When Luma finished her story, she dried her tears, rushed to her kitchen, and proudly brought back two kinds of homemade cake for us to have with our coffee. She said it had done her good to cry.
However, not all kinds of conjugal loss lend themselves so easily to a story of mourning and desire. Luma’s loss—the possibilities and the limitations of how she could express it—instigated my study of the consequences of being in a population, and a kind of marriage, that tend to be cast by Palestinians and academics alike in a language of heroism, perseverance, and national solidarity. I wanted to consider what happens when the emotional remains of being a bereaved wife appear to outweigh the sense of belonging to a collective, and when life in the shadow of heroism is unable to find expression.
One woman, Yara, appears to encapsulate precisely this dilemma. Her husband has been detained since 2001, and Yara herself has also been imprisoned. Yet with seven hundred thousand Palestinians incarcerated in Israel since 1967 (Btselem 2015), the confinement of Yara’s husband is nothing out of the ordinary. Imprisonment is lived, felt, and endured by the vast majority of families in occupied Palestine.
Yara lived next door to a Palestinian friend of mine in an upscale neighborhood of Ramallah. It was a rainy November day in 2007 when we first met. Gently ushering my assistant Rawan and me inside her living room, Yara seemed somewhat uneasy at the prospect of talking about her husband’s confinement, of presuming that her own words mattered as much as her husband’s. I explained that part of my project was to invite women to describe the experience of confinement for those left behind.
To a woman like Yara, the history of the Palestinian resistance movement and its varying intensities are woven into her account of her emotions about her husband’s imprisonment. As she recounted the early phases of resistance, she remembered how, at that time, political men were highly respected among Palestinian people and society.
However, Yara also explained how doubt had slowly but persistently crept into her conviction that she and her husband should devote their lives to politics: “I was thinking, ‘Why are you leaving your house and your wife and your kids; who are you doing this for?’ No one cares anymore.”
Despite these doubts, Yara is still loyal to the cause for which her husband is in prison. This comes through powerfully when she is invited to speak in public. One such occasion illustrates the imbrication of politics and intimate lives to which this book is dedicated. In 2012 yet another international campaign for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel was being launched. A series of meetings on the problem of the Palestinian prisoners followed. Despite the organizer’s expectations, very few people showed up for the meeting. Yara began her talk by emphasizing that she was speaking to raise awareness of the conditions for all Palestinian prisoners and not only for her own husband. She spoke about the large number of people held in detention and their common plight. Through illustrative examples of her husband’s difficulties in prison she voiced her concern about the general issues at stake for the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody. During the talk she subtly reminded the audience that she had not seen her husband for the last six years, as he was being held in isolation. When the floor opened for questions, a woman from a human rights movement asked if Yara would say something about the conditions faced by the prisoners’ family members. Yara recounted the humiliation many families endure when visiting their relatives in prison; how they employ human rights lawyers for years on end in the hope that yet another hearing might lead to their loved one’s release.
When a woman asked a more personal question, “What about you?” Yara’s voice suddenly fell. She was quiet for a while, took a deep breath, and then gestured toward me and said, “ask her, Lotte knows.” Given that I was neither an activist member of the host organization nor a regular participant in these meetings, the woman looked at me with a somewhat puzzled expression and urged Yara to continue talking. Yara then began speaking again in a more pensive tone of voice. Whereas her talk about the prisoners, the Israeli penal system, and the conflict at large was coherent, persuasive, and well rehearsed, it seemed to me that the words she needed to talk about her own experience were not readily at hand. At least not in the context of a political meeting on the cause of the Palestinians and more specifically the release of the prisoners. She did not say anything personal about how it felt to be her. Instead, she subtly changed the subject to that of the effect of her and her husband’s confinement on their children. She could not hold back her tears as she spoke about her daughter’s psychological distress and the ensuing difficulties of finding her a suitable spouse. This part of Yara’s story was not rehearsed. And in contrast to the evocative force of Yara’s political speech, the more personal revelations did not elicit any reaction from the audience. Neither the activists in the solidarity movement nor the members of the audience responded to what Yara confessed. While I am speculating here, the audience seemed simply unable to take in the full extent of her experience—that even though she continued to be politically active, she was expressing doubt about the worth of the struggle. Judging from the lack of response in the meeting to Yara’s more personal account in contrast to the clear acknowledgment of the political struggle, her experiences seemed relevant to the attendees only to the extent that she could represent the brave but suffering wife of the prisoner, and thus contribute to the political cause.
It is not that Yara’s predicament is ignored by distant or intimate witnesses. For instance, the leader of the professional organization in which Yara’s daughter works told me that they do what they can in the workplace to support her, not only as the child of a heroic detainee but also as a human being who is marked by the episodic imprisonment that both her father and mother have been through since her early childhood. During my conversation with Yara on that rainy November day in Ramallah, she seemed most distraught when speaking about the effect that her and her husband’s detention may have had on their children.
Grieving in Private
What do Luma’s and Yara’s stories each tell us about absent spouses and the ways in which they can and cannot be mourned in both the private and public lives of Palestinians? These small glimpses of conjugal life, or lack thereof, help reveal how the death or indefinite absence of a spouse suffuses many Palestinian relationships. My interest here is not only in the sadness that the women express over such a loss but also in how this is braided with a disenchantment with politics and a feeling of unbearable loss for many activists wrought by their participation in the Palestinian cause. This is not to say that the language of suffering and loss is unimportant or irrelevant in the history of the Palestinian national movement. The notion of the martyr, for example, is central to Palestinian iconography and political discourse. The figure of the victim has also played a central role in Palestinian human rights practices. However, the dominant ways in which loss and suffering have been framed have, I argue, effectively excluded the experience of many Palestinians.
For Yara, the losses she has had to endure are not easily expressed or publicly received within the repertoire of stories that women tell about loss in Palestine. Her loss does not lend itself well to the process of mourning, and to the relief that mourning can potentially bring. Her sorrow simply has to be borne in private anguish. To the martyr’s widow Luma, in contrast, the language of mourning, such as her lamentations, allows her both to inhabit and admit to feelings of love and desire in a way that is socially accepted, insofar as these feelings are directed toward her deceased husband. In Yara’s case, however, there is no available language by which to express the grief that invades her being. Her grief includes not only the continual loss of her husband but also her doubt about the roles she has filled and continues to fill in the Palestinian political community, as a committed activist, a female ex-detainee, and the proud wife of a hero.
A core argument of this book is that the language of a hopeful future for the Palestinian project almost requires blocking out the full extent of what it feels like to be in Yara’s position. A result of this is therefore a loss of language regarding marital separation that is not caused by death, among other inarticulable losses.
The predominant line of scholarship on Palestinian adversity would propose one of two things. Either that women like Yara may indeed suffer in their predicament but, at the same time, they occupy a space of agency and can feel consoled by the