10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4084
application/pdf
2239-625X
4084
1
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-27480
Sara Rawash
Anuac
Not even a word: Politics of speech and silence in Palestinian memories
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
10
Thematic section: Rethinking agency: Cultural trauma and political violence
2021-06-01
2020-04-19
2021-07-23
2021-07-23
139-159
1
Sara Rawash
2021/06/01
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4084
139
Università di Torino, Italy
2239-625X
1
en
159
urn:nbn:it:unica-27480
Not even a word: Politics of speech and silence in Palestinian memories
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/4084/4883
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                                           2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 139-159




Not even a word
Politics of speech and silence in Palestinian memories
Sara RAWASH
Università di Torino




ABSTRACT: This article explores the memories of female Palestinian former political
prisoners, via a rethinking of the interrogation moment as liminal space. This arena
reveals and triggers productive processes of recognition of self and other, construction
of meaning, and resistance strategies by reproducing a mode of remembering that can
transcend the yoke of “victimisation” and defeat. I aim to acknowledge the terminology
that prisoners use – or refuse – to describe themselves and their “being-in-the-world”
and to explore the wide range of meanings involved. In this context silence, the act of
not confessing during the interrogation, can be read as a microcosm of values that is
not reducible to traumatic discourses, a categorisation that risks obscuring the social,
cultural and political frame in which it is shaped.

KEYWORDS: FEMALE PRISONERS; LIMINALITY; SILENCE; RECOGNITION; PALESTINE.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Sara Rawash
Not even a word: Politics of speech and silence in Palestinian memories
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 139-159.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4084
140                                                                           SARA RAWASH




                                       Accounts by torture victims indicate the stage of
                                       breakdown at which their resistance intervenes.
                                       They “held up”, they say, by maintaining (perhaps
                                       we should even say “enduring”) the memory of
                                       comrades who, for their own part, were not
                                       “rotten”; by keeping in mind the struggle in which
                                       they were engaged, a struggle which survived their
                                       own “degradation” intact and did not unburden
                                       them of it any more than it depended on it; by
                                       discerning still, through the din of their tortures,
                                       the silence of human anger and the genealogy of
                                       suffering that lay behind their birth.
                                                     Michel de Certeau, Heterologies, 1986



   A reflection on the specific Palestinian context of former political female
prisoners who experienced interrogation and torture demands a rethinking
of traumatic memories and their implications in Palestinian biographies1.
The languages of trauma that have become hegemonic in the post-Oslo
Agreement era often represent Palestinian prisoners as agentless and
individualised, thereby hiding the subjectivity and the networks of struggle
that are involved. In his analysis of humanitarian politics of testimony in the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Fassin affirms: “Yesterday we denounced
imperialist domination; today we reveal its psychic traces. Not so long ago
we glorified the resistance of population; we henceforth scrutinise the
resilience of individuals” (Fassin 2008: 532). In the last decades, while
prisoners’ struggle remains one of the cornerstones of Palestinian resistance,
as Fassin says a new language is being used to frame the processes generated
by the politics of occupation.
   In recent years several ethnographers have applied an in-depth approach
to explore the various implications that have emerged from the phenomenon
of mass incarceration of Palestinians. They incorporate a measure of
complexity in that these works consider the social, cultural and relational
aspects. Among the others, Esmail Nashif (2008) has analysed the building of
a community of Palestinian political prisoners through textual production;
Nahla Abdo (2014) delineates an enquiry into the Palestinian women’s
struggle within the Israeli prison system from a historical and sociological

1. I wish to thank the anonymous Anuac referees for their stimulating comments, which
helped me to improve this paper.


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NOT EVEN A WORD                                                                        141


perspective. Julie Peteet (1994) has examined the policy and the practices of
imprisoning young Palestinian men during the Intifada on one hand and
male rituals of resistance on the other. Avram Bornstein (2001), in contrast,
explores the problems of representation stemming from detention and Lena
Meari (2011) focuses on the interrogation as a moment of constitution of
subjectivity and politics. She claims that “the interrogation-encounter
generates relationships that involve multiple layers and different
configurations of power” (ibidem: 20).
   Following the path opened up by these works, this article questions the
meanings of the politics of speech (and silence) in the interrogation
encounter with a focus on the way the agency that surfaces in the
interrogation arena is positioned within a broader social system of values
and effects. Pursuing the idea that a deep analysis of the language is needed,
I discuss both the words used by the military to subjugate and dehumanise
the prisoners, and the different strategies that the prisoners use to describe
themselves and their “being-in-the-world”2. Thus, through a study of the
words it is possible to reconsider the meanings through which subjects
manifest their solidarity as individuals within a group, or as subjects within a
community.
   It is undoubtedly difficult to approach the individual and collective
wounds generated by detention, torture and degrading treatment (Asad
1996; Scheper-Hughes, Bourgois 2004). As I will delineate throughout these
pages, violence and torture enacted on the bodies and minds of female
Palestinian prisoners are a definitive experience and a strategy that aims to
shatter the social reality by penetrating into families and society. Torture is
an attack, through the tortured body, on cultural and social bases (Scarry
1987). The purpose is thus to reconsider and to rethink the languages of
suffering that are socially grounded by the subjects lived experience,
collocating them into a broader constellation of meanings. Since we have to
face these “unspeakable” (Scarry 1987) experiences, they should be analysed
carefully in order to comprehend how they represent the self and the other,
and to provide new strategies, agencies or intentions. Great attention has
been rightly directed toward what violence can erase or destroy, however,
this report wants to explore the question of what it can create … within
prison cell walls.

