No Place for Grief
THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Tobias Kelly, Series Editor
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
NO PLACE FOR GRIEF
Martyrs, Prisoners, and Mourning
in Contemporary Palestine
Lotte Buch Segal
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4821-0
For Sune, David, and Elias
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. The Grammar of Suffering in Occupied Palestine
Chapter 2. Domestic Uncanniness
Chapter 4. On Hardship and Closeness
Chapter 5. Solitude in Marriage
Chapter 6. Enduring the Ordinary
PREFACE
My time in Palestine has left me with a sadness that flows from the experiences of the people I encountered there. The question of whether this influences my interpretation of words, human beings, and situations is at best rhetorical. Many times I did not know how to respond to the words, tears, or gestures of the human beings at the heart of this book. How could I reply? As a female researcher from one of the most affluent societies of the world. As a woman whose life is not imperiled by the systematic exhaustion of the Palestinian occupation. As someone who feels empathy with the people she meets without certainty that empathy is ever exhaustive or necessarily the pathway to knowledge.
A student in my Psychology in Anthropology course asked me after having read Chapter 2 of this book for class: “Do you understand these women?” To this question I replied with a qualified “Yes.” It is a yes only if we mean knowledge in the sense of acknowledgment, which I offer here. I have done my best not to simplify these women’s experiences, but I also know that I could not entirely avoid it.
I feel compelled to act upon what I know, but I am not sure of the consequences. I write. I tell. Who listens? Some do. Does it matter? I do not know. João Biehl once asked me what I thought was the most powerful part of my work. It took me an hour to dare to say that it may have been sitting down and listening to those women, so at least they knew that I had heard their stories. They knew, and I knew. Now you know.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
In transliterating Arabic words to English I follow Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: Arabic–English, edited by J. Milton Cowan (London: MacDonald and Evans, 1980). For smoother reading, the names of people have been transliterated without diacritical markings.
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