Sumūd, Suffering, and Nationalism
Another register of loss that currently suffuses social life in the occupied territory is something that I tentatively term the “loss of politics” (Buch Segal 2015). I am not suggesting that Palestinians have renounced any engagement with politics. Yet while violent death still causes people to mobilize and express anger at the political situation, less grievous forms of loss increasingly fail to register, as they are absorbed into everyday life—not quite normalized, but not worthy of public acknowledgment, either (see also Allen 2012 and Kelly 2009 for an ethnographic elaboration of this point). Media attention to “release parties,” which are broadcast live across the Middle East, to celebrate the return of Palestinian prisoners like those who were exchanged for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011 might seem to contradict the “loss of politics.” Nonetheless, I suggest that even words for political resistance appear to have lost their force, by dint of repetition. They are still uttered, but they ring hollow. Loss of politics is a loss of hope for a future for a Palestinian form of life (Buch 2010; Buch Segal in press; Das 1998: 174).
How is the idea of a loss of politics plausible among a population that is best known as the quintessentially resistant people? Were we to judge on the basis of much of the academic literature Palestinian nationalism is an idea that still, at least to some extent, mobilizes people (Allan 2013; Sayigh 2008; Peteet 2005; Khalili 2007; Hammami 2004; Tamari and Hammami 2001). As Laleh Khalili (2007) writes, there seem to be collective ways of wording solace for the price exacted by adamant resistance, whether that price is detention, martyrdom, or everyday suffering. A gatekeeping concept in Palestinian studies is therefore also sumūd, which has appeared in scholarship on the occupied territory and refugee camps across the Levant since the 1980s (see Sayigh 1993; Perdigon 2011; Meari 2014). Sumūd expresses an ethos of standing tall, of persevering no matter what is inflicted on you and your people. It implies that women like Yara and Luma endure by keeping the family together in the face of any negative effects that accompany the heroic deeds of their husbands, sons, and fathers.
Yet if we look at the most recent studies, based empirically on the time during or after the second Intifada, it is clear that the call for resistance is at best ambiguous in contemporary Palestine. Lori Allen argues that the rallying cry of human rights in the Palestinian nationalist discourse is permeated by a collective feeling of participation in a farce, or even a charade (2012: 2), and hence characterized by cynicism. Allen conducted the bulk of her fieldwork during and after the second Intifada. Similar research by Tobias Kelly (2009), undertaken at the same time, considers why some young men don’t take up weapons, but, rather, hope for jobs in accounting; he concludes that the violent struggle for statehood, characterized by inefficiency and hopelessness, is not the only future imaginable. Beyond doubt, there is indeed still intact a strong national rhetoric that reflects belief in and rallies citizens to work for a Palestinian state. But doubt in the worth of the struggle, framed as a desire for an ordinary life, is similarly detectable.
This double register of doubt and hope in the national project was reformulated for me during a conversation with a Palestinian acquaintance, a significant figure in Palestinian left-wing activism and in the health sector. Over a lemonade he said, “Look, Lotte, if you ask your question in terms of the prisoners themselves it is easy. During the first Intifada there was a packed suitcase under our bed all the time. Ready to go to prison. If you ask me about what it meant for women and children, that is an entirely different story.” Even he admitted that in private conversations, Palestinians will tacitly agree now that the golden era of Palestinian resistance is but a faint memory. The language of resistance nonetheless still represents collective hope for Palestinian freedom from occupation. People in Palestine have no option but to act as if they still believe in a collective future, even though the words with which collective hopes are narrated are emptied of life. The need to keep reiterating the Palestinian national narrative, even though its affect is in fact further dissolved by the hour, makes it hard to acknowledge what has happened to the wives of detainees. But whereas the audience that heard Yara’s revelations about her daughter’s psychological disorder was not able to acknowledge the extent to which the resistance struggle causes human hearts and minds to break, the people who live through these experiences on a day-to-day basis understand these costs only too well.
Once at a small gathering in my flat in Ramallah with three friends, all of whom have husbands serving lengthy prison sentences, one woman, Amina, told us about how nervous her husband was on the occasion of her last visit. In this atmosphere of casual women’s talk she ended her account saying, “kulhum majaniin, bnhibhum”—meaning they (the prisoners, or our husbands) are all mad, we love them. Her words illustrate the ambivalent self that is eclipsed by the grandiose political speeches made in national and international forums. Amina, Yara, and other women in the same situation perhaps inhabit the most delicate space of all. They experience the wound at the heart of the conjugal relation, but must go on loving and supporting their husbands in small everyday gestures, such as visiting prison, writing letters, sending photos, and engaging in other acts of caring. Amina’s words crystallize the tragic recognition that while the occupation is said to foster endurance in those who suffer its consequences, what it causes is sometimes madness. Despite Amina’s lighthearted tone, all the women in my living room that day knew the pain that would come from the confession that living through a fourteen-year stretch as a wife of a detainee tends to deaden the heroic impulse. Her words were but one instance of the murmured conversations within families and among friends, in which it is said that the long detentions of so many may turn out to have been simply a debilitating loss of time and sanity for the prisoner himself and his relatives.
The Exhaustion of Endurance
I have asked myself how to read these private conversations about frayed relations vis-à-vis the idea of resistance in contemporary Palestine. Thus hesitancy runs adjacent to my attempt to voice that which cannot be voiced—namely, the effects of more than sixty years of military occupation on the social institution called upon to embody sumūd: the Palestinian family. My work on the vulnerability of relationships in the occupied territory continually forces me to consider the responsibility of the anthropologist. Who am I to voice that which by Palestinian standards is best kept silent? Who decides what Palestinian standards are, and who is supposed to embody them? My verbalization of the experiences of those who supposedly epitomize how the occupation’s penetrating force comes to a halt at the doorstep of ad-dar, the Palestinian household, arguably could be read as a violation of the laborious work done by Palestinians to counter the occupation with dignity. It is, however, precisely the minutiae of this work that holds the key to understanding and acknowledging the exhaustion of endurance. Describing these women’s practices of endurance allows for the recognition of Palestinian voices that are heard but seldom listened to, as Yara’s example illustrates.
One figure in particular has inspired social analysis of voice, violence, and gender: the Greek heroine Antigone, who seems to epitomize a woman who balances loyalty to the state with loyalty to close kin (Das 2007; Saint Cassia 2005; Butler 2000; Willner 1982). In an act intended to secure the heroic burial of her brother, she defeats her uncle Creon and, as a consequence, is walled up in a tomb, where she commits suicide. By insisting on burying her brother, Antigone chooses kinship over the state, at the cost of her own life. To Judith Butler, Antigone’s choice is a conflict between the law of the state and the law of the family (2000: 6). In Chapter 6 below, Antigone appears as a thought-provoking figure who may help us understand the knife’s edge balanced by prisoners’ wives in their experiences of frayed relations with Palestinian resistance.
In the contemporary atmosphere of skepticism, women who are married to long-term detainees occupy a subject position that crystallizes just how profoundly Palestinians lack secure knowledge of their future, and world, in the hands of the occupation. But to recognize this would constitute betrayal. Admission that these women live through a slow, persistent erosion of their sense of self and their intimate lives equals the poisonous admission that the Israeli occupation has permeated the family. This admission ultimately testifies to how the language of sumūd may indeed still circulate, but has long been emptied of consolation, and has given