No Place for Grief. Lotte Buch Segal
tables and graphs, a growing number of clients were the relatives of detainees and martyrs. The presentation ended with pictures of the physical wounds on the bodies of torture victims, dead children, and lamenting women. After the presentation, there was a discussion about uncertainties concerning the identity of the organization’s clients. The representative from the UNVFVT said, “I need numbers of how many of your beneficiaries … are actually torture survivors or direct family,” to which the director firmly replied, “All of them are survivors of torture—they are captives in Israel!” This point was ignored for the remainder of the meeting. However, the representative of the fund said again in front of the employees of the organization, “It is important that when you make projects for the families, it has to be families who were directly affected. For example, ordinary domestic violence is not torture or to be directly related to it. It does not count.”
During the meeting with UNVFVT in its European headquarters, I asked the representatives how they identify direct victims affected at the time of the event. One answered, “No one can distinguish between someone who is tortured and the one who witnesses torture.” Both the fund and its beneficiary projects are thus intimately aware of the pitfalls and permeable boundaries of the definitions they constantly draw and redraw. It is interesting here to think in terms of Deleuze’s idea of convergence, described earlier. Within this line of reasoning, there are at least two points of convergence between the language of the European donor and the Palestinian center’s mode of expressing the suffering of its clients, the detainees, and their families within a framework of the Palestinian plight: immediacy and relation.
Immediacy is the first and primary point of convergence. Immediacy saturates the language of the representatives of the fund in their invocation of the terms “direct” and “directness” in the UNVFVT guidelines. “Direct” refers both to those who have undergone an event of torture, limited in time and space, and also to the insistence that the relation to that event must be “direct.” Immediacy was further expressed by the Prisoners’ Support Center through the director’s outburst that imprisonment equals torture, and the graphic portrayal of physical wounds and lost limbs in the PowerPoint presentation. As Allen asserts, a “politics of immediation” currently permeates Palestinian political discourse and social relations as well (2009: 163). The “politics of immediation” is an affect-driven discourse that is embedded in the Palestinians’ call to the world to pay attention to the immediacy of suffering—to the visceral aspects of the conflict—by insisting that images of fragmented bodies be displayed in the Western media, in addition to the Palestinian Maan News, al-Aqsa channel, or pan-Arab channels like al-Jazeera. Allen (2009) underscores that visualization plays a crucial role in the representation of the Palestinians as deserving victims who are worthy of recognition. In late summer 2014, for example, international news and social media were dominated by images of corpses, wounded children, and weeping mothers from Gaza during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge. Displaying the human body, Allen (2009) argues, is a way of sidestepping the mediating elements that are thought to obscure the message of the humanness of the Palestinians. Of particular significance here is that such visual displays are imbued with invocations of violent events as a cause for suffering, and in this way can be seen as an imperative call to action on the part of witnesses.
A focus on immediate suffering also figured at a women’s mosque meeting initiated by the Prisoners’ Support Center. The counselor opened the meeting by introducing the center and its services, after which she said, “I want to start with a new subject today: ’Azme [crisis]. I want to know what sadme [shock] means to you.” Various women quickly responded, “a disaster,” “problems and worries,” and “mašākil fi d-dār” (problems in the home). To these responses the counselor said, “Let me tell you what ’azme or ṣaḍme mean: if I knock on your door, how will you respond to that? You will open the door, right? It’s a reaction to a particular event. When I knock on the door, you will respond to this action by reacting to this event…. Who else has something to say? Imm Amjad, tell us what happened when you got the news that your son had been killed?”
Addressed so directly, Imm Amjad replied, “Oh, you want me to cry now?” The counselor replied that she would feel better if she cried. Imm Amjad began to describe the death of her son:
It was the twentieth day of Ramadan, so I was fasting and praying all the time. So on that day when they killed him, my brother came to tell me about it, he was telling gradually. He told me that my son was in the hospital, so I asked him why, and he told me that the Israelis had shot him. I told him, “Please ask them again, maybe you are not sure, or someone told you that he died, but we are not sure. Let’s wait to be sure,” but he told me, to be sure, and that he saw him. Then I felt like I was unable to stand up, I couldn’t even cry. But at the same time, I was saying that everyone wishes to die as a martyr, so my son got it and I shouldn’t feel bad. Thank God anyway.”
The counselor approached the sorrow of the 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