2. Here “being-in-the-world” refers strictly to the concept of “presence” theorised by De
Martino (1997) as a definite social-historical rootedness. In this case, the risk of losing
presence when faced with military violence and torture could be thwarted by ritual,
strategies or symbolisms that draw their efficacy from being culturally shared under-
standings and which are also subject to historical issues.

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142                                                                              SARA RAWASH


   The observations I draw on were gathered during an ethnographic fieldwork
I carried out in the West Bank between August and December 2016. The
fieldwork entailed living together with a former political prisoner and her
family in Nablus. I closely followed her work in a women’s association, and I
had the opportunity to talk with almost ten women – former political prisoners
– arrested between 1967 and 2013, who shared their own detention experiences
with me3. While staying in the West Bank and after the field-work, I
attempted to find a positioning and a methodological rigour able to bring
justice to these testimonies. “Recording” and reporting suffering memories
is a rather difficult exercise: the swing between detachment and participation
that characterises the ethnographic encounter acquires radical tones. Anaheed
Al-Hardan invites us to reflect on the implications of knowledge production
involved in research practices in Palestinian communities. She argues:
      The questioning of the researcher’s “expertise” during the analysis process, as
      well as the extent of the researcher’s ownership of a text that is produced
      through the writing of other people’s lives, are essentially interpretative issues
      which are yet to seep the language […] of researchers engaged in research on
      Palestinians (2014: 68).

   The first urgent question that I faced concerns the ontological statement
of witnessing and the testimonies that I listened to, that I translated and
transcribed. Organising these interviews was an important methodological
junction to understand the processes of construction of meanings. One issue
has been highlighted by Berliner (2005) who warned that the “abuse of
memory” in anthropological studies makes the bounding of the subject
increasingly shaded and less effective. Following Cappelletto’s (2003)
approach I will consider memory as a social practice that gains meaning not
just through testimony, but also in implicit and corporal expressions, in
silences and the “not said”, in places and through mythopoetic forms.
   Linked to this topic, it is essential to mention that the women I reached
were people who had chosen intentionally to share with me fragments of
their story4; a painful and heavy experience that sometimes requires a long

3. The fieldwork was carried out for a Master’s degree in Anthropology at the University of
Turin. The aim of this ethnography was to delineate the multiple forms in which the
colonial power expresses itself and to draw out gendered strategies of resistance produced
by the domination of the prison system. Most of the collected materials used for this paper
come from observations during both informal and institutional meetings organised by the
women’s organisations and from interviews that I recorded. The interviews were conducted
in Arabic, to allow a greater fluidity of discourse.
4. In this framework it is important to set out what “remembering” means. The act of
remembering generates the repetition of an experience that resists and transcends any
delimitation. The circularity of a mnemonic traumatic practice fields a plurality of ties that
concern both the claim of memory and the need for oblivion as a tension to domesticate
time and the past. See Beneduce 2010.


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NOT EVEN A WORD                                                                         143


process of metabolising. As it was for Aisha, whose autobiography of detention
was released in 2004, thirty years after her incarceration. She wrote in her pages:
“they keep bleeding; the wounds were still open after 35 years…” (Odeh 2004).
   During our conversation, Khawla5, a former political prisoner from Nablus,
allowed me to find ways to handle these memories. Her evocative words
provided me with the conducting wire, “le fil rouge”, whereby I performed
this analysis to understand the meanings and strategies of subjectivation
that are articulated within the interrogation space.
      When they put the bag on my head I thought about resistance, about all the
      fighters in Lebanon, in Palestine and Syria, and I thought that this bag had
      been put to all resistance fighters. I had to carry on and continue my struggle
      (Nablus, 29 September 2016).

