of resistance. Even in the current atmosphere of fatigue with ever more losses, detentions, and general adversity, unconditional support for the national struggle is perceived as ‘ādi.
A pivotal question then concerns the meaning of ‘ādi, the ordinary, under circumstances of absence and military occupation. Terming these circumstances “ordinary,” when confinement in fact molds the entire existence of the detainees’ wives, can be conceived as a denial of the suffering that accompanies the absence. Continuing a line of inquiry that finds expression most clearly in the work of Das (2007, 2010) and in regard to contemporary Palestine Kelly (2009), Allen (2012) and Feldman (2015), I work toward an understanding of how far individual notions of what is allegedly ordinary can be stretched, in order to turn inside out a key notion in contemporary n anthropology: “the ordinary” or its ethnographic twin, “the everyday.” I take maintaining the everyday as an achievement that is created through habitual actions. For my interlocutors, this means acting with the aim of sustaining their split families (Das 2010: 376).
This does not mean that every aspect of these women’s quotidian lives is enacted dramatically as suffering. It does mean, however, that the everyday is the place in which the braiding of the ordinary and the extraordinary occurs. The picture of endurance that emerges here shows us women’s labor of making an everyday life for themselves and their intimate relations while their husbands are imprisoned, and how the characteristics of such a life are simultaneously allowed and denied a place in the standing language.
Any work of endurance is intrinsically and necessarily in dialogue with Elizabeth Povinelli’s and João Biehl’s work on life marked by abandonment (Povinelli 2012; Biehl 2005 [2013]). Biehl’s writing introduces us to lives at the intersection of abandonment by kin, psychopharmaceuticals, and a state that has seemingly given up on caring for its citizens (2005; Biehl and Moran-Tomas 2009). Povinelli’s concern on the other hand is with the conceptualization of the effort to endure (2012: 471).
I think of endurance from a different angle. In contrast to Biehl’s description of his main protagonist Catarina’s abandonment by her relatives, none of my interlocutors have been abandoned by their kin. In fact, it is quite the contrary, as families offer support in the absence of husbands. Women have been integrated even more tightly into kin intimacy due to their husbands’ absences, whether those husbands are dead or in prison. Nor are the women necessarily deprived of material sustenance; some are even financially independent of these kin networks. Yet it is within the scene of care and support and even dramatic performances of kin solidarity that I could detect a feeling of suffocation, in the sense that these women were bound to represent what others wanted them to be, as an act of solidarity to their lost husbands and to the Palestinian cause.
While I share Povinelli’s wish to investigate the potential for a life lived Otherwise in the permeable boundary between endurance and exhaustion, her emphasis on the possibility of a different life would here translate into documentation of Palestinian inventiveness and vitality born out of exhaustion. My emphasis, however, is on the kind of endurance that cannot be separated from its limitations. Ethnographically, this is about the minutiae of the emotional labor that endurance requires, such as Luma’s effort to offer her guests refreshments the second her tears dried, or Yara’s participation in political campaigning whose efficacy she herself doubts. Consequentially, I put aside the idea of the Otherwise for a time. I am simply trying to work out what endurance means, and its dimensions, when it is considered as an aspect of the ordinary for the women figuring in this book.
Becoming an Intimate Stranger
This direction of my work came to me through a realization during three months of fieldwork in Gaza in 2005, where I was part of a research project under the auspice of RCT—The Danish Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims right after Israel’s withdrawal of its settlements from the strip. At the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, I found myself in a research office in Gaza overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. In front of me was a list with twenty names, a response to a request from the research team of which I was a part. We had asked our partners in a psychosocial organization to provide a randomized list of torture survivors, half of them men and half women. I was puzzled by the absence of any female names on the list. When I asked why there were only men, our Palestinian research leader answered with a shrug, “Women are not torture victims, they are the wives of the victims.”
The fact that women rarely are torture survivors or detainees in Israeli prisons is hardly a mystery, bearing in mind the gendered distribution of labor in the resistance against Israel (see Peteet 1991; Jean-Klein 2003; Sabbagh 1998; Gren 2009). However, the language in which the research leader noted that these women were wives rather than victims appeared to refer to notions of proper adversity, of who deserved services. My attempt to understand the rationales behind such assumptions grew into my examination of the acknowledgment, or lack thereof, of lives and forms of suffering, as well as the criteria used to evaluate affliction among those related to the heroes and victims of the Palestinian resistance. My field comprised a variety of venues and activities: the baking hours on Fridays in the village, the Prisoners’ Support Center’s appointments with donors, meetings in Europe or in the occupied territory of donors about allocations of funds to different interventions and conferences in Europe, the Middle East, and Canada, where the most recent knowledge on trauma, interventions, and conflict was being discussed by those most knowledgeable in their field.
My fieldwork began through the Prisoners’ Support Center in Ramallah, where I asked to meet clients who were secondary victims. I spent the first two months of my fieldwork accompanying therapists on outreach sessions and meetings with donors and other nongovernmental, psychosocial organizations in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Given that the Prisoners’ Support Center initiated a group therapeutic project for wives of detainees a couple of months into my fieldwork I soon came to spend most of my time with the five women of that therapeutic group. I compounded my research efforts around another group of women in the similar, though still different, situation of being the widows of martyrs in another town in the West Bank.
The two sites are here termed Dar Nūra and Bāb aš-šams, respectively. These are not the proper names of the villages because their disclosure, in combination with the personal details conveyed in this book, could betray the anonymity and confidentiality of my interlocutors. Recognizing that belonging to a village, a region, or a town in the occupied territory is as significant as being a Palestinian (Swedenburg 1990; Muhawi and Kanaana 1989), I have omitted detailed descriptions of these two sites, for the sake of protection. In the cases of particular interlocutors and their lives and stories, I have included as much local detail as confidentiality allows. I have done this while keeping the ethnographic problems involved in making such representative choices firmly in mind.
The bulk of data was created within, among, and about intimate relationships in the families of detainees, and secondarily in the families of martyrs. Intimate relationships in families were therefore a primary site of study rather than, say, a village, a town, or any other geographically bounded site.
Intimate relations for the women appearing in this book unfold primarily in the domesticities around the women’s homes. Notably, however, the domestic is not necessarily private, nor is intimacy always connoted as positive. Following Das, Ellen, and Leonard, I understand the domestic as “somehow always implicated in the non-domestic—be that the domain of the politico-jural, the idea of the non-domesticated wilderness, or as suffused by affects that circulate in the wider politico-jural domain” (2008: 351). The domestic, then, is the site where betrayals of relations and of oneself can take place in the wake of a violence that trespasses the porous boundary between the domestic and the outside (Das 2007: 11; Kelly and Thiranagama 2010).
Amina, her sisters Layla and Aisha, and the kin network around them are the women among the detainees’ families with whom I had and still have the closest relationships. Among my interlocutors, it is their company that I seek upon returning to the occupied territory and with whom I stay in touch through the occasional
