yara may indeed suffer in their predicament but, at the same time, they occupy a space of agency and can feel consoled by the shared language of sumūd, the local idiom of perseverance and steadfastness often used to connote the power of simply enduring rather than engaging in violent means of resistance (Meari 2014). Or that Yara’s experience is just an example of the chilling statistics about psychiatric disorders in Palestine. Psychiatry, too, is a common language to describe and understand life as a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank. In this language, 24.3 percent of Palestinian women display major lifetime depression, despite the fact that men are more directly exposed to traumatic events than women (Madianos, Lufti Sarhan, and Koukia 2012; Punamäki et al. 2005). But for Yara, neither the language of widowhood deployed by women like Luma nor the language of psychiatry sufficiently encapsulates her feelings and experiences.
Over the course of my engagement with affliction among Palestinians, I have come to think of the mutually absorbing languages of sumūd and trauma as a standing language of acknowledgment of suffering in contemporary Palestine. I am drawing here on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s argument in Philosophical Investigations against the existence of a private language, that is, a language that belongs only to an individual, and his related idea that words represent sensation (1953 [2009]: §244–§271; see Chapter 1 in this book for elaboration). What intrigues me is how language then works in terms of another of Wittgenstein’s concepts, namely, “forms of life.”1 Philosopher Stanley Cavell sums up the idea of forms of life this way:
We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing ensures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, sense of humor and significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life.” Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rests on nothing more, but nothing less than this. (1976: 52)
On this premise, a “standing language” refers to agreement in criteria as to what “forms of life” are human. My concern, however, is not whether particular experiences pertain to being human. Rather, I am pondering how, in complex ways, the standing language shapes what kinds of suffering can be put into words, and acknowledged, before the limits of agreement about what it means to be human in contemporary Palestine are reached. With this as my analytical point of departure I hope to offer details on what it means to be a prisoner’s wife in occupied Palestine, and to help conceptualize the entanglement of everyday endurance, intimacy, and the ordinary in the face of an occupation that has become part and parcel of Palestinian social life.
Beginning with the ways in which so-called heroic women’s endurance and suffering are understood, the book casts the ethnography of prisoners’ wives in the light of three mutually interacting contexts of understanding that these women are often seen within: first, the idea of trauma as capturing the derivative suffering of the women related to either martyrs or prisoners; second, a Palestinian moral discourse that entwines resistance, sumūd, and suffering; and, third, the temporality of endurance, and how this waxes and wanes with the temporality of both trauma and resistance.
Trauma with No Aftermath
Given the long history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians2 and, significantly, the outside world’s involvement in it, “trauma” is a most powerful language for talking about the affliction of the Palestinians. The language of trauma is where the twin experiences of enduring and suffering seem to have a home for both Palestinian health professionals and international observers (Fassin 2008; Fassin and Rechtman 2009). This is because the psychosocial organizations that offer the women their services work through languages of traumatization as a way to acknowledge the emotional effects of the occupation, be it imprisonment, loss, or violence. I am interested here in the gap between the language of trauma and the women’s experiences, and the political implications and nature of that gap.
During a stretch of fieldwork in 2008 I had an informal meeting on mental health, gender, and trauma in Palestine with an esteemed lecturer and now research colleague from the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University, which was then located in the West Bank town of Ramallah. When I asked her how she understood the notion of trauma in Palestine, she said with a smile that “Raija-Lena brought trauma to Palestine.” Since the early 1990s, the Finnish professor of psychology Raija-Lena Punamäki has had a highly acclaimed and locally respected collaboration with researchers at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program and, later, at Birzeit University on the occupation’s impact on the mental health of Palestinian adults and children (Punamäki et al. 1997; 2005). Punamäki was not alone, however, in bringing the idea of trauma to Palestinians. One figure in particular is mentioned whenever anthropologists contemplate the notion of trauma in occupied Palestine: the late Dr. Eyad al-Sarraj, an internationally renowned British-trained psychiatrist who established the Gaza Community Mental Health Program in 1993 (Fischer 2007; Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Under his direction, the psychological impact of war and occupation became what we might think of as household models of distress among Palestinians, not least in Gaza. Naturally, this is not because every single Gazan has been enrolled in individual therapy. Rather, “the program” (or al-barnamij Gaza as-saher nafsiyah, as it is called in the local vernacular) grew into four smaller centers across the strip, each of which functioned as a center for vocational training, awareness raising on the impact of violence on families, and individual and group counseling. Throughout its existence, the program has had the support of prominent Western and Israeli psychiatrists, who have coauthored what has become important and often-cited quantitative and qualitative documentation of the psychological effects of the occupation on Palestinians (Punamäki et al. 1990, 2005; Afana et al. 2010). Sarraj passed away in 2013, but the program continues to operate and has been frequently cited on the matter of women and children’s traumatization, most recently in the wake of the war on Gaza in the summer of 2014.
The Gaza Community Mental Health Program may be among the best-known Palestinian organizations of its kind internationally, but there are at least three other Palestinian institutions that play a crucial role in defining and offering treatment to victims of occupation-related violence.