   As she said, her experience was the same as that endured by thousands of
other Palestinian female prisoners. It is important to underline that the
Palestinian context is a field where violence and suffering have not ceased to
be and exist. They continue to permeate Palestinian biographies and to
constitute new shapes in which the process of remembering and forgetting
involves both personal and collective narratives. Hence, in Palestine these
processes cannot be considered as already digested products, as completely
historicised, but they act, produce and reproduce themselves within a
political landscape and a social past that “bites and re-bites” (De Certeau
1986).
   For these reasons the discourses on traumatic events, such as detention,
need to be rethought through an interpretative lens that permits us to capture
the social, cultural and political filters, the strategies and codes in which
violence is articulated. The transition of historical and external power into a
subjective internal force needs to be strongly investigated in order to understand
the overwhelming experience of the unexpected that trauma can describe.
      […] Power assumes this present character through a reversal of its direction,
      one that performs a break with what has come before and dissimulates as a
      self-inaugurating agency. The reiteration of power not only temporalizes the
      conditions of subordination but shows these conditions to be, not static
      structures, but temporalized — active and productive (Butler 1997: 16).

   It is important to distinguish between a power “acted on” the subject, and the
emerging of a power “acted by”. Indeed, it acts in at least two ways: first, as
what is for the subject always prior, outside itself, and second, the one here
explored, as a subjection that the subject brings on itself, as a precondition
of agency. Moreover, as Fassin and Rechtman affirm in a section of their work


5. The names of the interviewees have been changed, in order to respect the privacy of the
women I met.

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144                                                                            SARA RAWASH


dedicated to Palestine, for Palestinians “the representation of the past and their
expectations of the future are not fixed in the landscape of trauma” (Fassin,
Rechtman 2009: 211). Thus, it is urgent and necessary to recognise the multiple
meanings in action, thereby permitting a view of the historical implications of
traumatic events which other readings may flatten out. While a common
understanding of agency is associated with speech and then relegates silence
to the realm of passivity and of trauma, this article reconsiders silence as a
constructed practice, able to capture intentions, beliefs and communication
shaped by the particularity of the context (Seljamaa, Siim 2016).
   To delineate this context and the implication of its trajectories, I will firstly
concentrate on the context of the West Bank (as a settler–colonialist territory)
and the Israeli judicial system in order to understand the pervasive presence of
the occupation in Palestinian lives. Particularly, I will focus on the arena of
interrogation and on how it can explain the dynamics of construction of subjects
in the colonial encounter.

Colonial encounters
   Referring to the Palestinian context as a settler-colonial context I mean the
configuration that this territory encountered starting in the late nineteenth
century; I mean the project to establish a “Jewish nation” in Palestine. This
project culminated in 1948 with the occupation of Palestinian lands and the
expulsion of millions of Palestinians, destroying cities and villages.
Palestinians refer to this event as Nakba6, “the catastrophe”, in Arabic. In
1967 the Zionist project was extended to occupy the remaining parts of
Palestine, including the West Bank, the area I worked in. Since ‘67 this form of
colonial domain has been characterised by the pivotal and aggressive intrusion of
settlement, occupation and territorial conquest, along with the capture of
resources7.
   In this scenario, the Israeli judicial system is a bureaucratic net in which it
is easy to get trapped, even theoretically ensnared. “Palestinian” is a fluid
identity, not uniformly recognised. Therefore, different legislation exists
depending on whether the Palestinian comes from the West Bank or Gaza,
from East Jerusalem or from the historic Palestine, currently Israel.

6. In 2007 Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad Sa’di published an impressive anthology of memories
of Nakba. This ethnographic focus on Palestinian memory reflects the importance of a deep
study of the implications of this issue in the Palestinian historical landscape. Memory is
poignant because it struggles with a still contested present. And, as the authors claim,
“making memories public affirms identity, tames trauma, and asserts Palestinian political
and moral claims to justice, redress, and the right to return” (Sa’di, Abu-Lughod 2007: 3).
7. For an insight into the history of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and on
the relationship between democracy and colonialism, see Gordon 2008, 2010. For an
anthropological perspective on settler colonialism see Wolfe 1999. To focus on the
limitations of a settler–colonialist approach in the context of Palestine, see Barakat 2018.


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NOT EVEN A WORD                                                                           145


   In his “displaced autobiography” Murid al-Barghouti (2003) describes his
feeling toward the multiple definitions of his country:
     And now I pass from my exile to their… homeland? My homeland? The West Bank
     and Gaza? The Occupied Territories? The Areas? Judea and Samaria? The
     Autonomous Government? Israel? Palestine? Is there any other country in the
     world that so perplexes you with its names? Last time I was clear, and things were
     clear. Now I am ambiguous and vague. Everything is ambiguous and vague (2003: 22).

