While I share Povinelli’s wish to investigate the potential for a life lived Otherwise in the permeable boundary between endurance and exhaustion, her emphasis on the possibility of a different life would here translate into documentation of Palestinian inventiveness and vitality born out of exhaustion. My emphasis, however, is on the kind of endurance that cannot be separated from its limitations. Ethnographically, this is about the minutiae of the emotional labor that endurance requires, such as Luma’s effort to offer her guests refreshments the second her tears dried, or Yara’s participation in political campaigning whose efficacy she herself doubts. Consequentially, I put aside the idea of the Otherwise for a time. I am simply trying to work out what endurance means, and its dimensions, when it is considered as an aspect of the ordinary for the women figuring in this book.
Becoming an Intimate Stranger
This direction of my work came to me through a realization during three months of fieldwork in Gaza in 2005, where I was part of a research project under the auspice of RCT—The Danish Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims right after Israel’s withdrawal of its settlements from the strip. At the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, I found myself in a research office in Gaza overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. In front of me was a list with twenty names, a response to a request from the research team of which I was a part. We had asked our partners in a psychosocial organization to provide a randomized list of torture survivors, half of them men and half women. I was puzzled by the absence of any female names on the list. When I asked why there were only men, our Palestinian research leader answered with a shrug, “Women are not torture victims, they are the wives of the victims.”
The fact that women rarely are torture survivors or detainees in Israeli prisons is hardly a mystery, bearing in mind the gendered distribution of labor in the resistance against Israel (see Peteet 1991; Jean-Klein 2003; Sabbagh 1998; Gren 2009). However, the language in which the research leader noted that these women were wives rather than victims appeared to refer to notions of proper adversity, of who deserved services. My attempt to understand the rationales behind such assumptions grew into my examination of the acknowledgment, or lack thereof, of lives and forms of suffering, as well as the criteria used to evaluate affliction among those related to the heroes and victims of the Palestinian resistance. My field comprised a variety of venues and activities: the baking hours on Fridays in the village, the Prisoners’ Support Center’s appointments with donors, meetings in Europe or in the occupied territory of donors about allocations of funds to different interventions and conferences in Europe, the Middle East, and Canada, where the most recent knowledge on trauma, interventions, and conflict was being discussed by those most knowledgeable in their field.
My fieldwork began through the Prisoners’ Support Center in Ramallah, where I asked to meet clients who were secondary victims. I spent the first two months of my fieldwork accompanying therapists on outreach sessions and meetings with donors and other nongovernmental, psychosocial organizations in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Given that the Prisoners’ Support Center initiated a group therapeutic project for wives of detainees a couple of months into my fieldwork I soon came to spend most of my time with the five women of that therapeutic group. I compounded my research efforts around another group of women in the similar, though still different, situation of being the widows of martyrs in another town in the West Bank.
The two sites are here termed Dar Nūra and Bāb aš-šams, respectively. These are not the proper names of the villages because their disclosure, in combination with the personal details conveyed in this book, could betray the anonymity and confidentiality of my interlocutors. Recognizing that belonging to a village, a region, or a town in the occupied territory is as significant as being a Palestinian (Swedenburg 1990; Muhawi and Kanaana 1989), I have omitted detailed descriptions of these two sites, for the sake of protection. In the cases of particular interlocutors and their lives and stories, I have included as much local detail as confidentiality allows. I have done this while keeping the ethnographic problems involved in making such representative choices firmly in mind.
The bulk of data was created within, among, and about intimate relationships in the families of detainees, and secondarily in the families of martyrs. Intimate relationships in families were therefore a primary site of study rather than, say, a village, a town, or any other geographically bounded site.
Intimate relations for the women appearing in this book unfold primarily in the domesticities around the women’s homes. Notably, however, the domestic is not necessarily private, nor is intimacy always connoted as positive. Following Das, Ellen, and Leonard, I understand the domestic as “somehow always implicated in the non-domestic—be that the domain of the politico-jural, the idea of the non-domesticated wilderness, or as suffused by affects that circulate in the wider politico-jural domain” (2008: 351). The domestic, then, is the site where betrayals of relations and of oneself can take place in the wake of a violence that trespasses the porous boundary between the domestic and the outside (Das 2007: 11; Kelly and Thiranagama 2010).
Amina, her sisters Layla and Aisha, and the kin network around them are the women among the detainees’ families with whom I had and still have the closest relationships. Among my interlocutors, it is their company that I seek upon returning to the occupied territory and with whom I stay in touch through the occasional e-mail or text message.
I consider these relationships to be based on mutuality, differences at every imaginable level aside. Amina, the woman with the least education of the group, welcomed me wholeheartedly into her home after we first spoke. On this occasion she commented on the character of our conversation, which covered topics she discussed with many people, but, she said, in a different way. Voicing our conversations as “different” tells me that even if only sometimes and with some people I did in fact succeed in listening “differently” to my interlocutors, a method of anthropological inquiry that in Lisa Stevenson’s thoughtful words make room for hesitancy, the uncertain, and the unsettled (2014:2). Indeed, my hope is that this work overall will convey precisely knowledge in a way that allows us to think about voice, heroism, and gender in an alternative light.
Listening differently may in fact have been the most important aspect of how I conducted my fieldwork and why I was not only accepted but welcomed with a sincerity that I had not envisioned, in Amina’s home or elsewhere. I thus accepted Amina’s welcome and used her house as a base during the days and nights I spent in Dar Nūra. This was the place to which I returned and where her unmarried sister Layla, their mother, and their brother, as well as Amina’s four children, welcomed me. They never made anything special out of my presence, yet we enjoyed each other’s company, whether we were baking together under the watch of Amina’s and Layla’s strict eyes, sharing a meal, watching old Indian action movies before bedtime, or walking through the village in the cool evenings.
Aisha, a highly educated, politically active, professional woman, I got to know slowly through conversations and joint activities. During our first encounters she spoke entirely in the language of nationalist rhetoric. It was only over time and after I had shared hours in her home, at her workplace, and in her car with her two children that she expressed the paradoxes intrinsic to her situation. For shorter periods I was part of the rhythm of Aisha’s daily routine by coming to her office for a couple of hours, reading or talking with her and other staff members there. We then drove home, cooked lunch for the children, and visited friends, family, and in-laws, before she either dropped me off at Amina’s house or drove me to Birzeit, from where I took a minibus to Ramallah or Jerusalem. Eventually, both Amina and Aisha spoke confidentially with me, using words that they did not share with either their kin or children. Since being with the women often also meant being with their families, it was only on particular,