The first organization with a psychosocial mandate in the West Bank was the Palestinian Counseling Center, which had ties to the left-wing movement in Palestine, prominent figures of Palestinian civil society, and key mobilizers of the first Intifada, or uprising, from 1987 to 1993. The center has branches across the West Bank for Palestinians. The second institution is the YMCA in Beit Sahour, a Christian organization that spearheaded the treatment of people with physical disabilities caused by the armed clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli military during the first Intifada. Among therapists in the occupied3 territory the counselors trained at the YMCA generally enjoy a good reputation for being among the most professional and up-to-date therapists. The last institution, which works differently, through a primarily medical rather than community-anchored approach, is the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims. This center, too, was founded by a psychiatrist, Dr. Mahmoud Sehwail, in 1997. In contrast to centers that offer treatment for the effects of the occupation more universally, this organization’s original mandate was to focus on helping victims of torture. But since its inception, the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center has broadened its services to include the families of torture victims along with prisoners’ and martyrs’ families more generally. The state of Israel changed its interrogation practices after the second Intifada, and physical torture is allegedly less prevalent among detainees in Israel today (B’Tselem 2010) compared to two decades ago. Israeli nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) nonetheless continue to testify about ongoing incidents of torture and ill treatment of Palestinians in Israeli confinement (PCATI 2009, 2011). Lori Allen’s work further reveals that torture in Palestinian Authority prisons and detention centers across the occupied territory is a continuing practice that is common knowledge among Palestinians (2012: 2; see also PHRG 2014) Some of the families in my study have family members who have suffered torture or ill treatment both at the hands of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
The omnipresence of violence, actual and potential, in its different guises indeed conveys how the idea of the Palestinians as a traumatized population is a powerful vehicle by which to make their suffering legible to a global audience (see also Fassin and Rechtman 2009). But the characterization of a traumatized victim has a downside. As Ruth Leys (2007) has shown in her genealogy of trauma and derivative concepts, the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder has been a battleground for different understandings of the human psyche. According to Leys, the removal of survivor’s guilt from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders third edition laid the groundwork for the theory of a victim who was traumatized by a specific external event rather than through identification with his or her aggressor, as Sigmund Freud had earlier theorized. One may speculate as to whether the idea of a victim farther removed from the initial act of violence is what allowed the notion of a traumatized war victim to be recognized globally—especially since it was precisely in the 1990s that we saw an increase in the proliferation of psychosocial programs to war-affected populations across the globe, Palestine being no exception (Pupavac 2001; Summerfield 1999; Giacaman et al. 2011). Though there is a vast body of literature that testifies to the permeability of victim and perpetrator categories in situations of violence, the notion of a victim as someone to whom something has happened is still a powerful vehicle for designing interventions for so-called target groups (Jensen and Rønsbo 2014).
As Giacaman et al. (2011) have noted, trauma-based interventions in populations that suffer from war-induced distress go only part of the way in offering solace for their suffering. The three internationally funded NGOs and three smaller initiatives are most certainly the drivers behind the “psychosocialization” of the response to the occupation, but the Palestinian Ministry of Health struggled for years to agree on the Psychosocial Bill, in which such services could also be part of an already inferior and underfunded health system. The negotiation of the bill was difficult due to the conflicting perspectives on mental health as either a medical or a political issue. As Giacaman et al. point out, the Palestinian health system is modeled on a colonial understanding of psychiatry. Accordingly, the mentally ill who were taken care of in their family homes before the British colonialization are now hospitalized in the Mental Health Hospital of Bethlehem in the West Bank. In the local vernacular, this is also known as the hospital for the mad (Giacaman et al. 2011). Patients with a congenital mental disorder thus belong to this system, whereas psychiatric patients whose illness is due to violence pose complexity and difficulty, given the heroic politics associated with participation in the struggle. That this participation is to a great many participants psychologically painful has been documented time and again, yet the stigmatization of poor mental health is hugely prevalent as well. During fieldwork in Gaza as well as the West Bank, I witnessed psychiatrists and counselors in NGOs go to great lengths before handing over their clients, both men and women, to the conventional psychiatric care system.
Whereas psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians have indeed documented the consequences of the occupation for mental and physical health, I aim to offer in anthropological terms what it means to live with violence at your front door as a permanent feature of life rather than as an occasional, discrete occurrence. Allan Young (1995) wrote in his study of the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder that events dominate the discipline of psychology, with its reliance on notions of trauma and traumatic memory cemented in Western thought with Freud’s writings in the early twentieth century (1928 [1969]). Yet anthropologists align themselves with psychologists in how they write and theorize violence related to suffering as, respectively, event and aftermath (see Herman 1992 and for comparison Leys 2000). In anthropology, a focus on violent events and a linear temporality of suffering may be an apt way to conceptualize affliction, but such a framework fails to account for suffering of an ongoing, chronic, and enduring character (see Das 2015 for an elaborate discussion of this point). I intend to shed light precisely on these entangled languages of trauma and heroism, and their residual effects on those who do not occupy the center stage: namely, Palestinian prisoners’ wives.