   It is precisely for this reason that I have decided to focus on the Israeli
military system as applied to former political prisoners who come from the
West Bank.
   The Israeli military court system was created in 1967, when Israel
captured and occupied the West Bank and Gaza. It is a part of a broader
system that was established to govern the Palestinian residents of the
Occupied Territories (OT). As Hajjar cogently explains in her book, the legal
status of Palestinian residents in this area is strongly contested, mainly
because “Israel is not their state, they have no sovereign state of their own,
and their status vis-à-vis Israel is that of ‘foreign civilians’ residing in an
area under Israeli control” (Hajjar 2005: 2). Despite the establishment of a
Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994, Palestinians remain formally occupied
and stateless. The 1995 Oslo Accord divided the West Bank into three types
of area. Areas A and B were officially handed over to the Palestinian
Authority’s control: these form an archipelago of 165 disconnected “islands”
throughout the West Bank (Lambert 2013; Solombrino 2017). The remaining
part of West Bank was designated as Area C, where Israel retains full control
over security and civil affairs, including planning, building, infrastructure
and development. The impact of this Israeli policy extends beyond Area C, to
affect the hundreds of Palestinian communities located entirely or partially
in the other areas. Furthermore, this configuration ensures that military
forces have a widespread presence and an all-pervading control over
Palestinian lives.
   In this geographic and colonial context, the primary purpose of the
military court system is to persecute Palestinians who are arrested by the
Israeli military and charged with security violations (as defined by Israel)
and other crimes. As Hajjar explains:
     The military and emergency laws enforced through the military courts criminalise
     Palestinian violence, as well as a wide array of other types of activities,
     including certain forms of political and cultural expression, association,
     movement, and nonviolent protest – anything deemed to threaten Israeli
     security or to adversely affect the maintenance of order and control of
     territories. The scope of these laws is expansive, penetrating virtually all
     aspects of Palestinian life (2005: 3).


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146                                                                           SARA RAWASH


   Since the Israeli occupation in 1967, over 800,000 Palestinians have been
arrested by Israel and approximately 15,000 of them are women. Presently
there are 4,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, almost 40 of whom are
women. These statistics are indicative of the persistence of an Israeli policy
of mass imprisonment that is extremely high by any standard.
   According to Israeli military law, detainees may be interrogated for 180
days, and for the first 90 days lawyer visits are denied. This long and painful
time implies the construction of strategies and models of relationships that
enable us to understand moral worlds which are, however, locally situated.
   In her work, Lena Meari (2011) pursues the idea that the interrogation-
encounter can be read as a liminal stage. As she observes, the interrogation
“signifies a colonial rite of passage that encompasses direct confrontation
between ideologies, beliefs, value systems and modes of being of the
Palestinian and the Israeli interrogators within non-symmetric conditions
that resemble and transform the colonial conditions themselves” (Meari
2011: 22). In these terms, she explains how the interrogation-encounter
represents the entire colonial occupation. Referring to the interrogation
stage as a “liminal” stage means that it can be read as a colonial rite where
the condition of the subject and its being in relation with society is
reassembled and transformed8. Liminality resides in a middle phase where
the absence of a structure makes the development of new social realities
possible. Furthermore, it condenses the past, present and future of every
Palestinian who has been arrested, subjugated and displaced. The interrogation
practices constitute the experience of every prisoner, transcending spatiality
and temporality and revealing the representation of occupation.
   As Aisha evokes:
      I remember the pain. It seemed like it came out from the belly of the earth and
      would come through my body like a twister reaching up to the sky. As if all the
      injustices of human history perpetrated by humans against humans were
      gathering up that night inside them and they would pour them out on me
      (Khoury 2004).

   Fanon’s disruptive and dense first publication Black Skin, White Masks (2008)
also helps us to discern the singular features of the colonial encounter. Although
Fanon’s reflection is strictly directed at questions of Blackness and
Whiteness, it is also nevertheless crucial reading for understanding the
multiple levels of colonial subjugation and the terms of its overcoming. The

8. As Thomassen (2015) argues, liminality “is a concept with which to think, and it points
towards a certain kind of interpretative analysis of events and experiences”. In liminality
the distinction between structure and agency fails and a new structuration takes place. For
the context see Peteet 1994.


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NOT EVEN A WORD                                                                              147


pivotal issue of recognition is highly relevant to delineating the conflictual
relationship between coloniser and colonised. Following these analyses, in
the next pages I will consider the interrogation arena as a metaphor for the
colonial encounter, where practices of subjugation and strategies of resistance
are mutually constituted in a struggle for recognition.

The burden of words
   As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, language is a field where
the investigator deploys strategies to permeate and subjugate prisoners’ sense
of reality. Language is where the struggle for recognition unfolds and
becomes urgent and imminent.
   In his work Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, Michel de Certeau (1986)
dedicates a section to the concept of “nomination of the other” that can be
used to analyse the linguistic process that occur between jailer and prisoner
in the context of interrogation. De Certeau analyses the Shreberian expletive
Luder, “to be rotten”, as a term that connects the individual wounds with the
decay of the symbolic body. The offence – from which the author starts to
propose his reflections on the torture experience – is a nomination process:
it does not concern the content of the word, but the word itself. “The name
performs”, he says.
   Following this approach, the main interest is not in analysing the
interrogation discourse as the result of power relations: the meaning of a
certain behaviour is hidden in the words pronounced inside the filthy cells of the
investigation centres. In the interrogation encounter, the distance between
jailers and prisoners, torturer and tortured, is not just a symbolic or an
ideological distance; it is material and effective: one speaks Hebrew, the
other Arabic. During the interrogations the military speak Arabic, and this
enforces the will and the act of appropriation of meanings. Furthermore,
their knowledge of Arabic is meticulous and profound enough to engage with
the historical, social and cultural system of Palestinians.
      He said: “You are Fatima? Ana ibn al hijja w talla’ w thanāya mata hada al
      hamāma t’arfwni” [I’m Hijja’s son and I can discover everything, even little things.
      When I put on my turban you will recognise me]’. This is Al Hajjaj, an Iraqi
      poet9. The meaning of this expression is “I cut heads”. This is the meaning (Nablus,
      11 October 2016).



9. Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (661–714) was an important General of the army in the service of the
Caliphate in the first Omayyad period. He was sent by Omayyad to pacify Iraq where, after
surviving an assassination attempt, he pronounced the above-mentioned phrase. He is re-
membered as a brilliant strategist and administrator, but at the same time he is sadly
notorious for the brutality he was able to enact.

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148                                                                              SARA RAWASH


   Poems and proverbs that are typical of the Arabic expressive tradition are
used to undermine prisoners. Good evidence of this is that the investigators
often demand to be called by fake Arabic names: “Abu Nihad”, “Shawki” …
an inverted process of nomination that has the purpose of overturning the
belief system of the interrogated.
   Another frequent example that is reported in many interviews concerns a
typical expression: “alf ‘ain tibki wala ‘ain immi tibki” (thousands of eyes are
crying except my mother’s eyes). The emotional involvement of detainees
becomes a way into provoke and induce them to surrender in the name of
the family affection. As Samia confessed, talking about the moment in which
she was arrested with her brother: “We sent a message to each other. I’m not
your sister and you’re not my brother. Because emotions and family
affections can weaken us while we’re at the investigative centre” (Nablus, 16
December 2016).
   These recollections show the intention of exposing the prisoner, who is
confronted with the pervasiveness of his language held by the enemy. The
power of reaching every aspect of prisoners’ existence is clearly described in
this passage from an interview with Samia:
      What I want to say is that the investigators who work with female prisoners are
      specialists. They are doctors, professors of psychology that know how to behave
      with women. “We’re specialised with women… we’re specialised with women of
      this or that party…”. This is the pressure that they exert on us. From the point
      of view of our society (Nablus, 16 November 2016).

   This is what specialists do: insinuating into taboos – norms, interdictions,
customs – to induce women to embody the offence into their own social and
cultural context. Luder does not mean just being a slut before the
interrogators but applies to all those the woman will meet in her social circle
after incarceration. The prisoners’ gender unequivocally produces a system
of a specific language that can threaten their individual integrity, as women.
It is right in this space that the will of subjugating the other gives rise to a
body “remade” for and by the name (De Certeau 1986). The power of
language, embodied by nomination processes, also feeds on physical
harassments that aim to provoke a sort of depersonalisation. All the women,
as they thought over the interrogation moments, tried gradually to find the
right words to describe them. It is not just the humiliation. It is the sleep
deprivation, the isolation cell loneliness and so on:
      [The investigator] used impolite and offensive words. After asking some
      questions he left me shackled to the chair for five, six, eight hours. I spent two
      days and two nights there (Khawla, Nablus, 29 September 2019).



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NOT EVEN A WORD                                                                        149


  And:
     [T]he cell is dirty, and you can’t change your clothes. You’re supposed to wash
     yourself, to change your clothes like a normal human being even if you are in
     jail (Samia, Nablus, 16 November 2016).

   Luder is supported by an image that makes the woman into an almost
unrecognisable subject: dirty, uncombed, filthy. A rotten body.
   It is significant here to think back to Beneduce’s (2014) suggestion, when
he affirmed the importance, for anthropology, of not dealing only with
cultures and imaginaries, but rather, primarily with bodies, whose condition
and destiny “are made” by cultures of violence that undermine their right to
exist. In these cases of extreme pain and daily violence, the distinction
between bodies and languages, between physical and psychic dispossession
becomes gradually more nuanced and imperceptible.

The act of language
   The interactions that arise during the interrogation have specific aims: to
confess or not to confess.
   De Certeau, linking this unwieldy law of language to the extreme process
of torture, affirms that “the goal of torture, in effect, is to produce
acceptance of a state discourse, through the ‘confession’ of putrescence.
What the torturer in the end wants to extort from the victim he tortures is to
reduce him to being no more than that, rottenness” (De Certeau 1986: 41).
   The issue of “confession” needs a first analysis on its linguistic use.
Indeed, in Arabic, the term i’tiraf has a double meaning: i’tiraf ila, “to
confess to”, and i’tiraf bi, “to recognise the other” (Meari 2011). The act of
confessing, of admitting, does not just mean the surrender to the enemy. In
a wider sense, it refers to the recognition of the other and of oneself in what
s/he says, in other terms, to believe in her/his words. This belief, properly
the trust in the interrogator’s words, starts from an induced destruction of
the self, from an unmade and unspeakable body, to achieve a new attribution
of meaning, a body re-made by the name given by the other.
   The relational process that could occur is i’tiraf: to confess and to
recognise the other, since there is not an effective recognition of oneself. On
the other side, not to confess becomes an embodiment of a socially
constructed meaning that could be analysed as sumud, steadfastness.
   In many interviews, the act of resistance to the interrogation, the strength
to not succumb to the tortures, is described with this word, sumud. Khawla
said:


