both from the Prisoners’ Support Center.1 The five women participating in the two-hour sessions appear throughout this book, less however as therapeutic subjects than as wives, mothers, and daughters who are living through the absence of their husbands.
Even before they participated in the group therapy, the women knew each other. They all live in Dar Nūra, a village of around five thousand inhabitants, and are related to each other through either consanguine or affinal kinship, or, in most cases, both, as patrilateral parallel cousin marriage is the preferred form of marriage in the village.2 They are thus folded into each other’s lives, and know of each other either through firsthand accounts or, more often, rumors and reputation. The knowledge shared in the therapeutic group was therefore anything but confidential. None of the women ever risked her reputation as the proud, dutiful wife of a heroic detainee.
On the first two occasions, the group met downstairs in the library of the town hall. With children browsing through books and playing, and secretaries working with open doors, the library was not an appropriate therapeutic space, the therapists found. Since one of the participants, Aisha, enjoyed considerable social esteem in the village, the group was thereafter allowed to meet in a more private room. Moving two floors up and under the auspices of the town council, we were served tea and coffee by the council’s cook at every meeting. When the women who formed part of the group met and asked each other whether they would attend the next session, they would say “bt-rohiila al-baladiyyeh?” (Are you going to the town hall?), rather than referring to it as either a women’s or a therapeutic group.
In this way the women distanced themselves from the fact that they were involved in a process that problematized their relationship to the detainees. Local assumptions hold that being a relative of a detainee inspires a sense of honor and feelings of pride for those who are active against the Israeli occupation. Among Palestinians, being the wife of a detainee is therefore not considered a genuine reason for distress proper, save for the affliction that the wife may feel vicariously on behalf of her detained husband. That life as a detainee’s wife is not in fact lived exclusively in the glow of derivative honor is no surprise to fellow Palestinians or international observers of Palestine. Nonetheless, there are difficulties in acknowledging that “form of life” for the very same Palestinians and foreigners alike, difficulties that are the theme of this chapter.
Muna, who was facilitating the Dar Nūra town hall group, hoped to create a social space in which these women’s lives and suffering were recognized. During the span of the therapeutic group project, the Prisoners’ Support Center hosted a training course in group therapy on its Ramallah premises for twenty Palestinian counselors. Two Spanish psychotherapists led the course. A vital element of the course concerned how to enable clients to establish what is termed “a safe place,” in therapeutic vernacular. A safe place refers to both a state of mind and a physical space or a material object that evokes a feeling of comfort and safety in the client. Ideally this personal space is established for the group members before they express their traumatic experiences. During the training course, Muna raised her hand to voice a concern. She was already halfway through the group therapeutic process for the detainees’ wives. Muna asked, “What if the clients do not have and cannot create a safe place?” The teacher replied, “We have to help them establish a safe place.” Muna continued, “I have a problem with a member of this group, Amina. She feels more victimized than all the others. How can I deal with that?” The teacher answered, “The feeling of victimhood is a feeling that ‘no one can understand me.’ You could try asking her how she would feel if someone actually understood her. Because she thinks that she is not allowed to be okay. She reacts like she expects her husband to prefer that she is not okay. Ask her to look toward the future. Because she’s not staying the same: life changes.”
Later in the day’s packed training schedule, the participating therapists were asked to enact a situation from their therapy using the therapeutic intervention of psychodrama. This form of therapy is based on the work of the Brazilian psychotherapist Jacob Moreno (1946). His central idea is the powerful potential of reenacting a psychic conflict in front of an audience. Ideally, this performance will transform a traumatic experience into something that can be shared and thereby externalized from the inner, allegedly ineffable register of the traumatized person.
As a therapeutic method, psychodrama enjoys widespread popularity across Gaza and the West Bank. It is an intervention believed to be well suited to clients, such as women and children, who are not quite comfortable in providing coherent narratives of past and difficult experiences (Burmeister and Maciel 2007; Moreno 1946). That psychodrama also figured in the training program for group therapy is no surprise, since psychodrama and group therapy both emphasize collective sharing as a way to heal painful experience.
During such an exercise in psychodrama, Muna enacted the role of Amina, whom she represented as feeling too much like a victim. Still shaken, Muna told me afterward, “When I played the role of Amina and told the audience why I felt like a victim, I started crying and I could not stop; I just cried and cried. I felt for that moment that I was Amina. Esmail [Muna’s husband] is also political, he could just as well be in prison.”
Why did the enactment of Amina cause Muna to cry? The training session for the Palestinian therapists appears to convey at least two modes of understanding distress. One is a Palestinian moral discourse on suffering captured by Muna as the concerned wife of a politically active and potentially heroic husband at risk of both violent death and detention in Israel. The local idiom of perseverance, sumūd, summarizes this discourse. By this understanding, women like Amina are praised as the patient, supportive, and proud wives of heroic husbands, suffering as spouses, albeit differently according to the gendered division of labor in the Palestinian project (see Peteet 2005; Jean-Klein 2003). The second, underlying concept of suffering is the one offered by the Spanish trainers, an idea of victimhood as an emotional experience that one can recover from with time. This framework grounds affliction on the psychological terrain of trauma (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Argenti-Pillen 2000; Leys 2000). The two modes of understanding anguish, both demonstrated in the vignette, together constitute how suffering is addressed and understood in the occupied territory.
This compound framing of affliction resembles what Didier Fassin has termed the hero-victim subjectivity, but there are important differences between his and my engagement with trauma among Palestinians. Fassin’s work (2008) is primarily based on professional immersion as well as fieldwork among medical and management staff in the organization Medecins sans Frontiers in Paris and its programs for Palestinians. In contrast my analysis privileges the view from rather than on subjectivities, in the sense that the bulk of empirical data is based on fieldwork in occupied Palestine among people who are labeled as traumatized and their therapists. This ethnographic premise allows me to ponder how the experiences of wives of Palestinian detainees are not adequately contained in the framing of their suffering as either trauma or heroic sacrifice.
By asking why Muna was crying as an initial question, this chapter offers both an ethnographic analysis and a conceptualization of the problem of experiences that evade what Sally Engle Merry and Susan Bibler Coutin (2014) term “commensurability.” This term refers to the globally circulating indicators used to register, for instance, suffering in the shape of violence, sexual assault, or poverty and the lives that can get lost in this registration. This chapter brings to light how the forms of affliction for detainees’ wives are incommensurate with, and elude, the languages of these indicators.
What Counts as Suffering in Palestine
Muna’s difficulty with Amina’s case suggests precisely the degree of incommensurability between the therapeutic premise of change and the uneventful life it is supposed to heal. This premise emerges in the Spanish teacher’s presentation of Amina’s inability to engage in life as related to the onset of an event—her husband’s imprisonment—to which Amina responded with an immediate show of overwhelming emotion. Following an emotional response, Amina was supposed to recover. By this understanding, suffering is caused, and defined, by an extraordinary
