No Place for Grief. Lotte Buch Segal
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that is not supposed to be there. In other words, Amina’s relationship with her husband does in fact allow her suffering to be translated into the grammar of suffering in occupied Palestine. Notably, though, her experiences fail the criteria of event-based suffering. It is at this point that we need to attend to the internal connection and hierarchy among the two criteria, which help explain why Amina is not “supposed” to feel like a victim, despite the apparently straightforward translation of her situation into the grammar of suffering: The criterion of relation is an optional criterion, whereas the temporal criterion of event is in fact obligatory. This is why Amina’s experience is not fully acknowledged, either by Muna as a therapist or by Muna as a Palestinian.
The moment of Muna’s identification with Amina is one in which Muna reads Amina and thus acknowledges her. By allowing herself to read Amina’s experience, Muna comes to know her suffering on different terms than the available grammar of suffering by which affliction is known and acknowledged in occupied Palestine. Acknowledgment requires a moral inclination to act on one’s knowledge, which is what Muna does by addressing it during the course, and by breaking down when she recognizes her inability to effect change in Amina.
Muna’s recognition invites us to think further about an anthropological wording of experiences of hardship that do not fit into the grammar of suffering in contemporary Palestine, even though this grammar does, indeed, encompass a wide range of experiences, as this chapter has shown. The criteria for the recognition of suffering are in fact so powerful that they constitute what I think of as a standing language. I propose the idea of a standing language in order to acknowledge, along with Khalili and Sylvain Perdigon, that the Palestinians themselves have developed a fine-grained vocabulary to articulate the diverse experiences their statelessness imposes on them. Yet I hesitate to assume that such a language offers a wording of suffering truer to the Palestinian experience than, as Fassin and Rechtman argue, a Western language of trauma, because of the circumstances of post-Oslo Palestine and the criteria of suffering described here.
A standing language is not simply psychological, national, and religious representations of suffering that morph into a grammar of suffering. That grammar includes the tripartite set of heroic, tragic, and sumūd narratives that Khalili finds among Palestinians in Lebanon and the psychological discourse of traumatization that has proliferated in Palestine. In order to flag the difference between this grammar and a standing language, I turn to Wittgenstein and more specifically Das’s reading of him (2011; see also Han and Das 2015). The premise of a standing language includes agreement over criteria as to what forms of life are human. What makes such an agreement about criteria relevant in the context of gendered expressions of suffering in contemporary Palestine is the question of whether all forms of suffering experienced by Palestinians can actually be seen to belong to a particular form of life reflecting agreement about the criteria of what it means to be human. How the experiences of prisoners’ wives fail both knowledge and acknowledgment in the grammar of suffering in contemporary Palestine reads to me as a reformulation of that question. The experiences of the prisoners’ wives cannot be embodied in the standing language: There are simply no words for what it means to be in their situation. Muna cries when she realizes the inadequacy of the standing language to allow her access to the slow grinding of Amina’s lived life, a grind so finely textured that it slips away from the criteria that have been put in place to know and acknowledge it. Amina’s feelings reflect the unsettling, continuous situation that is a predicament for all the women who are married to long-term detainees in contemporary Palestine.
The question is how the slow grind of Amina’s life relates to the slow grind of ordinary life for the majority of Palestinians (Kelly 2008), a condition eclipsed by the standing language of suffering, but that produces adversity, nonetheless. The argument I make in this book is that the unsettling effects of everyday occupied life are in fact so grave as to bring Palestinians to profoundly question the national project and the cost of endurance (see also Buch Segal 2015).
How do a grammar of suffering and the idea of a standing language help us better conceptualize distress? Why not simply analyze the complexity of the idea of trauma, as has been done sensibly by, for instance, anthropologist Rebecca Lester in her merging of anthropology and psychotherapy? I am hesitant to employ the language of trauma as an analytics of ethnography, but not because I am suspicious of the notion of trauma laid out by Fassin and Rechtman. The resonances between a psychological discourse of trauma and a Palestinian moral discourse of suffering lead me to think of the grammar of suffering in contemporary Palestine in terms similar to Nils Ole Bubandt’s (2008) work on psychological distress in North Maluku. Bubandt argues that “the introduction of trauma to north Maluku has given rise to new forms of meaning that make perfect sense to people, even if they are patched together from global flows of media narratives and development practices” (293).
It is precisely this merging of the global and local in language and action that constitutes the grammar of suffering in contemporary Palestine. We thereby see that there is no “authentic” language in which distress can be vocalized, either through a discourse of trauma or through the words available in Palestinian moral discourse. Not only do internationally circulating discourses rooted in trauma naturally fail to cover all forms of global affliction, so, too, do the local vernacular discourses. This is perhaps the most radical conclusion of the book, since there is a strong tradition in anthropology that documents how local vernaculars of pain encompass and console by providing words to talk about difficult circumstances that the Western trauma idea does not. As will be clear in subsequent chapters, Palestinians have a reason to make ineffable particular experiences that occur as a consequence of the struggle for national recognition, and this discourse is therefore not all encompassing of suffering, either.
However, the fact that Muna, as both a therapist and a Palestinian woman, at one point acknowledges Amina’s suffering may suggest the potential of shifting from a register based on distance, heroism, and objective diagnostics to an affective register that eschews the comforting armature of scientific and national terminology alike. As Das observes, this alternative vision requires that the eye be not an organ that sees, but an organ that weeps (2007: 62). Only in Muna’s tears was Amina’s suffering acknowledged in a way that transcended spoken expression. This could be read as corroboration of a point that underlies both notions of trauma and an anthropological literature indebted to Elaine Scarry’s argument that some forms of pain defy language (1985). What I have tried to show is in fact the opposite. Wittgenstein writes on the relationship between pain and words: “So are you saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying? On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it” (1953 [2009]: §244). Muna’s tears and the words she uttered simultaneously force us to think closely about the imbrication of language and the suffering it tries to describe.
CHAPTER 2
Domestic Uncanniness
Heimlich becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merges with its antonym unheimlich. The uncanny is in some respects a species of the familiar.
—Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
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