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150                                                                                    SARA RAWASH


      The strength emerges from inside, from here. This is the beginning of women’s
      struggle. When they took me and carried me to the office, when they offended
      me, when they insulted me, when they kicked me like an animal. There, there
      was sumud (Nablus, 29 September 2016).

   In these terms, in the contest of occupied Palestine, sumud “encompasses
a broad range of tactics and actions directed at maintaining a Palestinian
presence on the land” (Ryan 2015: 300). From a wider perspective, it
signifies the strong determination to resist the occupation and the
oppression and has been developed as a political strategy as a part of the
anti-colonial struggle. It is not a definable practice and it has come to embody
“a whole range of significations, sensibilities, affections, attachments and
aspirations” (Meari 2014: 547). In the interrogation, it refers to the practice of
not confessing and not recognising the other but recognising oneself as a
part of a struggle. When Khawla says “I thought about […] all the fighters in
Lebanon, in Palestine and Syria, and I thought that this bag had been put
over the heads of all resistance fighters”, she recognises herself as a part of
the Palestinian struggle. That point becomes the point of juncture between
the past and the present taken in their contemporary time. It might be said
that sumud “blasts the continuum of history” and re-signifies the interrogation
space/time. Present is perceived in its articulation with the past and with
other past experiences as they are: just a “now” of confrontation.

Silence as a moral practice
   The pervasive strength of the torturer stands in contrast to a form of
language that can be inscribed in sumud: silence. Indeed, silence can be read
as the result of symbolic meanings transmitted in a “confrontation
culture”10.
   “Wala qlmi” meaning “not even one word”; this was a frequently en-
countered phrase, repeated in almost all the interviews. It is a conscious and
structured strategy, as Samia told me:
      When, the day after [my arrest], I’d been taken to the investigative centre they
      asked my name, and my brother’s name. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t admit
      anything. […] I paid no attention to them, and I entertained myself removing
      nail polish … The interrogation period was miserable, but I took the decision
      not to talk, not to say anything. It’s in my political culture and is very important for
      me. […] This is me. This is what I believe in. So, I had to be strong (Nablus, 16
      November 2016).


10. The later mentioned text: The Philosophy of Confrontation Behind Bars could be
considered as part of this confrontation culture, i.e., ideologies, beliefs, value systems and
modes of action that are produced in the interrogation stage.


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NOT EVEN A WORD                                                                       151


   For this reason, silence should not be analysed through hegemonic psycho-
analytical categories as just the result of a traumatic experience, where
words no longer hold any value. It is, rather, the intentional choice of
answering to the theft of meanings conducted by investigators. Silence
expresses the intention to destroy the recognition expected by the torturer
through other semantic methods. The eventuality of the “end of the world”
(De Martino 2002) the crushing of an individual story, triggers the process of
construction of a collective history of incarceration. In the empty space of
silence, we can recognise the echo of a moral strategy that lays down the
basis for the building of community and identity. As Samia said “It is in my
political culture”, “it’s what I believe in”.
   Silence, in this context, can be read as what Fassin (2011) considers
“moral economy”. According to his analysis, the main reason to promote the
concept of moral economy is to reintroduce history and politics. In these
terms, that “production and circulation of values, norms and affect” acquires
sense through its historicization, characterising a specific historical context
and the subjects that are involved (Fassin 2011: 486).
   The relevance of Fassin’s analysis is strictly linked with the universalisation
of the discourses of trauma and of humanitarianism. Moreover, Nicola
Perugini and Neve Gordon (2015) have cogently problematised the
limitations of these narratives and politics, arguing that the limit of human
rights lies with the lack of structural critique and complaint against the
structural basis of domination and the abuses that it generates. So, the
cultural translation of moral issues and reformulated values transforms the
way in which they are produced and performed. It is important to focus on
both the global and the micro-level of moral economic processes to reveal the
dialectical implications. They are profoundly entangled within larger social,
historical and political issues. Thus, the de-construction of this dynamic
concept allows social values to emerge as structured and shared by a process
of awareness and historicization. It could also reveal the implications of
multiple interactions and tension between the subjects.
   Remembering “the resistance, the fighters in Lebanon, Palestine and
Syria”, is a micro-local and contextualised reference that highlights the
conclusive discourse of De Certeau, who affirms:
     Accounts by torture victims indicate the stage of breakdown at which their
     resistance intervenes. They “eld up”, they say, by maintaining (perhaps we
     should even say “enduring”) the memory of comrades who, for their own part,
     were not “rotten”; by keeping in mind the struggle in which they were engaged,
     a struggle which survived their own “degradation” intact […] (De Certeau 1986:
     43).


