No Place for Grief. Lotte Buch Segal
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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