When I first met most of my interlocutors, they were accompanied by their therapists from either the Prisoners’ Support Center’s headquarters in Ramallah or the branch office in Bāb aš-šams. Such an introduction meant that the therapist acted as both a female confidante and a fellow Palestinian who guaranteed my trustworthiness. This proved invaluable, especially with regard to the families of detainees: betrayal, treason, and rumors are real and experienced elements of their everyday life and part of the cause of their husbands’ detainments (Kelly 2010). This form of introduction thus dramatically facilitated my access. In addition, choosing a therapeutic organization rather than a detainees’ club as a point of access confirmed to the women that I was interested in their own experiences, rather than those of their men. It expressed to them that they were not a gateway to knowledge about events or the suffering or political lives of their husbands: I was concerned with the women and their lives with and without their absent husbands.
I have had conversations with forty-two women who were either married to detainees, the widows of martyrs, or the mothers of either detainees or martyrs. Among them, twelve women stand out. Seven were married to detainees, and five were the widows of martyrs. The ethnography of these women forms the backbone of the book, which is based on our recurrent meetings. I met all of them at least three times individually and once each in the company of their mother, mother-in-law, sisters, or sisters-in-law, respectively, or at times collectively. Seven of the twelve are women whom I visited regularly with or without the intention of conducting a formal interview. This is why I refer to the main part of my data as conversations. As one aspect of my dialogue with the seven women, I gave them diaries in which to record their thoughts, feelings, or anything that sprang to their minds. I asked them to fill the diaries in for a week, after which I would read them, too. However, I also made clear to the women that if they did not feel like writing or showing me their writings, that was fine. Four of the women returned their diaries to me, and their content is discussed mainly in Chapter 6.
As for the thirty women who constitute only a peripheral part of my ethnographic material, conversations with them have provided me with knowledge about nationalist rhetoric in the nexus of the personal and the collective.
With five of the seven women, I had the most intimate conversations and relationships that developed over time: Amina, Aisha, Fatemeh, Nadia, and Luma. Amina, Aisha, and Fatemeh formed part of the support group for detainees’ wives and all live in Dar Nūra. Nadia and Luma are from the outskirts of Bāb aš-šams. Nadia is the widow of a martyr and currently married to a detainee. Luma is the widow of a martyr. My relationships with Nadia, Luma, and less so Fatemeh centered on our conversations, and however close we came through words, I did not at any point form part of their everyday life. I joined Fatemeh on a visit to her husband in prison, yet I did not spend an extended period of time in her home. In the case of all seven women, I accompanied them on visits to their female relatives and also received guests together with them in their homes.
I am cautious about how close a stranger can possibly become to another human being, to say nothing of a stranger who does not master Arabic fully and has had utterly different life circumstances. Yet insofar as we assume that the words through which we express ourselves are the result of our relations to one other, the fact that I was a stranger, Western, and then unmarried meant I could not judge the women morally by the criteria they were normally assessed by. Therefore I was allowed to ask particularly probing questions, and they frequently answered. Of course, they had to trust that I would not betray them, not only to the Israelis but also to their families, their families-in-law, and the community of the village. This is why I have concealed not only their true names but also the names of their villages and the circumstances under which their husbands came to be detained in Israel.
On the morning after I arrived at the wonderful house in East Jerusalem that was to become my base during fieldwork, Rose, my caring landlady, said over a cup of coffee: “So, do you want to get started habibti?” She ushered me into her green Citroёn in which we drove to Ramallah in order for me to meet a friend of hers who, as it turned out, was one of the most esteemed psychological counselors in Palestine. Our meeting was the beginning of my friendship with a sharp-witted and generous woman who at one point formulated my research as “looking into the effects on women of our crutches of heroism” in occupied Palestine. For a number of reasons, those words would and could never be mine. Yet they frame with almost stunning accuracy the question of why at times particular experiences of distress among those who are “only the wives” of the heroes cannot be acknowledged without impairing the collective hope for the Palestinian project. In essence, this is the fundamental question that I examine in this book. I do so through by pondering questions such as what it means to endure when that which is endured is without end and how to grieve when that which is grieved does not lend itself to a language of loss and mourning. In No Place for Grief I give no easy answers, nor do I claim to offer irrefutable facts or knowledge. What I do offer is the kind of knowledge, which is more akin to acknowledgment that such questions persist and pose particular kinds of pressure on its subjects.
CHAPTER 1
The Grammar of Suffering in Occupied Palestine
From the late autumn of 2007 through the end of winter the following year, five women married to long-term political detainees met every Wednesday at 11 A.M. in a chilly meeting room at the town hall in a sleepy West Bank village. The group was facilitated by a female therapist, Muna, and her assistant, both from the Prisoners’ Support Center.1 The five women participating in the two-hour sessions appear throughout this book, less however as therapeutic subjects than as wives, mothers, and daughters who are living through the absence of their husbands.
Even before they participated in the group therapy, the women knew each other. They all live in Dar Nūra, a village of around five thousand inhabitants, and are related to each other through either consanguine or affinal kinship, or, in most cases, both, as patrilateral parallel cousin marriage is the preferred form of marriage in the village.2 They are thus folded into each other’s lives, and know of each other either through firsthand accounts or, more often, rumors and reputation. The knowledge shared in the therapeutic group was therefore anything but confidential. None of the women ever risked her reputation as the proud, dutiful wife of a heroic detainee.
On the first two occasions, the group met downstairs in the library of the town hall. With children browsing through books and playing, and secretaries working with open doors, the library was not an appropriate therapeutic space, the therapists found. Since one of the participants, Aisha, enjoyed considerable social esteem in the village, the group was thereafter allowed to meet in a more private room. Moving two floors up and under the auspices of the town council, we were served tea and coffee by the council’s cook at every meeting. When the women who formed part of the group met and asked each other whether they would attend the next session, they would say “bt-rohiila al-baladiyyeh?” (Are you going to the town hall?), rather than referring to it as either a women’s or a therapeutic group.
In this way the women distanced themselves from the fact that they were involved in a process that problematized their relationship to the detainees. Local assumptions hold that being a relative of a detainee inspires a sense of honor and feelings of pride for those who are active against the Israeli occupation. Among Palestinians, being the wife of a detainee is therefore not considered a genuine reason for distress proper, save for the affliction that the wife may feel vicariously on behalf of her detained husband. That life as a detainee’s wife is not in fact lived exclusively in the glow of derivative honor is no surprise to fellow Palestinians or international observers of Palestine. Nonetheless, there are difficulties in acknowledging that “form of life” for the very same Palestinians and foreigners alike, difficulties that are the theme of this chapter.
Muna, who was facilitating the Dar Nūra town hall group, hoped to create a social space in which these women’s lives and suffering were recognized. During the span of the therapeutic group project, the Prisoners’ Support