An Anthropological Grammar of Suffering
If we set aside for now the concept of trauma as a way to understand suffering in occupied Palestine, how then do we describe the emotions that arise in the wake of a spouse’s absence? Wittgenstein’s notion of “forms of life” may help us think about loss that is not caused by death. Veena Das calls our attention to how the duality in the notion of forms of life is often missed in anthropology (Das 1998, 2013): only forms, understood as different cultures, seem to grasp our attention as anthropologists. In contrast, Cavell emphasizes form and life, both the social and the natural. There is therefore an ethnological or horizontal form of life and a vertical or biological form of life. “It is the vertical sense of the form of life that he suggests marks the limit of what is considered human in a society,” Das remarks, “and provides the conditions of the use of criteria as applied to others” (1998: 180).
These thoughts are pertinent to an ethnography of endurance in the occupied territory because the pressure of military occupation exerted on the Palestinians slowly but steadily suffocates social lives and intimate relations. How can an ethnography on Palestinian women’s contradictory emotions about the death or imprisonment of their husbands further advance our thinking about loss, mourning, and grief, as well as forms of life? There is an elaborate repertoire of narrative styles, laments, folk songs, poetry, and performance of bodily gestures through which mourning (including the mourning that is tied to a political cause) can be articulated in occupied Palestine. Why are these collective forms of expression inadequate in the cases of detainees’ wives?
A salient aspect of loss is the fact that human life goes on, even in the face of harrowing bereavement. Interpreting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s text (1844) on the death of his young son Waldo, Das writes, “When Emerson says that grief has nothing to teach me he is overcoming an illusion that any publicly available institutions such as religion could offer consolation. ‘Nothing is left now but death’—the issue is not that the father-philosopher does not know how to go on but to make sense of the fact that he does go on” (2011: 948). This analysis of the subtleties of finding a place in language for grief marks the beginning of my dual focus on different registers of loss in Palestinian marriages, and what it means to endure in such a context. I emphasize what intimate, if never truly private, experience means in regard to grief in a context where loss, especially loss caused by death, is often framed in religious terms (e.g., their travails are a test from God) or as a political sacrifice. In public speech as well as in everyday talks with acquaintances, women will often use these two languages. During my time in Palestine I found that not only was it easier for the widows of martyrs to present their suffering in these terms than it was for the wives of prisoners, but also that this vocabulary of mourning did not convey the full extent of their grief, even for the widows of martyrs.
Anthropologists use an array of analytical approaches to understand how life and social arrangements are restructured for women who are bereaved (see Brison and Levitt 1995). It seems to me, however, that anthropology has not, to the same extent as other disciplines, honed a language to talk about experiences when such social arrangements fail to do their work. One possible approach to this issue would be to follow Wittgenstein’s claim that language can never be truly private. It is a part of sociality. Grief and loss of belief in the political project are removed from the narratives that circulate in the public realm, even narratives that at the outset appear to include the entire scale of affliction brought upon the Palestinians by the military occupation.
There is, however, another way that detainees’ wives have a different relation to the standing languages of mourning: Those languages do not account for the painful feeling of betrayal that remains once the personal cost of engagement in the struggle becomes heavier than the value accorded to heroically supporting the Palestinian collective (Kelly 2010). A feeling of betrayal, writes Vincent Crapanzano (2011), is the more or less intentional loss of belief in the “we” as a vantage point. And since Palestinians understand that the objective of the military occupation is to splinter the Palestinian population and prevent it from becoming a national “we,” doubting the value and worth of the struggle amounts to an admission that the occupation has won. This doubt is part and parcel of the grief felt by prisoners’ wives, as is the loneliness that necessarily follows it, even if it is suppressed in order for the struggle to endure. To acknowledge the doubt and grief of prisoners’ wives would be to acknowledge doubt in the Palestinian project.
Sumūd, Suffering, and Nationalism
Another register of loss that currently suffuses social life in the occupied territory is something that I tentatively term the “loss of politics” (Buch Segal 2015). I am not suggesting that Palestinians have renounced any engagement with politics. Yet while violent death still causes people to mobilize and express anger at the political situation, less grievous forms of loss increasingly fail to register, as they are absorbed into everyday life—not quite normalized, but not worthy of public acknowledgment, either (see also Allen 2012 and Kelly 2009 for an ethnographic elaboration of this point). Media attention to “release parties,” which are broadcast live across the Middle East, to celebrate the return of Palestinian prisoners like those who were exchanged for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011 might seem to contradict the “loss of politics.” Nonetheless, I suggest that even words for political resistance appear to have lost their force, by dint of repetition. They are still uttered, but they ring hollow. Loss of politics is a loss of hope for a future for a Palestinian form of life (Buch 2010; Buch Segal in press; Das 1998: 174).
