Over the course of my engagement with affliction among Palestinians, I have come to think of the mutually absorbing languages of sumūd and trauma as a standing language of acknowledgment of suffering in contemporary Palestine. I am drawing here on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s argument in Philosophical Investigations against the existence of a private language, that is, a language that belongs only to an individual, and his related idea that words represent sensation (1953 [2009]: §244–§271; see Chapter 1 in this book for elaboration). What intrigues me is how language then works in terms of another of Wittgenstein’s concepts, namely, “forms of life.”1 Philosopher Stanley Cavell sums up the idea of forms of life this way:
We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing ensures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, sense of humor and significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life.” Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rests on nothing more, but nothing less than this. (1976: 52)
On this premise, a “standing language” refers to agreement in criteria as to what “forms of life” are human. My concern, however, is not whether particular experiences pertain to being human. Rather, I am pondering how, in complex ways, the standing language shapes what kinds of suffering can be put into words, and acknowledged, before the limits of agreement about what it means to be human in contemporary Palestine are reached. With this as my analytical point of departure I hope to offer details on what it means to be a prisoner’s wife in occupied Palestine, and to help conceptualize the entanglement of everyday endurance, intimacy, and the ordinary in the face of an occupation that has become part and parcel of Palestinian social life.
Beginning with the ways in which so-called heroic women’s endurance and suffering are understood, the book casts the ethnography of prisoners’ wives in the light of three mutually interacting contexts of understanding that these women are often seen within: first, the idea of trauma as capturing the derivative suffering of the women related to either martyrs or prisoners; second, a Palestinian moral discourse that entwines resistance, sumūd, and suffering; and, third, the temporality of endurance, and how this waxes and wanes with the temporality of both trauma and resistance.
Trauma with No Aftermath
Given the long history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians2 and, significantly, the outside world’s involvement in it, “trauma” is a most powerful language for talking about the affliction of the Palestinians. The language of trauma is where the twin experiences of enduring and suffering seem to have a home for both Palestinian health professionals and international observers (Fassin 2008; Fassin and Rechtman 2009). This is because the psychosocial organizations that offer the women their services work through languages of traumatization as a way to acknowledge the emotional effects of the occupation, be it imprisonment, loss, or violence. I am interested here in the gap between the language of trauma and the women’s experiences, and the political implications and nature of that gap.
During a stretch of fieldwork in 2008 I had an informal meeting on mental health, gender, and trauma in Palestine with an esteemed lecturer and now research colleague from the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University, which was then located in the West Bank town of Ramallah. When I asked her how she understood the notion of trauma in Palestine, she said with a smile that “Raija-Lena brought trauma to Palestine.” Since the early 1990s, the Finnish professor of psychology Raija-Lena Punamäki has had a highly acclaimed and locally respected collaboration with researchers at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program and, later, at Birzeit University on the occupation’s impact on the mental health of Palestinian adults and children (Punamäki et al. 1997; 2005). Punamäki was not alone, however, in bringing the idea of trauma to Palestinians. One figure in particular is mentioned whenever anthropologists contemplate the notion of trauma in occupied Palestine: the late Dr. Eyad al-Sarraj, an internationally renowned British-trained psychiatrist who established the Gaza Community Mental Health Program in 1993 (Fischer 2007; Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Under his direction, the psychological impact of war and occupation became what we might think of as household models of distress among Palestinians, not least in Gaza. Naturally, this is not because every single Gazan has been enrolled in individual therapy. Rather, “the program” (or al-barnamij Gaza as-saher nafsiyah, as it is called in the local vernacular) grew into four smaller centers across the strip, each of which functioned as a center for vocational training, awareness raising on the impact of violence on families, and individual and group counseling. Throughout its existence, the program has had the support of prominent Western and Israeli psychiatrists, who have coauthored what has become important and often-cited quantitative and qualitative documentation of the psychological effects of the occupation on Palestinians (Punamäki et al. 1990, 2005; Afana et al. 2010). Sarraj passed away in 2013, but the program continues to operate and has been frequently cited on the matter of women and children’s traumatization, most recently in the wake of the war on Gaza in the summer of 2014.
The Gaza Community Mental Health Program may be among the best-known Palestinian organizations of its kind internationally, but there are at least three other Palestinian institutions that play a crucial role in defining and offering treatment to victims of occupation-related violence.
The first organization with a psychosocial mandate in the West Bank was the Palestinian Counseling Center, which had ties to the left-wing movement in Palestine, prominent figures of Palestinian civil society, and key mobilizers of the first Intifada, or uprising, from 1987 to 1993. The center has branches across the West Bank for Palestinians. The second institution is the YMCA in Beit Sahour, a Christian organization that spearheaded the treatment of people with physical disabilities caused by the armed clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli military during the first Intifada. Among therapists in the occupied3 territory the counselors trained at the YMCA generally enjoy a good reputation for being among the most professional and up-to-date therapists. The last institution, which works differently, through a primarily medical rather than community-anchored approach, is the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims. This center, too, was founded by a psychiatrist, Dr. Mahmoud Sehwail, in 1997. In contrast to centers that offer treatment for the effects of the occupation more universally, this organization’s original mandate was to focus on helping victims of torture. But since its inception, the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center has broadened its services to include the families of torture victims along with prisoners’ and martyrs’ families more generally. The state of Israel changed its interrogation practices after the second Intifada, and physical torture is allegedly less prevalent among detainees in Israel today (B’Tselem 2010) compared to two decades ago. Israeli nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) nonetheless continue to testify about ongoing incidents of torture and ill treatment of Palestinians in Israeli confinement (PCATI 2009, 2011). Lori Allen’s work further reveals that torture in Palestinian Authority prisons and detention centers across the occupied territory is a continuing practice that is common knowledge among Palestinians (2012: 2; see also PHRG 2014) Some of the families in my study have family members who have suffered torture or ill treatment both at the hands of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
The