Читать книгу The Politics of Suffering - Nell Gabiam - Страница 12

The tension between what I call “the politics of suffering” and “the politics of citizenship” is captured by the picture on the book cover. I took the picture in the barracks area of Neirab Camp in October 2010, before the Syrian uprisings started. My guess is that when looking at the picture most people would assume that the partial ruin is a reference to the refugee camp while the apartment building signals a world beyond it. The picture, however, depicts an almost completed modern apartment building standing in a spot previously occupied by a barrack and behind it, a partially destroyed barrack, awaiting transformation into a modern apartment building. The picture gives an insight into the promise of development. It also gives an insight into the implications of a blurring of the distinction between the camp and the city. Once the barracks became slated for destruction, a move that had initially found consensus among all project stakeholders, it became clear to many in Neirab that the destruction of the barracks meant the silencing of an important witness to the suffering they had endured as refugees and, therefore, an important ally in their quest for justice.

Palestinian refugees in Ein el Tal and Neirab usually described their suffering using the term mu‘ānā, a noun that comes from the Arabic root ānā, meaning “to incur,” “to suffer (from),” or “to endure.” It can also mean “to be anxious” or “to be preoccupied” or “to take pain (in doing something).” Refugees usually talked about mu‘ānā to point out the hardships of their everyday lives, often connecting it to the events that resulted in their forced exile: had they not been historically exiled and dispossessed, they would not be facing their current hardships.⁴ For the refugees of Ein el Tal and Neirab, suffering took on political meanings that were sometimes at odds with formal, state-centered understandings of social equality and progress.

The Neirab Rehabilitation Project aimed to put an end to suffering understood as dilapidated housing and an unhealthy physical environment, overcrowding, low income, lack of employment, and a general lack of socioeconomic opportunities. It did not address suffering as a consequence of political subjugation or injustice. It did not capture suffering as it was expressed to me by Anwar Fanous, a Palestinian official working for the General Authority for Palestinian Arab Refugees (GAPAR), Syria’s government body that oversees the country’s Palestinian population and maintains a strong presence in the camps.⁵ At the time, Fanous was GAPAR’s representative for the Aleppo area. He was from Neirab Camp, where he lived in the barracks with his wife and four children. According to a high UNRWA official closely involved with the Neirab Rehabilitation Project, Fanous was the one who first brought the harsh living conditions of the barracks to UNRWA’s attention and insisted that something be done about them.

I often saw Fanous, a smallish man with an intense gaze and a severe demeanor, at project meetings, but had never dared to approach him. I was aware that he knew of me because I needed permission from GAPAR to be in the camps of Neirab and Ein el Tal. I waited until a few days before my departure from northern Syria to finally ask him for an interview. To my surprise, he accepted. During the interview, I was struck by a particular moment when this man–who never smiled, never acknowledged my presence at public events, and had the power to banish me from Neirab and Ein el Tal at the slightest faux pas–suddenly tried to convey how he felt knowing that anybody from any part of the world could visit his homeland while he could not. This caused ‘azza ‘alā al-qalb, “sorrow to the heart,” he explained repeatedly as he put his hand on his chest–an expression not only of emotional pain but also of the sense of injustice at not being able to set foot in his homeland.

In addition to expressing their suffering as emotional pain resulting from the injustice of living in forced exile, Palestinian refugees also saw it as a political tool. Suffering took on the form of stoicism, something that needed to be endured to maintain the memory of exile and actualize the narrative of return.⁶ Stoicism dignified Palestinian suffering understood as part of a larger struggle for liberation and return. Those who earned a camp community’s respect were those who had struggled for Palestinian freedom through their political activism, especially those who had shed blood for the cause. Most were those who lived in humble conditions in the camp, not those who had achieved the dream of modernization, who lived in villas and were economically prosperous, who met the international indicators of well-being that are important to UNRWA. Anthropologist Rosemary Sayigh notes that when Palestinians embraced resistance and armed struggle in Lebanon in the late 1960s, the notion of struggle was closely tied to a “special capacity for suffering” (1979:166). UNRWA’s development discourse is invested in bestowing dignity in the form of “capacity building,” “self-reliance,” and economic prosperity but not in the form conferred by suffering that is viewed strategically, as sacrifice in the name of a larger political struggle.

There is now a solid body of literature exploring the relationship between suffering and political agency (Allen 2009; Asad 2003; Benbassa 2010; Brown 1995; Fassin 2002, 2012; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Petryna 2002; Ticktin 2006, 2012). To fully understand Palestinian refugees’ engagement with the Neirab Rehabilitation Project, one has to understand suffering both as a passive state that one strives to overcome and as agentive–that is, suffering itself as a kind of action (Asad 2003). Agentive suffering, understood as a political tool or as having political effects, falls within the scope of what I term the politics of suffering. I use this term to describe the ways in which suffering becomes a means–whether deliberately or not–of attaining political legitimacy and rights. For Palestinians in Neirab and Ein el Tal, ongoing suffering testified to the original injustice of the Nakba, which is the term used by Palestinian refugees to describe the dismemberment of Palestinian society and the forced displacement and exile of more than half of the members of this society in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab–Israeli war; it acted as a conduit for neither forgetting the traumatic past nor the claims of redress linked to that past; and it included bodily and material sacrifice in the name of the Palestinian Political struggle.

UNRWA’s focus on eradicating poverty and suffering is framed by a state-centric approach expressed especially in the prominent role played by the Syrian government in project implementation and in the agency’s use of an urban development approach. While the Syrian government legally recognizes that Palestinian refugees on its soil have most of the social rights associated with citizenship, this does not mean that the refugees are always able to access or make the most of these rights in practice, and poverty remains an issue in the camps. In UNRWA’s vision, the goal of development is, on the one hand, to incorporate individuals as much as possible in the institutional framework of the state and, on the other hand, to pursue progress by enabling individuals to attain the social privileges associated with citizenship, if not citizenship itself. Conceived in this manner, development is part of a politics of citizenship. A framing of Palestinian victim-hood as one in which Palestinians are marginalized from the rights, privileges, and opportunities that accrue to citizens of an independent state because they are not fully integrated in this state does not take into account the issue of return to one’s place of residence before exile. Return becomes irrelevant. What is important is the acquisition of substantive citizenship rights, if not citizenship altogether, and the home that counts is not where one has historical or emotional links–the home that counts is where one has the possibility of becoming a full citizen.

Palestinian refugees in Neirab and Ein el Tal did not reject development outright, nor did they reject many of the material outcomes promised by the Neirab Rehabilitation Project. What was at stake for them was the need to articulate a vision of progress and improvement that did not ignore their history or seem to compromise their political claims. As noted by Laleh Khalili (2007), the last few decades have seen the emergence of a global human rights and humanitarian discourse that addresses the suffering of victims of injustice “in such a way that suffering and tragedy are made immanent to their being, sometimes to the exclusion of their political struggle for justice” (Khalili 2007:35). UNRWA-sponsored development is based on an understanding of suffering that is not really able to accommodate Palestinian political claims. UNRWA’s imbrication in the Western-dominated order that created it and that is mostly responsible for funding it, as well as its historical mandate as a humanitarian agency, have curtailed its ability and willingness to address or sometimes even acknowledge the political concerns of the refugees it assists.

However, rather than simply point out the shortcomings (and achievements) of UNRWA’s approach to development in Palestinian refugee camps, this book explores efforts, both Palestinian refugees’ and others’, to come up with a vocabulary and set of practices that transcend the apparent dichotomy between the politics of suffering and the politics of citizenship.