How is the idea of a loss of politics plausible among a population that is best known as the quintessentially resistant people? Were we to judge on the basis of much of the academic literature Palestinian nationalism is an idea that still, at least to some extent, mobilizes people (Allan 2013; Sayigh 2008; Peteet 2005; Khalili 2007; Hammami 2004; Tamari and Hammami 2001). As Laleh Khalili (2007) writes, there seem to be collective ways of wording solace for the price exacted by adamant resistance, whether that price is detention, martyrdom, or everyday suffering. A gatekeeping concept in Palestinian studies is therefore also sumūd, which has appeared in scholarship on the occupied territory and refugee camps across the Levant since the 1980s (see Sayigh 1993; Perdigon 2011; Meari 2014). Sumūd expresses an ethos of standing tall, of persevering no matter what is inflicted on you and your people. It implies that women like Yara and Luma endure by keeping the family together in the face of any negative effects that accompany the heroic deeds of their husbands, sons, and fathers.
Yet if we look at the most recent studies, based empirically on the time during or after the second Intifada, it is clear that the call for resistance is at best ambiguous in contemporary Palestine. Lori Allen argues that the rallying cry of human rights in the Palestinian nationalist discourse is permeated by a collective feeling of participation in a farce, or even a charade (2012: 2), and hence characterized by cynicism. Allen conducted the bulk of her fieldwork during and after the second Intifada. Similar research by Tobias Kelly (2009), undertaken at the same time, considers why some young men don’t take up weapons, but, rather, hope for jobs in accounting; he concludes that the violent struggle for statehood, characterized by inefficiency and hopelessness, is not the only future imaginable. Beyond doubt, there is indeed still intact a strong national rhetoric that reflects belief in and rallies citizens to work for a Palestinian state. But doubt in the worth of the struggle, framed as a desire for an ordinary life, is similarly detectable.
This double register of doubt and hope in the national project was reformulated for me during a conversation with a Palestinian acquaintance, a significant figure in Palestinian left-wing activism and in the health sector. Over a lemonade he said, “Look, Lotte, if you ask your question in terms of the prisoners themselves it is easy. During the first Intifada there was a packed suitcase under our bed all the time. Ready to go to prison. If you ask me about what it meant for women and children, that is an entirely different story.” Even he admitted that in private conversations, Palestinians will tacitly agree now that the golden era of Palestinian resistance is but a faint memory. The language of resistance nonetheless still represents collective hope for Palestinian freedom from occupation. People in Palestine have no option but to act as if they still believe in a collective future, even though the words with which collective hopes are narrated are emptied of life. The need to keep reiterating the Palestinian national narrative, even though its affect is in fact further dissolved by the hour, makes it hard to acknowledge what has happened to the wives of detainees. But whereas the audience that heard Yara’s revelations about her daughter’s psychological disorder was not able to acknowledge the extent to which the resistance struggle causes human hearts and minds to break, the people who live through these experiences on a day-to-day basis understand these costs only too well.
Once at a small gathering in my flat in Ramallah with three friends, all of whom have husbands serving lengthy prison sentences, one woman, Amina, told us about how nervous her husband was on the occasion of her last visit. In this atmosphere of casual women’s talk she ended her account saying, “kulhum majaniin, bnhibhum”—meaning they (the prisoners, or our husbands) are all mad, we love them. Her words illustrate the ambivalent self that is eclipsed by the grandiose political speeches made in national and international forums. Amina, Yara, and other women in the same situation perhaps inhabit the most delicate space of all. They experience the wound at the heart of the conjugal relation, but must go on loving and supporting their husbands in small everyday gestures, such as visiting prison, writing letters, sending photos, and engaging in other acts of caring. Amina’s words crystallize the tragic recognition that while the occupation is said to foster endurance in those who suffer its consequences, what it causes is sometimes madness. Despite Amina’s lighthearted tone, all the women in my living room that day knew the pain that would come from the confession that living through a fourteen-year stretch as a wife of a detainee tends to deaden the heroic impulse. Her words were but one instance of the murmured conversations within families and among friends, in which it is said that the long detentions of so many may turn out to have been simply a debilitating loss of time and sanity for the prisoner himself and his relatives.
The Exhaustion of Endurance
I have asked myself how to read these private conversations about frayed relations vis-à-vis the idea of resistance in contemporary Palestine. Thus hesitancy runs adjacent to my attempt to voice that which cannot be voiced—namely, the effects of more than sixty years of military occupation on the social institution called upon to embody sumūd: the Palestinian family. My work on the vulnerability of relationships in the occupied territory continually forces me to consider the responsibility of the anthropologist. Who am I to voice that which by Palestinian standards is best kept silent? Who decides what Palestinian standards are, and who is supposed to embody them? My verbalization of the experiences of those who supposedly epitomize how the occupation’s penetrating force comes to a halt at the doorstep of ad-dar, the Palestinian household, arguably could be read as a violation of the laborious work done by Palestinians to counter the occupation with dignity. It is, however, precisely the minutiae of this work that holds the key to understanding and acknowledging the exhaustion of endurance. Describing these women’s practices of endurance allows for the recognition of Palestinian voices that are heard but seldom listened to, as Yara’s example illustrates.
