however, is that while they are included in therapy because they are wives of potentially traumatized men, and witnesses of potentially disturbing events of detention, these women’s experiences are arguably not “events” set apart from the ordinary, nor do they unfold in a temporally linear fashion with an onset, an emotional response, and an aftermath in which recovery can occur. Muna speaks about her client Amina by using the vocabulary of therapeutic progress, while identifying with Amina’s situation of being the wife of a man who is politically active. Muna thereby employs a language of affect that merges psychological jargon with Palestinian modes of knowing affliction. The complex resonances3 between these two modes of knowing suffering together form what I think of as a “grammar of suffering.” This grammar merges a global psychological understanding of suffering as trauma and a Palestinian moral discourse on suffering expressed in terms of events, heroism, and endurance in the face of hardship.
The Palestinian moral discourse of suffering is polyvocal. Khalili’s triad of heroic, tragic, and sumūd narratives captures the three main genres in which Palestinians tend to recount their experiences, depending on whether they are recounting a heroic past or current stories of tragedy and suffering (2007: 224). Heroic narratives, Khalili argues, are those that privilege the courageous aspects of a person or an experience, leaving, for instance, the cost of such courage unspoken. More often than not, heroic narratives are set in the past tense. Tragic narratives on the other hand increasingly have become part of the Palestinian narrative repertoire, as instances of loss and consistent discrimination against Palestinians in Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel are extremely common. Lastly, what Khalili calls sumūd narratives tend to describe a range of experiences not easily accounted for. At first glance, sumūd narratives would seem to sum up and include the experiences of, say, detainees’ wives. As this chapter proceeds, however, it will become clear that I am hesitant to agree with Khalili’s point that the value and efficacy of the sumūd narratives is that they allow their narrators a breathing space. Drawing my inspiration from Deleuze’s thoughts on convergence,4 I suggest instead that breathing space is precisely what is missing for detainees’ wives due to a convergence between knowing the Palestinian predicament as trauma, on the one hand, and local ways of acknowledging suffering by the criteria of event and relation, on the other.
As we shall see, however, these criteria are not equal. Event is given emphasis in the convergence of Palestinian and psychological ways of understanding suffering, while relation is considered secondary, or at least derivative. In the second half of the chapter, I analyze how these criteria and their internal hierarchies fail to recognize the less clear-cut aspects of Palestinian affliction.
The Criteria of Event
In their book The Empire of Trauma (2009), Fassin and Rechtman map out how knowledge production about suffering and interventions in the occupied territory have altered in scope and focus since the second Intifada in 2000–2003. The orientation of international donations has shifted from providing medical assistance to people who were wounded in direct violent clashes, during the first Intifada from 1987 to 1993, to the broader, allinclusive category of conducting psychosocial interventions with the people affected by, for instance, house demolitions, violent clashes, home invasions, and the loss, wounding, or death of family members. Rather than following the precise diagnostic criteria for evaluating a client’s mental state, interventions and representations of suffering slide into a witnessing of the general situation of the Palestinians. Fassin and Rechtman term this phenomenon “humanitarian psychiatry” (209).
Against this backdrop, Fassin and Rechtman suggest that a focus on direct violence and the events that cause traumatization have been replaced by an emphasis on the clinical narratives of clients, their general life circumstances, and mundane suffering (2009: 201). While their analysis brings to the fore central tendencies in how adversity is understood in the occupied territories, I would argue that the notion of “event” has in fact retained its centrality. As will become clear in the ethnography that follows, “event” serves as a marker for suffering across diagnoses, narratives, and representations, even when the suffering is not related to an actual event. This was brought to light early in my fieldwork: When I asked the staff in the Prisoners’ Support Center to meet those among their clients who were wives of prisoners, the therapists instead urged me to meet with widows and mothers whose relatives had been martyred and who were therefore able to express their experiences in terms of “events.”
The lure of violent events as markers for suffering emerges clearly in the Prisoners’ Support Center, where documentation of the physical consequences of torture and detention occurs in tandem with the psychological diagnosis and treatment of ailments. Since the early 1990s, in similar zones of protracted conflict across the world, emphasis on the psychological effects of violence has perpetuated psychosocial theories and practices of alleviating the effects of violence (Fassin 2008; Pupavac 2001; Summerfield 1999). As an employee of a Swiss development organization said about the omnipresence of psychosocial intervention; “Is it not what we all do these days?”
One expression of this “empire of trauma” is the sheer number of scientific articles, studies, and statistics, written and collected by both Palestinian and international scientists, about the prevalence of traumatic events and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among Palestinians (Peltonen et al. 2010; Abu Hein et al. 1993; Salo et al. 2005). In the main office of the therapists at the Prisoners’ Support Center, a faded photocopy on the wall displayed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fourth edition (DSM-IV) checklists for PTSD, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and depression—which is remarkable, given that none among the staff were clinical psychologists or psychiatrists. The presence of the DSM-IV photocopy next to ads for favorite takeout restaurants and Naje al Ali’s iconic drawing of Handala encapsulates how therapists imagine their clients’ suffering: it is about a violent event that is direct and detectable through psychiatric diagnosis, despite the fact that the aim of the interventions and the mandate of the organization were more along the lines of local support to prisoners and their families. In a similar vein, the former director of a major health NGO, Dr. Issa Nejmeh, told me how the trope of traumatization was a mode of imagining the plight of the Palestinians and the mental effects on the wounded victims of the first Intifada from 1987 to 1993: “The notion of trauma was related to the people injured in the Intifada, and is completely different from what was later called PTSD. It was a direct physical pressure or manifestation, say, if a resistant lost an eye or ended up in a wheelchair. It was a psychological phenomenon related to a physical happening. Secondly, people became aware of physical problems that were a result of psychological problems.”Nejmeh’s drawing attention to how PTSD in Palestine was related at its inception to a physical phenomenon indicates that the move from physical injuries to psychological distress was circular rather than linear. PTSD was crystallized as a mode of presenting the suffering of the Palestinians (and those in other conflict zones around the world) as on par with human rights violations (see Young 1995; Fassin 2008; Allen 2012), to both the political world and to “eager, but uncaring donors,” as Nejmeh said dryly. Elaborating on the counterintuitive lack of care among international institutions and organizations that channeled large amounts of funding to the Palestinians, Nejmeh offered the well-known fact that, whereas projects concerned with the effect of the conflict are sure to attract generous funds, the political will to change “the situation” have evaporated with what he saw as the post-Oslo depoliticized relationship between Palestinians and their donors.
During our conversation, which started in his clinic in 2007, continued in his living room, and was taken up again in a Bethlehem café in 2011, he elaborated his point by analyzing the main Palestinian actors who work under the umbrella of trauma and psychosocial interventions as a response to violence. These were centers established to help those perceived to have been most severely afflicted by the occupation, namely, the detainees, the torture survivors, or those suffering from physical disability caused by what are considered heroic acts of resistance. It is violence, and thus events of radical negative change, rather than general health, that preoccupies all these local institutions.
Western donors and experts,
