rise to new forms of meaning that make perfect sense to people, even if they are patched together from global flows of media narratives and development practices” (293).
It is precisely this merging of the global and local in language and action that constitutes the grammar of suffering in contemporary Palestine. We thereby see that there is no “authentic” language in which distress can be vocalized, either through a discourse of trauma or through the words available in Palestinian moral discourse. Not only do internationally circulating discourses rooted in trauma naturally fail to cover all forms of global affliction, so, too, do the local vernacular discourses. This is perhaps the most radical conclusion of the book, since there is a strong tradition in anthropology that documents how local vernaculars of pain encompass and console by providing words to talk about difficult circumstances that the Western trauma idea does not. As will be clear in subsequent chapters, Palestinians have a reason to make ineffable particular experiences that occur as a consequence of the struggle for national recognition, and this discourse is therefore not all encompassing of suffering, either.
However, the fact that Muna, as both a therapist and a Palestinian woman, at one point acknowledges Amina’s suffering may suggest the potential of shifting from a register based on distance, heroism, and objective diagnostics to an affective register that eschews the comforting armature of scientific and national terminology alike. As Das observes, this alternative vision requires that the eye be not an organ that sees, but an organ that weeps (2007: 62). Only in Muna’s tears was Amina’s suffering acknowledged in a way that transcended spoken expression. This could be read as corroboration of a point that underlies both notions of trauma and an anthropological literature indebted to Elaine Scarry’s argument that some forms of pain defy language (1985). What I have tried to show is in fact the opposite. Wittgenstein writes on the relationship between pain and words: “So are you saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying? On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it” (1953 [2009]: §244). Muna’s tears and the words she uttered simultaneously force us to think closely about the imbrication of language and the suffering it tries to describe.
CHAPTER 2
Domestic Uncanniness
Heimlich becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merges with its antonym unheimlich. The uncanny is in some respects a species of the familiar.
—Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
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