bereaved woman as well as the other women’s experiences of affliction through a language of acute crisis. Moreover, she tied their experiences to the onset of an event to which the women respond with immediate affect. The therapist’s decision to focus on a woman who lost her son to martyrdom illustrates how the emphasis on immediacy permeates psychosocial intervention, as it does the manner in which this woman shares her grief with the other participants. During the session in the mosque, a focus on experiential wounds that are discrete, visceral, and delineated in time and space eclipsed long-term suffering. The converging point of immediacy is an expression of the assumption that an event occurs in a moment. It is directly experienced by a victim or a witness, and it can only be ameliorated by the presence of an other, in this case the specific other of direct psychological, medical, psychosocial, or legal assistance.
There is a similarity here to the ethics of immediacy that, according to Mittermaier, suffuses the “Tahrir Square state of mind,” the hopeful intentionality of the demonstrators in the square in Cairo during the Arab Spring as well as the khidma, a Sufi place in which a meal is offered free of charge to those in need in downtown Cairo (2014: 55). Based on fieldwork at the height of the Arab Spring, Mittermaier says that an ethics of immediacy revolves around a set of embodied practices that call for tending to those in front of us and around us (55). The politics of immediation in occupied Palestine are not the same as an ethics of immediacy in contemporary Egypt, but it seems that they share the appeal of that which is right before us—for example, a tortured person or a human being in need of a meal—and how that person calls forth action on the part of an other. Immediacy has an inherent urgency and as such immediacy surfaces as a crystallization of the forceful lure of life marked by events, albeit tragic. In contrast, the lives that lack this eventful, immediate criterion are easily missed.
The Criteria of Relation
The second point of convergence in the grammar of suffering is “relation.” This point is reflected in how the fund representative emphasized that a relation to the event of torture, either through witnessing it or by “being directly connected” to the torture victim, is the most significant criterion when choosing projects to fund. For the Prisoners’ Support Center, the importance of relation is premised on the fact that the relatives of torture survivors form a major client population. Emphasizing a relationship to the torture victim or the detainee includes this client population among the deserving victims through a language of secondary victimhood or secondary traumatization.
The DSM-IV diagnosis of PTSD emphasizes both the occurrence of a traumatic event and the ensuing emotional response of traumatization (APA 2000). It is considered a fact, and a source of puzzlement, among researchers and mental health professionals that women universally and in the occupied territory display higher PTSD scores than men, despite the fact that women rarely experience so-called traumatic events of torture, detention, direct violence, or the like (Helweg-Larsen and Kastrup 2007; Giacaman et al. 2009). Women are admitted to rehabilitation programs due to their classification as secondary victims because of their relationships to the primary victims (Solomon et al. 2004). An Israeli study of wives of prisoners of war by the well-known psychologist Zahava Solomon (2007) and her team showed that compared with women who had lost their husbands, the wives of prisoners of war showed higher degrees of traumatization.
The challenges of working with secondary victims were the topic of a conversation with the Palestinian therapist Muna, introduced earlier. I asked her why she employed cognitive behavioral therapy in her group intervention to the detainees’ wives. She replied, “They need CBT, they need many things during the day, they are under the pressure of society, or they suffer from traumatic events and maybe there are irrational thoughts in their minds like, ‘I’m a wife of a detainee, I can’t go out, I can’t do anything.’ This is irrational beliefs. With CBT we can work with these beliefs through working with relaxation techniques.” Noting Muna’s description of the wives’ afflictions as traumatic events, I asked her which precise events she was talking about. She replied, “I want to remove the traumatic events from their lives. During the session, the women said, ‘Oh, I am not alone, there’s another woman like me.’ When some of them said, ‘I feel like this and like this, another one said I feel the same, I suffer like you, I am not the only one who feels that.’ They learn from each other, how to deal with problems like the children and the family-in-law.”
How Muna frames the distress of her female clients as the result of traumatic events that have befallen them illuminates how a relation to a direct victim—political hero is a criterion for having one’s suffering acknowledged, in addition to the occurrence of a traumatic event. That these criteria are at times indistinguishable was revealed when Muna explained to me what she meant by “traumatic event”: she recounted intricate, ongoing situations of relational injury from the women’s social relations, rather than singular happenings. Significantly, these at times implicitly wounding relations do not include the secondary victim’s relationship to the primary victim. This confounds the criteria for the recognition of suffering, as well as the fit between therapeutic measures and the kinds of suffering these measures attempt to describe and ameliorate. The discrepancy between the language available for knowing suffering and the experiences the therapist tries to heal is evident with individual therapists. It is also evident in the institutionalization of a psychosocial approach to suffering in Palestine. Muna’s comments point to two parallel concepts of suffering: one in which the immediacy of the traumatic event and a relation to a primary victim are the criteria of knowing suffering, and a second that is an acknowledgment that the object of amelioration is actually not the reliving of a traumatic memory of a violent event at all. Rather, it is the uneventful everyday life as a detainee’s wife, folded into potentially harmful or challenging social relations.
How to think about the apparent incomprehension of what it means to be in the shoes of a detainee’s wife can be aided by paying further attention to the notions of knowing and acknowledgment respectively. To know, argues Cavell, means to read others and to allow oneself to be read by others. It is “a process of being read, as finding your fate in your capacity for interpretation for yourself ” (1988: 16). Being known as a human being thus allows for a language for speaking and thinking about oneself and one’s experience. Cavell, however, underscores the discrepancy between knowing (reading) and experiencing. Following Cavell this leads us to Martin Heidegger, who in Being and Time argued that, although language straightens out experience, experience can never be straightened out “except through existing itself” (1962: 33). This process of straightening out experience unfolds, in this example, with reference both to the global psychological discourse and a Palestinian moral discourse on suffering. Through resonance between the two, the criteria of violent events and relations are concretized and become the criteria, per se, on which knowledge about bereaved women rests. Importantly, “knowledge” here is not the same as “acknowledgment.” Cavell argues that acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge. It includes a moral dimension formulated as “recognising what I know” and acting upon it (Cavell 1979: 428). This distinction figures in Kelly’s recent work (2011) on torture. He concludes that our failure to acknowledge the event of torture and the marks it leaves on its victim is not a result of the inexpressibility of pain. Rather, lack of acknowledgment comes from our failure to see and listen to the pain right in front of us (4).
The distinction between knowledge and acknowledgment helps us get closer to what is in fact lost in the “straightening out” of the experiences of prisoners’ wives. Relation as the second criterion of suffering, to be sure, includes and acknowledges detainees’ wives. Yet this is a frayed, partial inclusion. In the straightening out of experience, not all relations are valued: the grief of mothers who have lost someone through a violent event is recognized, whereas that of wives who experience only absence is eclipsed. Desolation is recognized only through relations to the figure of the hero and primary victim. In fact, however, the relations that seem to distress the wives of the detainees most are those with the people who help make do during their spouse’s confinement: the family and the husband’s family. This gestures toward a hierarchy of the two criteria, in which event is privileged, and relation downplayed.
