No Place for Grief. Lotte Buch Segal
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therapy in her group intervention to the detainees’ wives. She replied, “They need CBT, they need many things during the day, they are under the pressure of society, or they suffer from traumatic events and maybe there are irrational thoughts in their minds like, ‘I’m a wife of a detainee, I can’t go out, I can’t do anything.’ This is irrational beliefs. With CBT we can work with these beliefs through working with relaxation techniques.” Noting Muna’s description of the wives’ afflictions as traumatic events, I asked her which precise events she was talking about. She replied, “I want to remove the traumatic events from their lives. During the session, the women said, ‘Oh, I am not alone, there’s another woman like me.’ When some of them said, ‘I feel like this and like this, another one said I feel the same, I suffer like you, I am not the only one who feels that.’ They learn from each other, how to deal with problems like the children and the family-in-law.”
How Muna frames the distress of her female clients as the result of traumatic events that have befallen them illuminates how a relation to a direct victim—political hero is a criterion for having one’s suffering acknowledged, in addition to the occurrence of a traumatic event. That these criteria are at times indistinguishable was revealed when Muna explained to me what she meant by “traumatic event”: she recounted intricate, ongoing situations of relational injury from the women’s social relations, rather than singular happenings. Significantly, these at times implicitly wounding relations do not include the secondary victim’s relationship to the primary victim. This confounds the criteria for the recognition of suffering, as well as the fit between therapeutic measures and the kinds of suffering these measures attempt to describe and ameliorate. The discrepancy between the language available for knowing suffering and the experiences the therapist tries to heal is evident with individual therapists. It is also evident in the institutionalization of a psychosocial approach to suffering in Palestine. Muna’s comments point to two parallel concepts of suffering: one in which the immediacy of the traumatic event and a relation to a primary victim are the criteria of knowing suffering, and a second that is an acknowledgment that the object of amelioration is actually not the reliving of a traumatic memory of a violent event at all. Rather, it is the uneventful everyday life as a detainee’s wife, folded into potentially harmful or challenging social relations.
How to think about the apparent incomprehension of what it means to be in the shoes of a detainee’s wife can be aided by paying further attention to the notions of knowing and acknowledgment respectively. To know, argues Cavell, means to read others and to allow oneself to be read by others. It is “a process of being read, as finding your fate in your capacity for interpretation for yourself ” (1988: 16). Being known as a human being thus allows for a language for speaking and thinking about oneself and one’s experience. Cavell, however, underscores the discrepancy between knowing (reading) and experiencing. Following Cavell this leads us to Martin Heidegger, who in Being and Time argued that, although language straightens out experience, experience can never be straightened out “except through existing itself” (1962: 33). This process of straightening out experience unfolds, in this example, with reference both to the global psychological discourse and a Palestinian moral discourse on suffering. Through resonance between the two, the criteria of violent events and relations are concretized and become the criteria, per se, on which knowledge about bereaved women rests. Importantly, “knowledge” here is not the same as “acknowledgment.” Cavell argues that acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge. It includes a moral dimension formulated as “recognising what I know” and acting upon it (Cavell 1979: 428). This distinction figures in Kelly’s recent work (2011) on torture. He concludes that our failure to acknowledge the event of torture and the marks it leaves on its victim is not a result of the inexpressibility of pain. Rather, lack of acknowledgment comes from our failure to see and listen to the pain right in front of us (4).
The distinction between knowledge and acknowledgment helps us get closer to what is in fact lost in the “straightening out” of the experiences of prisoners’ wives. Relation as the second criterion of suffering, to be sure, includes and acknowledges detainees’ wives. Yet this is a frayed, partial inclusion. In the straightening out of experience, not all relations are valued: the grief of mothers who have lost someone through a violent event is recognized, whereas that of wives who experience only absence is eclipsed. Desolation is recognized only through relations to the figure of the hero and primary victim. In fact, however, the relations that seem to distress the wives of the detainees most are those with the people who help make do during their spouse’s confinement: the family and the husband’s family. This gestures toward a hierarchy of the two criteria, in which event is privileged, and relation downplayed.
Revisiting Muna’s Tears
Let us return here to Amina, for whom Muna shed her tears. Amina was included in the category of the secondary victim, and on this premise was admitted to the therapeutic group for detainees’ wives described earlier. Amina was present when the Israeli Army detained her husband fifteen years ago in their home. Her family home was destroyed due to her husband’s violent acts of resistance against Israel. She raises their four girls and lived with her mother and sister for ten years until she moved to a single-unit family home. Amina is under close surveillance by the village community because she is married, yet living as a single woman. Amina embodies the idea of a secondary victim because her husband is in prison. The question worth posing, however, is the extent to which her actual experience is knowable through the criteria of “event” and “relation.” At first glance, Amina’s life is translated by counselors so that it overlays the criteria by which suffering in Palestine is known through relation to a violent event or as a direct victim of a violent event. Amina’s experience, in other words, is “straightened out” so that it matches the criteria necessary to know and acknowledge it for fellow Palestinians as well as therapists. In Amina’s case, however, an apparently inclusive language of acknowledgment does not in fact enable one to read her experience.
The misreading occurs because the criteria of acknowledgment are imbued with the eventfulness of violence. They emphasize how some relations are intrinsically more wounding than others, as is true in the difference between a mother’s loss of a son and a wife’s experience of an absent husband. Interestingly, such understandings of suffering mesh with how physical injury was known in the wake of the first Intifada.
Muna’s frustration with the lack of progress in the group therapeutic project suggests a gap between the experiential realms of the detainees’ wives and the available therapeutic method. This gap is what made Muna pose the question to the teacher during the workshop on group therapy: what could she do to help her client, who did not feel better after several months of therapy? The teacher interpreted Amina’s case in the following way: “She reacts like she expects her husband to prefer that she is not OK.” His framing of Amina’s feeling of victimization may suggest a failure on his part to acknowledge that the circumstances of Amina’s life might actually be enough for her to feel anguished, regardless of whether her husband agrees. The teacher’s comment resonates with the use of an event as a criterion for the recognition of affliction: he tells Muna that Amina’s life is “not staying the same; life changes.” Implicitly, the teacher compares Amina’s situation with that of her husband. Seen in that light, Amina is out of prison, whereas her husband is the one whose liberty has been taken away. The words of the teacher therefore suggest that Amina can quite easily break free of her victimization, whereas her husband is the one who is still marked by a violent event—his incarceration.
The teacher’s assertion that “things change” resonates further with the criterion of a traumatic event, something that is limited in time and space. His advice to Muna assumes that suffering eventually ends. One of the criteria to be fulfilled in the diagnosis of PTSD is the experience of a traumatic event. Were we to think about Amina in purely psychiatric terms, she shows the symptoms of a disorder, but she lacks a traumatic event to explain her symptoms.
Muna embodies the resonances and convergences between the therapeutic and nationalist modes of framing affliction. Her representation of Amina’s case converges between her position as a therapist trained to think within a psychological mode of reasoning and her status as a Palestinian who also thinks about her clients within the national notions of suffering outlined earlier. By posing the question to the teacher