us return here to Amina, for whom Muna shed her tears. Amina was included in the category of the secondary victim, and on this premise was admitted to the therapeutic group for detainees’ wives described earlier. Amina was present when the Israeli Army detained her husband fifteen years ago in their home. Her family home was destroyed due to her husband’s violent acts of resistance against Israel. She raises their four girls and lived with her mother and sister for ten years until she moved to a single-unit family home. Amina is under close surveillance by the village community because she is married, yet living as a single woman. Amina embodies the idea of a secondary victim because her husband is in prison. The question worth posing, however, is the extent to which her actual experience is knowable through the criteria of “event” and “relation.” At first glance, Amina’s life is translated by counselors so that it overlays the criteria by which suffering in Palestine is known through relation to a violent event or as a direct victim of a violent event. Amina’s experience, in other words, is “straightened out” so that it matches the criteria necessary to know and acknowledge it for fellow Palestinians as well as therapists. In Amina’s case, however, an apparently inclusive language of acknowledgment does not in fact enable one to read her experience.
The misreading occurs because the criteria of acknowledgment are imbued with the eventfulness of violence. They emphasize how some relations are intrinsically more wounding than others, as is true in the difference between a mother’s loss of a son and a wife’s experience of an absent husband. Interestingly, such understandings of suffering mesh with how physical injury was known in the wake of the first Intifada.
Muna’s frustration with the lack of progress in the group therapeutic project suggests a gap between the experiential realms of the detainees’ wives and the available therapeutic method. This gap is what made Muna pose the question to the teacher during the workshop on group therapy: what could she do to help her client, who did not feel better after several months of therapy? The teacher interpreted Amina’s case in the following way: “She reacts like she expects her husband to prefer that she is not OK.” His framing of Amina’s feeling of victimization may suggest a failure on his part to acknowledge that the circumstances of Amina’s life might actually be enough for her to feel anguished, regardless of whether her husband agrees. The teacher’s comment resonates with the use of an event as a criterion for the recognition of affliction: he tells Muna that Amina’s life is “not staying the same; life changes.” Implicitly, the teacher compares Amina’s situation with that of her husband. Seen in that light, Amina is out of prison, whereas her husband is the one whose liberty has been taken away. The words of the teacher therefore suggest that Amina can quite easily break free of her victimization, whereas her husband is the one who is still marked by a violent event—his incarceration.
The teacher’s assertion that “things change” resonates further with the criterion of a traumatic event, something that is limited in time and space. His advice to Muna assumes that suffering eventually ends. One of the criteria to be fulfilled in the diagnosis of PTSD is the experience of a traumatic event. Were we to think about Amina in purely psychiatric terms, she shows the symptoms of a disorder, but she lacks a traumatic event to explain her symptoms.
Muna embodies the resonances and convergences between the therapeutic and nationalist modes of framing affliction. Her representation of Amina’s case converges between her position as a therapist trained to think within a psychological mode of reasoning and her status as a Palestinian who also thinks about her clients within the national notions of suffering outlined earlier. By posing the question to the teacher regarding Amina’s claim to victimhood, Muna presents Amina’s reactions as excessive. However, at the moment of her breakdown, Muna appears to reconsider, as she herself feels the excess of suffering that is not supposed to be there. In other words, Amina’s relationship with her husband does in fact allow her suffering to be translated into the grammar of suffering in occupied Palestine. Notably, though, her experiences fail the criteria of event-based suffering. It is at this point that we need to attend to the internal connection and hierarchy among the two criteria, which help explain why Amina is not “supposed” to feel like a victim, despite the apparently straightforward translation of her situation into the grammar of suffering: The criterion of relation is an optional criterion, whereas the temporal criterion of event is in fact obligatory. This is why Amina’s experience is not fully acknowledged, either by Muna as a therapist or by Muna as a Palestinian.
The moment of Muna’s identification with Amina is one in which Muna reads Amina and thus acknowledges her. By allowing herself to read Amina’s experience, Muna comes to know her suffering on different terms than the available grammar of suffering by which affliction is known and acknowledged in occupied Palestine. Acknowledgment requires a moral inclination to act on one’s knowledge, which is what Muna does by addressing it during the course, and by breaking down when she recognizes her inability to effect change in Amina.
Muna’s recognition invites us to think further about an anthropological wording of experiences of hardship that do not fit into the grammar of suffering in contemporary Palestine, even though this grammar does, indeed, encompass a wide range of experiences, as this chapter has shown. The criteria for the recognition of suffering are in fact so powerful that they constitute what I think of as a standing language. I propose the idea of a standing language in order to acknowledge, along with Khalili and Sylvain Perdigon, that the Palestinians themselves have developed a fine-grained vocabulary to articulate the diverse experiences their statelessness imposes on them. Yet I hesitate to assume that such a language offers a wording of suffering truer to the Palestinian experience than, as Fassin and Rechtman argue, a Western language of trauma, because of the circumstances of post-Oslo Palestine and the criteria of suffering described here.
A standing language is not simply psychological, national, and religious representations of suffering that morph into a grammar of suffering. That grammar includes the tripartite set of heroic, tragic, and sumūd narratives that Khalili finds among Palestinians in Lebanon and the psychological discourse of traumatization that has proliferated in Palestine. In order to flag the difference between this grammar and a standing language, I turn to Wittgenstein and more specifically Das’s reading of him (2011; see also Han and Das 2015). The premise of a standing language includes agreement over criteria as to what forms of life are human. What makes such an agreement about criteria relevant in the context of gendered expressions of suffering in contemporary Palestine is the question of whether all forms of suffering experienced by Palestinians can actually be seen to belong to a particular form of life reflecting agreement about the criteria of what it means to be human. How the experiences of prisoners’ wives fail both knowledge and acknowledgment in the grammar of suffering in contemporary Palestine reads to me as a reformulation of that question. The experiences of the prisoners’ wives cannot be embodied in the standing language: There are simply no words for what it means to be in their situation. Muna cries when she realizes the inadequacy of the standing language to allow her access to the slow grinding of Amina’s lived life, a grind so finely textured that it slips away from the criteria that have been put in place to know and acknowledge it. Amina’s feelings reflect the unsettling, continuous situation that is a predicament for all the women who are married to long-term detainees in contemporary Palestine.
The question is how the slow grind of Amina’s life relates to the slow grind of ordinary life for the majority of Palestinians (Kelly 2008), a condition eclipsed by the standing language of suffering, but that produces adversity, nonetheless. The argument I make in this book is that the unsettling effects of everyday occupied life are in fact so grave as to bring Palestinians to profoundly question the national project and the cost of endurance (see also Buch Segal 2015).
How do a grammar of suffering and the idea of a standing language help us better conceptualize distress? Why not simply analyze the complexity of the idea of trauma, as has been done sensibly by, for instance, anthropologist Rebecca Lester in her merging of anthropology and psychotherapy? I am hesitant to employ the language of trauma as an analytics of ethnography, but not because I am suspicious of the notion of trauma laid out by Fassin and Rechtman. The resonances between