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152                                                                         SARA RAWASH


   Resistance becomes a claim to existence, to recognition of the subject in
an unmade body. To insert themselves into the interstices of the “institution
of rot”, means to recognise themselves, to see their own reflection in all
prisoners’ image. The inexpressibility of pain and humiliation becomes the
stubborn statement of refusal to speak, to “not say even one word”.

Politics of silence
   Attempting to listen to the multiple implications of silence could reveal
more about the society or the community. The voices and the testimonies I
collected are part of a wider framework of displaced, dispossessed and
occupied lives that have been, and still are, silenced. In order to have a
deeper insight into the multiple implications of silence, it is quite pivotal to
recognise that silence shifts; it can be a power “acted on” or can emerge as
“acted by” the subjects. This swing of power discloses the strategies by
which Palestinians strengthen identity and the sense of community.
   On one hand, the first implication has been studied by many authors.
Rosemary Sayigh (2015), for example, examines the multiple forms in which
Palestinian suffering has been silenced. Ilan Pappe introduces the term
“memoricide” to refer to the acts that have led to the proclamation of the
State of Israel (2007). The Nakba is not recognised as a historical fact, as
being an event that actually happened; more importantly it is not recognised
as a crime that should be faced politically and morally.
      The tale Israeli historiography had concocted speaks of a massive “voluntary
      transfer” of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had decided
      temporarily to leave their homes and villages so as to make way for the
      invading Arab armies bent on destroying the fledgling Jewish state (Pappe
      2007: 5).

   This ejection of historical trajectories gave rise to and drives the urgency
of relating individual memories of Palestinians to the events that
characterised the second part of the last century (Feldman 2008).
   The history and memories of Palestinian prisoners’ struggle has had a
central role to play in shaping the process that leads to the constitution of
autobiographical memory and its relationship to the wider class of a collective
one: the attempt to tame the present by shaping the past. An important
example is the text Falsafat al Muwajahah Wara al Qudban (The philosophy
of confrontation behind bars), written in 1982 by some political prisoners,
which deals with the question of what a Palestinian should do during the
interrogation process, based on prisoners’ own experience. Esmail Nashif
(2008), who has analysed the social implications of this book, recognises its
potential to create the basis for building both community and identity.

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NOT EVEN A WORD                                                                           153


   On the other hand the second implication, that of silence as a moral
practice, as a producer of meaning not only breaks with a common reading of
agency as linked to the verbal, but also encourages an increase in attention
paid to the unspoken and the unspeakable as they emerge in fieldwork and
in the research process too. What the anthropologist can access in terms of
information is structurally delimited by the existing reality of colonial
occupation11.
   Speech and silence should not be regarded as a dichotomic and static
entities, but rather as the effort trough which both parties seek a position
and recognition. In this case, the “recognising” of the interlocutor and the
awareness of what can be spoken or what the recorder bulky ears’ have to
circumvent, was perceived as an I’tiraf exercise, a methodology of confession
that recalls my previous analysis. Behind words there are acts and strategies,
there are “hidden transcripts”, that represent the “practices and claims of
their rule that cannot be openly avowed” (Scott 1990: xii).
   The memories I heard are thus inherently partial, constrained and
incomplete, as are the ethnographic truths (Clifford, Marcus 1986).
   For that reason, I consider them to be “fragments of memories”, as shreds
of life that come out. The challenge here arises with the identification of
history where there is not a diachronic linearity, where contradictions and
historical incongruities emerge. Salih’s work on the affective and bodily
narratives of Palestinian refugee women helped me to deal with these
memories “[…] As women remember and talk they produce a performative
effect that shifts the boundaries of the legitimate stories to tell” (Salih 2017:
757). In this sense, the crucial point is the meaning women gave birth to
through and by their experience, as fragments of stories, in an attempt to
connect them with each other.

Conclusion
   In these pages I have reconsidered and focused on the codes and tactics
that regulate relations – including the ethnographic ones – as well as on the
multiple forms in which these relations are expressed or left unspoken. The
interviews were conducted in Arabic. As a researcher, I “appropriated” their
mother language as well. For this reason, I consider that translation needs a


11. For example, the question of confession I referred to in the previous section does not
concern just those who keep silence, but also the ones that yield under torture. In this case
it is the prisoner that confesses who is bound to silence. The implications of this tricky and
presently unexplored question are not the main claim of this inquiry; however, I refer to
Bornstein 2001 or Kelly 2010. I also recommend the immersive film Omar directed by Hany
Abu-Assad (2013).

