As Giacaman et al. (2011) have noted, trauma-based interventions in populations that suffer from war-induced distress go only part of the way in offering solace for their suffering. The three internationally funded NGOs and three smaller initiatives are most certainly the drivers behind the “psychosocialization” of the response to the occupation, but the Palestinian Ministry of Health struggled for years to agree on the Psychosocial Bill, in which such services could also be part of an already inferior and underfunded health system. The negotiation of the bill was difficult due to the conflicting perspectives on mental health as either a medical or a political issue. As Giacaman et al. point out, the Palestinian health system is modeled on a colonial understanding of psychiatry. Accordingly, the mentally ill who were taken care of in their family homes before the British colonialization are now hospitalized in the Mental Health Hospital of Bethlehem in the West Bank. In the local vernacular, this is also known as the hospital for the mad (Giacaman et al. 2011). Patients with a congenital mental disorder thus belong to this system, whereas psychiatric patients whose illness is due to violence pose complexity and difficulty, given the heroic politics associated with participation in the struggle. That this participation is to a great many participants psychologically painful has been documented time and again, yet the stigmatization of poor mental health is hugely prevalent as well. During fieldwork in Gaza as well as the West Bank, I witnessed psychiatrists and counselors in NGOs go to great lengths before handing over their clients, both men and women, to the conventional psychiatric care system.
Whereas psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians have indeed documented the consequences of the occupation for mental and physical health, I aim to offer in anthropological terms what it means to live with violence at your front door as a permanent feature of life rather than as an occasional, discrete occurrence. Allan Young (1995) wrote in his study of the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder that events dominate the discipline of psychology, with its reliance on notions of trauma and traumatic memory cemented in Western thought with Freud’s writings in the early twentieth century (1928 [1969]). Yet anthropologists align themselves with psychologists in how they write and theorize violence related to suffering as, respectively, event and aftermath (see Herman 1992 and for comparison Leys 2000). In anthropology, a focus on violent events and a linear temporality of suffering may be an apt way to conceptualize affliction, but such a framework fails to account for suffering of an ongoing, chronic, and enduring character (see Das 2015 for an elaborate discussion of this point). I intend to shed light precisely on these entangled languages of trauma and heroism, and their residual effects on those who do not occupy the center stage: namely, Palestinian prisoners’ wives.
An Anthropological Grammar of Suffering
If we set aside for now the concept of trauma as a way to understand suffering in occupied Palestine, how then do we describe the emotions that arise in the wake of a spouse’s absence? Wittgenstein’s notion of “forms of life” may help us think about loss that is not caused by death. Veena Das calls our attention to how the duality in the notion of forms of life is often missed in anthropology (Das 1998, 2013): only forms, understood as different cultures, seem to grasp our attention as anthropologists. In contrast, Cavell emphasizes form and life, both the social and the natural. There is therefore an ethnological or horizontal form of life and a vertical or biological form of life. “It is the vertical sense of the form of life that he suggests marks the limit of what is considered human in a society,” Das remarks, “and provides the conditions of the use of criteria as applied to others” (1998: 180).
These thoughts are pertinent to an ethnography of endurance in the occupied territory because the pressure of military occupation exerted on the Palestinians slowly but steadily suffocates social lives and intimate relations. How can an ethnography on Palestinian women’s contradictory emotions about the death or imprisonment of their husbands further advance our thinking about loss, mourning, and grief, as well as forms of life? There is an elaborate repertoire of narrative styles, laments, folk songs, poetry, and performance of bodily gestures through which mourning (including the mourning that is tied to a political cause) can be articulated in occupied Palestine. Why are these collective forms of expression inadequate in the cases of detainees’ wives?
A salient aspect of loss is the fact that human life goes on, even in the face of harrowing bereavement. Interpreting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s text (1844) on the death of his young son Waldo, Das writes, “When Emerson says that grief has nothing to teach me he is overcoming an illusion that any publicly available institutions such as religion could offer consolation. ‘Nothing is left now but death’—the issue is not that the father-philosopher does not know how to go on but to make sense of the fact that he does go on” (2011: 948). This analysis of the subtleties of finding a place in language for grief marks the beginning of my dual focus on different registers of loss in Palestinian marriages, and what it means to endure in such a context. I emphasize what intimate, if never truly private, experience means in regard to grief in a context where loss, especially loss caused by death, is often framed in religious terms (e.g., their travails are a test from God) or as a political sacrifice. In public speech as well as in everyday talks with acquaintances, women will often use these two languages. During my time in Palestine I found that not only was it easier for the widows of martyrs to present their suffering in these terms than it was for the wives of prisoners, but also that this vocabulary of mourning did not convey the full extent of their grief, even for the widows of martyrs.
Anthropologists use an array of analytical approaches to understand how life and social arrangements are restructured for women who are bereaved (see Brison and Levitt 1995). It seems to me, however, that anthropology has not, to the same extent as other disciplines, honed a language to talk about experiences when such social arrangements fail to do their work. One possible approach to this issue would be to follow Wittgenstein’s claim that language can never be truly private. It is a part of sociality. Grief and loss of belief in the political project are removed from the narratives that circulate in the public realm, even narratives that at the outset appear to include the entire scale of affliction brought upon the Palestinians by the military occupation.
There is, however, another way that detainees’ wives have a different relation to the standing languages of mourning: Those languages do not account for the painful feeling of betrayal that remains once the personal cost of engagement in the struggle becomes heavier than the value accorded to heroically supporting the Palestinian collective (Kelly 2010). A feeling of betrayal, writes Vincent Crapanzano (2011), is the more or less intentional loss of belief in the “we” as a vantage point. And since Palestinians understand that the objective of the military occupation is to splinter the Palestinian population and prevent it from becoming a national “we,” doubting the value and worth of the struggle amounts to an admission that the occupation has won. This doubt is part and parcel of the grief felt by prisoners’ wives, as is the loneliness that necessarily follows it, even if it is suppressed in order for the struggle to endure. To acknowledge the