One figure in particular has inspired social analysis of voice, violence, and gender: the Greek heroine Antigone, who seems to epitomize a woman who balances loyalty to the state with loyalty to close kin (Das 2007; Saint Cassia 2005; Butler 2000; Willner 1982). In an act intended to secure the heroic burial of her brother, she defeats her uncle Creon and, as a consequence, is walled up in a tomb, where she commits suicide. By insisting on burying her brother, Antigone chooses kinship over the state, at the cost of her own life. To Judith Butler, Antigone’s choice is a conflict between the law of the state and the law of the family (2000: 6). In Chapter 6 below, Antigone appears as a thought-provoking figure who may help us understand the knife’s edge balanced by prisoners’ wives in their experiences of frayed relations with Palestinian resistance.
In the contemporary atmosphere of skepticism, women who are married to long-term detainees occupy a subject position that crystallizes just how profoundly Palestinians lack secure knowledge of their future, and world, in the hands of the occupation. But to recognize this would constitute betrayal. Admission that these women live through a slow, persistent erosion of their sense of self and their intimate lives equals the poisonous admission that the Israeli occupation has permeated the family. This admission ultimately testifies to how the language of sumūd may indeed still circulate, but has long been emptied of consolation, and has given way to what I think of as profound skepticism.
The Temporality of Endurance and the Ordinary
The infrastructure of the military occupation of the Palestinian territory is of such magnitude that it has seeped through the permeable boundaries of interiority so profoundly that we need to ask what occupation does even to Palestinian subjectivity and ways of intimacy. Kelly (2013) asserts that the crucial task in such a context is to tease out how the particular markers of suffering affect people’s acts of care and kindness to each other, and where the limits of kindness are drawn. The emphasis here, then, is to show how far endurance is stretched, to gauge its elasticity as well as its limits.4 Because there are, in fact, limits to endurance, and the important thing here is for anthropology to elucidate that which is eclipsed by the rallying of Palestinian resistance. This provokes one of this book’s main questions: what becomes of endurance when that which is to be endured is without end? Ultimately this book testifies to the slow grind of violence that is not spectacularly catastrophic, not generally categorized by immediate and large-scale death. What is most violent about the situation in occupied Palestine is that it continues without end.
Even though the call to endure, to stand tall and to show sumūd in the face of occupation, is still heard, responses to this call are saturated with doubt. In an attempt to detail and give form to this slow, steady erosion of the means of resilience in Palestine, I use ethnography to describe human beings in terms of the particular lifeworlds they inhabit (Jackson 2014). There is also a moral impulse in this description: the maintenance of narratives of agency and steadfastness in spite of the occupation constitutes at best a partial and fractured picture of how Palestinians at this time see the situation and themselves within it (see Peteet 2005: x). In this sense this book focuses on lives for which the regular narratives appear to be dissolving, a focus so clearly exemplified in the work of Sarah Pinto (2014) on women and mental disorder in North India. Thinking about the dissolving narratives of Palestinian resistance and the dissolving ascription of meaning in loss and adversity in the wake of such dissolution poses a conceptual challenge to an anthropology in which the work of narrative is seen to have a great impact (see the works of Mattingly, Lutkehaus and Throop 2008; Mattingly 1998; and Jackson 2002, 2014). Enduring distress, be it due to chronic mental illness or detention, begs conceptualization that can accommodate not only the efficacy of but also the failure of narrative.
Endurance as Duration
How then do we think about the temporality of endurance in occupied Palestine? The absence that these wives experience does not follow the linear time line of a traumatic event, an emotional reaction, and an attendant aftermath. Such traumatic events are often marked by spectacular characteristics that separate them from everyday routine. They are a radical “other” that has suddenly upended the lifeworlds of those who engage with violence, as either victims or perpetrators, or both. In other words, the traumatic is an event that occurs at a particular moment, and lasts for a definite duration. Through a foregrounding of temporality, I hope to further anthropological understanding of how human relationships are configured in an ordinary life that is imbued with the presence of violence, but is, at the same time, generally uneventful (Povinelli 2012). This perspective unsettles precisely the notion of an aftermath—that is, the time after a violent event in which the pieces of normal life are presumably gathered and reassembled. In Palestine, by contrast, the everyday is where violence, betrayal, and fear are actualized.
Thinking about the temporality of endurance, then, requires that we think about the everyday as repetitious, or in the words of Das and colleagues (2014), habitual. For example, Adam Reed’s writing on inmates in Papua New Guinea underscores the temporality of the prison as being intrinsically linked to a “tiresome, weighty now” (2003: 100). Reed’s finding reverberates with Chapter 3’s conclusion that life as a relative of a Palestinian detainee seems to be structured by repetition.
The idea of “duration,” introduced by the French Philosopher Henri Bergson, here mainly through Deleuze’s (1988) reading of him in Bergsonism, helps us understand enduring violence and its intensities. Over the last decade, Bergson has inspired anthropologists—in particular, it seems, those who are concerned with the intricacies of violence and temporality (Das 2007; Pedersen and Holbraad 2013; Khan 2012; Caton 2014). Here, the notion of duration aptly describes the time of incarceration, an aspect of life that is potentially permanent or that constantly lacks the certainty of a final date of release. Moreover, the idea of duration has enabled me to think more closely about the relation between the enduring violence and the temporality of relatedness in occupied Palestine.
