Introduction

      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