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154                                                                  SARA RAWASH


deeply attentive, cautious respect for that world of meanings that language
transmits. I highlighted the way in which subjectivities shape themselves in
the “liminality” of interrogation in an attempt to look at the relationship
between suffering languages and their social configurations.
   Referring to the colonial encounter condensed in the interrogation stage, I
looked back to Fanon’s analysis of decolonisation. He wrote: “Decolonization
is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact
owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the
colonial situation” (Fanon 1963: 2). From within the colonial constellation of
power, and specifically the colonised struggle against it, Fanon portrays the
mode of subjectivity, the agency that emerges throughout the anti-colonial
struggle.
   Khawla’s words that opened this paper, allowed me to explore the way in
which these women live, embody and narrate their struggle. Furthermore,
they underline the intimate relationship that exists between an individual
experience and a collective memory that can be historically and socially
situated. The act of veiling, of hiding and covering the prisoner’s head under
the bag, is, conversely, where the De Martinian concept of cultural
apocalypse could occur in his etymological meaning: “to reveal”, “to show
what is hidden”. Cultural apocalypse is constituted as a crisis, as the end of a
world that holds and at the same time it discloses a new beginning
(Clemente 2005). In this sense, the apocalypse’s image highlights all the
historical, political and social factors in which violence acquires meaning
through the idea of community. It creates an inextricable link between
individual and collective experience, where the past and the present
dialogue in a contemporary iteration. As I explained, the risk of an individual
breakdown becomes concrete and imminent during the interrogation. The
robbery of meanings implemented by the soldiers – who speak Arabic, the
prisoners’ mother tongue – the permeating use of language achieved
through focused offences and the shaming conditions of isolation cells,
contributes to construct offended, unrecognisable and “rotten” bodies. The
crisis gets closer exactly at this juncture and the possibility of the end of the
world triggers productive devices where the individual history links with
other similar experiences. There recognition can take place, the reconsidering
of oneself as a part of a group.
   At the same time, it is reductive to read the memories of suffering and the
stories of the dolorous interactions under traumatic categories only.
According to Beneduce’s (2010) remark, the more we speak about “trauma”,
the less visible history becomes and the victim is inevitably beaten back
towards the pain of being unable to build history and shared memory.


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NOT EVEN A WORD                                                                          155


Furthermore, the hegemonic languages of trauma run the risk of making
people believe that this is the only, or at least the most effective way, to
make their story heard in the international arena (Khalili 2007; Meari 2015).
   As Rauda affirmed during a passionate dialogue, they were not “entered
[in jail] to be victims or stuff like this… we were munadelat – fighters – not
victims!” (Nablus, 29 October 2016)12. Not recognising themselves as victims
is a product of the embodiment of cultural codes that pass along winding
paths of violence. This expression also evoked Abourahme’s work for me:
Nothing to Lose But our Tents (2018). Quoting the words of a Palestinian
refugee “We’re not refugees. We’re fugitives and nothing more”, the author
affirms that “the fugitive, here, is the figurative inversion of the refugee.
Both figures start with a constitutive movement, but where the refugee ends
in terminal limbo and the stasis of a camp, the fugitive keeps moving, and
moving with consequence’ (Abourahme 2018: 33). In that sense Rauda’s
words can be explained by a sense of action, of moving in a self (and socially)
constructed direction, rejecting a static definition and identification.
   Understanding the suffering languages and strategies that arise from
unbalanced power relations means capturing the deep sense of the words
and of the silences, rebuilding the winding paths of meaning, both individual
and collective, that are involved.
   In conclusion, I recollected De Martino’s lesson. He identified a powerful
antidote to the conceit of psychological categorisation through paying
attention to the historicity and the languages of suffering. I recognise in his
works the hard and precious effort to transcend pain with value, and to
reintegrate subjects into history. It is necessary to capture the way in which
those who live and suffer a “not decided” history can think of themselves
and the surrounding world. Therefore, the aim of this paper has been to
delineate figures of crisis and redemption, subjects in which I discerned a
thrust to “get out of the night” and to think beyond the category of victims,
offended by and removed by history.




12. This argument is interesting for the reversal relation that could emerge looking at works
that analyse the processes of the controversial term “victim”, both as a status produced by
domination and as an identification – or not – with the term acted by their own “victims”.
See Taliani 2011.

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156                                                                       SARA RAWASH



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NOT EVEN A WORD                                                                     157


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                                           2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 139-159




 Sara RAWASH holds a II-level Degree in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology from
 University of Turin. She has carried out an ethnographic research in West Bank
 between August and December 2016, studying the polysemous implications of
 prison on female former prisoners lives. Her unpublished MA is titled Come rose in
 terra di sale. Etnografia intorno all’esperienza carceraria di ex prigioniere politiche
 palestinesi. Currently she works as a high school teacher.
 sara.rawash@edu.unito.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Sara Rawash
Not even a word: Politics of speech and silence in Palestinian memories
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 139-159.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4084