Endurance as the Ordinary
The Arabic word ‘ādi means “nothing unusual or spectacular, plain, ordinary.” Among Palestinians, ’ādi is a frequent response in everyday conversations to questions like “kīfik” (How are you?), “šu aḵbārik” (What’s your news?), and “kīf aḥsāsik” (How do you feel?). It was also the word I encountered during my fieldwork as a response to my question of if and how life had changed after a husband had gone into prison. Yet knowing the wives of long-term detainees and the way in which their lives changed, during their husbands’ detentions, I wondered how they could they answer “‘ādi” to describe a life that, to me, seemed uncanny. In contrast, Ghada al-Shafi’i’s poem “Maps of Absence,” quoted in the epigraph to this Introduction, expresses a sense of self that merges with the void left by a disappeared other. Resonating with this book’s attention to the lack of a language available to Yara to voice the emotional effects of her husband’s detention, the poetry of al-Shafi’i investigates the subject of female voices on the Palestinian art scene (Khankan 2009). The poem conveys the embeddedness of absence, of someone who has left—but is not lost. It gestures at the uncanniness of an enduring, infinite void in the intimacy of relations around the absent husband.
In line with al-Shafi’i’s faceless “I,” the void left by the women’s imprisoned husbands becomes over time an integral part of the women’s lives to the extent that it is ‘ādi, ordinary. At the same time, the women are obliged to project sumūd; they must not show any signs that other feelings exist parallel to pride in the honor generated by their husbands’ acts of resistance. Even in the current atmosphere of fatigue with ever more losses, detentions, and general adversity, unconditional support for the national struggle is perceived as ‘ādi.
A pivotal question then concerns the meaning of ‘ādi, the ordinary, under circumstances of absence and military occupation. Terming these circumstances “ordinary,” when confinement in fact molds the entire existence of the detainees’ wives, can be conceived as a denial of the suffering that accompanies the absence. Continuing a line of inquiry that finds expression most clearly in the work of Das (2007, 2010) and in regard to contemporary Palestine Kelly (2009), Allen (2012) and Feldman (2015), I work toward an understanding of how far individual notions of what is allegedly ordinary can be stretched, in order to turn inside out a key notion in contemporary n anthropology: “the ordinary” or its ethnographic twin, “the everyday.” I take maintaining the everyday as an achievement that is created through habitual actions. For my interlocutors, this means acting with the aim of sustaining their split families (Das 2010: 376).
This does not mean that every aspect of these women’s quotidian lives is enacted dramatically as suffering. It does mean, however, that the everyday is the place in which the braiding of the ordinary and the extraordinary occurs. The picture of endurance that emerges here shows us women’s labor of making an everyday life for themselves and their intimate relations while their husbands are imprisoned, and how the characteristics of such a life are simultaneously allowed and denied a place in the standing language.
Any work of endurance is intrinsically and necessarily in dialogue with Elizabeth Povinelli’s and João Biehl’s work on life marked by abandonment (Povinelli 2012; Biehl 2005 [2013]). Biehl’s writing introduces us to lives at the intersection of abandonment by kin, psychopharmaceuticals, and a state that has seemingly given up on caring for its citizens (2005; Biehl and Moran-Tomas 2009). Povinelli’s concern on the other hand is with the conceptualization of the effort to endure (2012: 471).
I think of endurance from a different angle. In contrast to Biehl’s description of his main protagonist Catarina’s abandonment by her relatives, none of my interlocutors have been abandoned by their kin. In fact, it is quite the contrary, as families offer support in the absence of husbands. Women have been integrated even more tightly into kin intimacy due to their husbands’ absences, whether those husbands are dead or in prison. Nor are the women necessarily deprived of material sustenance; some are even financially independent of these kin networks. Yet it is within the scene of care and support and even dramatic performances of kin solidarity that I could detect a feeling of suffocation, in the sense that these women were bound to represent what others wanted them to be, as an act of solidarity to their lost husbands and to the Palestinian cause.
While I share Povinelli’s wish to investigate the potential for a life lived Otherwise in the permeable boundary between endurance and exhaustion, her emphasis on the possibility of a different life would here translate into documentation of Palestinian inventiveness and vitality born out of exhaustion. My emphasis, however, is on the kind of endurance that cannot be separated from its limitations. Ethnographically, this is about the minutiae of the emotional labor that endurance requires, such as Luma’s effort to offer her guests refreshments the second her tears dried, or Yara’s participation in political campaigning whose efficacy she herself doubts. Consequentially, I put aside the idea of the Otherwise for a time. I am simply trying to work out what endurance means, and its dimensions, when it is considered as an aspect of the ordinary for the women figuring in this book.
Becoming an Intimate Stranger
This direction of my work came to me through a realization during three months of fieldwork in Gaza in 2005, where I was part of a research project under the auspice of RCT—The Danish Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims right after Israel’s withdrawal of its settlements from the strip. At the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, I found myself in a research office in Gaza overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. In front of me was a list with twenty names, a response to a request from the research team of which I was a part. We had asked our partners in a psychosocial organization to provide a randomized list of torture survivors, half of them men and half women. I was puzzled by the absence of any female names on the list. When I asked why there were only men, our Palestinian research leader answered with a shrug, “Women are not torture victims, they are the wives of the victims.”
The fact that women rarely are torture survivors or detainees in Israeli prisons is hardly a mystery, bearing in mind the gendered distribution of labor in the resistance against Israel (see Peteet 1991; Jean-Klein 2003; Sabbagh 1998; Gren 2009). However, the language in which the research leader noted that these women were wives rather than victims appeared to refer to notions of proper adversity, of who deserved services. My attempt to understand the rationales behind such assumptions grew into my examination of the acknowledgment, or lack thereof, of lives and forms of suffering, as well as the criteria used to evaluate affliction among those related to the heroes and victims of the Palestinian resistance. My field comprised a variety of venues and activities: the baking hours on Fridays in the village, the Prisoners’ Support Center’s appointments with donors, meetings in Europe or in the occupied territory of donors about allocations of funds to different interventions and conferences in Europe, the Middle East, and Canada, where the most recent knowledge on trauma, interventions, and conflict was being discussed by those most knowledgeable in their field.
My fieldwork began through the Prisoners’ Support Center in Ramallah, where I asked to meet clients who were secondary victims. I spent the first two months of my fieldwork accompanying therapists on outreach sessions and meetings with donors and other nongovernmental, psychosocial organizations in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Given that the Prisoners’ Support Center initiated a group therapeutic project for wives of detainees a couple of months into my fieldwork I soon came to spend most of my time with the five women of that therapeutic group. I compounded my research efforts around another group of women in the similar, though still different, situation of being the widows of martyrs in another town in the West Bank.
The two sites are here termed Dar Nūra and Bāb aš-šams, respectively. These are not the proper names of the villages because their disclosure, in combination with the personal details conveyed in this book, could betray the anonymity and confidentiality of my interlocutors. Recognizing that belonging to a village, a region, or a town in the occupied territory is as significant as being a Palestinian (Swedenburg 1990; Muhawi and Kanaana 1989), I have omitted detailed descriptions of these two sites, for the sake of protection. In the cases of particular interlocutors and their lives and stories, I have included as much local detail as confidentiality allows. I have done this while keeping the ethnographic problems involved in making such representative choices firmly in mind.
The bulk of data was created within, among, and about intimate relationships in the families of detainees, and secondarily in the families of martyrs. Intimate relationships in families were therefore a primary site of study rather than, say, a village, a town, or any other geographically bounded site.
Intimate relations for the women appearing in this book unfold primarily in the domesticities around the women’s homes. Notably, however, the domestic is not necessarily private, nor is intimacy always connoted as positive. Following Das, Ellen, and Leonard, I understand the domestic as “somehow always implicated in the non-domestic—be that the domain of the politico-jural, the idea of the non-domesticated wilderness, or as suffused by affects that circulate in the wider politico-jural domain” (2008: 351). The domestic, then, is the site where betrayals of relations and of oneself can take place in the wake of a violence that trespasses the porous boundary between the domestic and the outside (Das 2007: 11; Kelly and Thiranagama 2010).
Amina, her sisters Layla and Aisha, and the kin network around them are the women among the detainees’ families with whom I had and still have the closest relationships. Among my interlocutors, it is their company that I seek upon returning to the occupied territory and with whom I stay in touch through the occasional e-mail or text message.
I consider these relationships to be based on mutuality, differences at every imaginable level aside. Amina, the woman with the least education of the group, welcomed me wholeheartedly into her home after we first spoke. On this occasion she commented on the character of our conversation, which covered topics she discussed with many people, but, she said, in a different way. Voicing our conversations as “different” tells me that even if only sometimes and with some people I did in fact succeed in listening “differently” to my interlocutors, a method of anthropological inquiry that in Lisa Stevenson’s thoughtful words make room for hesitancy, the uncertain, and the unsettled (2014:2). Indeed, my hope is that this work overall will convey precisely knowledge in a way that allows us to think about voice, heroism, and gender in an alternative light.
Listening differently may in fact have been the most important aspect of how I conducted my fieldwork and why I was not only accepted but welcomed with a sincerity that I had not envisioned, in Amina’s home or elsewhere. I thus accepted Amina’s welcome and used her house as a base during the days and nights I spent in Dar Nūra. This was the place to which I returned and where her unmarried sister Layla, their mother, and their brother, as well as Amina’s four children, welcomed me. They never made anything special out of my presence, yet we enjoyed each other’s company, whether we were baking together under the watch of Amina’s and Layla’s strict eyes, sharing a meal, watching old Indian action movies before bedtime, or walking through the village in the cool evenings.
Aisha, a highly educated, politically active, professional woman, I got to know slowly through conversations and joint activities. During our first encounters she spoke entirely in the language of nationalist rhetoric. It was only over time and after I had shared hours in her home, at her workplace, and in her car with her two children that she expressed the paradoxes intrinsic to her situation. For shorter periods I was part of the rhythm of Aisha’s daily routine by coming to her office for a couple of hours, reading or talking with her and other staff members there. We then drove home, cooked lunch for the children, and visited friends, family, and in-laws, before she either dropped me off at Amina’s house or drove me to Birzeit, from where I took a minibus to Ramallah or Jerusalem. Eventually, both Amina and Aisha spoke confidentially with me, using words that they did not share with either their kin or children. Since being with the women often also meant being with their families, it was only on particular, orchestrated occasions that they could speak differently with me about their lives as detainees’ wives.
When I first met most of my interlocutors, they were accompanied by their therapists from either the Prisoners’ Support Center’s headquarters in Ramallah or the branch office in Bāb aš-šams. Such an introduction meant that the therapist acted as both a female confidante and a fellow Palestinian who guaranteed my trustworthiness. This proved invaluable, especially with regard to the families of detainees: betrayal, treason, and rumors are real and experienced elements of their everyday life and part of the cause of their husbands’ detainments (Kelly 2010). This form of introduction thus dramatically facilitated my access. In addition, choosing a therapeutic organization rather than a detainees’ club as a point of access confirmed to the women that I was interested in their own experiences, rather than those of their men. It expressed to them that they were not a gateway to knowledge about events or the suffering or political lives of their husbands: I was concerned with the women and their lives with and without their absent husbands.
I have had conversations with forty-two women who were either married to detainees, the widows of martyrs, or the mothers of either detainees or martyrs. Among them, twelve women stand out. Seven were married to detainees, and five were the widows of martyrs. The ethnography of these women forms the backbone of the book, which is based on our recurrent meetings. I met all of them at least three times individually and once each in the company of their mother, mother-in-law, sisters, or sisters-in-law, respectively, or at times collectively. Seven of the twelve are women whom I visited regularly with or without the intention of conducting a formal interview. This is why I refer to the main part of my data as conversations. As one aspect of my dialogue with the seven women, I gave them diaries in which to record their thoughts, feelings, or anything that sprang to their minds. I asked them to fill the diaries in for a week, after which I would read them, too. However, I also made clear to the women that if they did not feel like writing or showing me their writings, that was fine. Four of the women returned their diaries to me, and their content is discussed mainly in Chapter 6.
As for the thirty women who constitute only a peripheral part of my ethnographic material, conversations with them have provided me with knowledge about nationalist rhetoric in the nexus of the personal and the collective.
With five of the seven women, I had the most intimate conversations and relationships that developed over time: Amina, Aisha, Fatemeh, Nadia, and Luma. Amina, Aisha, and Fatemeh formed part of the support group for detainees’ wives and all live in Dar Nūra. Nadia and Luma are from the outskirts of Bāb aš-šams. Nadia is the widow of a martyr and currently married to a detainee. Luma is the widow of a martyr. My relationships with Nadia, Luma, and less so Fatemeh centered on our conversations, and however close we came through words, I did not at any point form part of their everyday life. I joined Fatemeh on a visit to her husband in prison, yet I did not spend an extended period of time in her home. In the case of all seven women, I accompanied them on visits to their female relatives and also received guests together with them in their homes.
I am cautious about how close a stranger can possibly become to another human being, to say nothing of a stranger who does not master Arabic fully and has had utterly different life circumstances. Yet insofar as we assume that the words through which we express ourselves are the result of our relations to one other, the fact that I was a stranger, Western, and then unmarried meant I could not judge the women morally by the criteria they were normally assessed by. Therefore I was allowed to ask particularly probing questions, and they frequently answered. Of course, they had to trust that I would not betray them, not only to the Israelis but also to their families, their families-in-law, and the community of the village. This is why I have concealed not only their true names but also the names of their villages and the circumstances under which their husbands came to be detained in Israel.
On the morning after I arrived at the wonderful house in East Jerusalem that was to become my base during fieldwork, Rose, my caring landlady, said over a cup of coffee: “So, do you want to get started habibti?” She ushered me into her green Citroёn in which we drove to Ramallah in order for me to meet a friend of hers who, as it turned out, was one of the most esteemed psychological counselors in Palestine. Our meeting was the beginning of my friendship with a sharp-witted and generous woman who at one point formulated my research as “looking into the effects on women of our crutches of heroism” in occupied Palestine. For a number of reasons, those words would and could never be mine. Yet they frame with almost stunning accuracy the question of why at times particular experiences of distress among those who are “only the wives” of the heroes cannot be acknowledged without impairing the collective hope for the Palestinian project. In essence, this is the fundamental question that I examine in this book. I do so through by pondering questions such as what it means to endure when that which is endured is without end and how to grieve when that which is grieved does not lend itself to a language of loss and mourning. In No Place for Grief I give no easy answers, nor do I claim to offer irrefutable facts or knowledge. What I do offer is the kind of knowledge, which is more akin to acknowledgment that such questions persist and pose particular kinds of pressure on its subjects.
