‘All the Beautiful Things’: Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian Childhood

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which Palestinian children variously perform and transform the discourse of trauma and the aesthetic of suffering that have come to dominate representations of Palestinian childhood and the Palestinian struggle in general. It is argued that everyday beauty in the lives of Palestinian refugee children, as found in mundane spaces and enacted through interpersonal relationships, constitutes an aesthetic disruption to the dominant representation of trauma as put forward by international humanitarian aid organisations and development agencies. Far from being restricted to the immediacy of everyday spaces and interactions, however, everyday beauty is located within wider national and religious geographical imaginaries, and likewise forms the basis of critiques of social and political injustice, and demands for a more just and equitable future. It is argued that children enact an everyday Islamic ethic of beauty as part of a wider political demand for life itself.

Acknowledgements

I am very greatful to the young people who agree to be part of this research. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the community centres, NGOs and other organizations that helped to facilitate this work, including Project Hope, the Disability Resource Center, the Happy Childhood Club, MyDigiStory, and many others. This research was made possible by the National Science Foundation – Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (NSF-DDRI) award for Geography and Spatial Sciences (GSS), as well as a Research Fellowship proved by the Palestinian American Research Center. Thanks finally to Anna Secor, Kirsi Pauliina Kallio, Jouni Hakli, Michael Kennedy, and the two anonymous reviewers who reviewed this article for their valuable feedback. Any mistakes or shortcomings are of course my own.

Notes

Ahmed and Stacey (2001) and Thompson (2009) argue that the politics of trauma risks creating communities immobilised by the inertia of injury and mired in a sentimentalist politics of mourning. However, Till (2012) and Pratt (2012), in contrast, see the transformative potential for trauma as an emotional resource that can mobilise communities to commemorate past injustice, critique present social ills and bring together counter-publics of care. As Pratt (2012, p. xxx) puts it “Emotions are resources around which communities can organize, to make claims in a public domain. Experiences of trauma and loss need not shrivel from political engagement; rather, they can provide deep – enduringly painful - reservoirs for political mobilizing”. Thus, the question here is not whether trauma is or is not politically useful or empowering, but rather, what kinds of political subjectivities are mobilised by the particular aesthetics of trauma used in humanitarian discourse vis-à-vis Palestine.

To draw a comparison to Lefebvre's spatial triad, we might consider this perceptual space to be akin to Lefebvre's representational (or lived) space, that is, the space which is “lived through its associated images and symbols”, a “dominated—and hence passively experienced” space, and yet the “space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39). Here we can imagine Rancière's aesthetics as providing the means for such imaginational re-appropriation, a disruption of everyday spatial practice and a contestation to the dominant discursive (conceptual, to use Lefebvre's term) construction of ethical space.

The children who participated in this study are the descendants of the original refugees who fled historic Palestine in 1948. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the organisation responsible for the wellbeing of Palestinian refugees, defines a Palestinian refugee as anyone whose normal place of residence in 1948 was Palestine and left their homes as a result of the fighting, or a descendant from the male line of any original refugee. As officially registered refugees with UNRWA, and as children growing up in Balata Refugee Camp, these children are refugees both in legal status and as part of their cultural identity.

Children use the formal Arabic word for beauty, jameel, in discussing the family, religion and historic Palestine, while Hilo/Hilwa, literally meaning sweet but implying nice or pretty, is used more casually in talking about people, places and situations. The word betjanin is used emphatically to describe something as amazing or gorgeous. Coming from the root j-n-n meaning hidden, as in jinni (embryo), jinn (genie), jennah (paradise), and majnoon (mad), betjanin literally means to hide reason, that is, to make crazy—a term expressing the notion of beauty as affect.

During early adolescence, girls and boys in the Middle East often experience a transformation in their spatial mobility. Boys become less welcome in female-dominated domestic spaces, whereas girls, previously able to play in the streets around the house, find their unaccompanied mobility restricted to private spaces of the family home and school (see Gregg, 2005). Many parents suggest that, while this restriction to girls' mobility is something found in the cities and villages of Palestine, it is more pronounced in Balata due to the already restricted amount of space and lack of privacy. Girls often describe feeling imprisoned by these restrictions, whereas boys often complain of having nowhere else to go but the streets. However, both boys and girls use a variety of tactics in using their spaces to their advantage, as I will discuss in a forthcoming paper.

Maintaining an elegantly decorated and impeccably cleaned home is a labour-intensive and time-consuming aspect of many women's lives in Nablus, with the relative tidiness of the homes of friends, family and neighbours being a common theme of everyday conversation. To urban-dwelling Palestinians, the refugee camps appear to be a place of perpetual chaos and messiness, such that maintaining a tidy home seems like an impossibly futile feat. However, as Abourahme puts it

the turn to beautification andimprovement of houses in many camps displays an awareness of the importance of interiority and nearness, as means of mediating both the uneasy senses of belonging and ‘home'as well as the continuing existential threat; this is borne out in Shu'fat camp where the most ornate and decorated houses are also those that stand closest to ‘the wall’ (Abourahme, 2011, p. 459).

In an interview with the mothers of this group, they expressed fear not just that thieves and kidnappers would invade their homes, but that the very bodies of their children would be violated by collaborators working with Israeli organ harvesters (see Scheper-Hughes, 2000, and Weir, 2009, on Israel and the global organ trade). However, this bodily anxiety was rejected in another interview with a group of mothers who said that not only is kidnapping unheard of in Balata, but when children get lost in the camp the neighbours will help find the child, or return the child home.

This notion of an Islamic aesthetic of public cleanliness runs counter to Winegar's (2011) class-based interpretation of the trash clean-ups in Cairo following the Egyptian revolution as being an expression of middle-class values of cleanliness.

For example, in Surat al-Hijr (The Rocky Tract) 15: 45–46 the Qur'an says: “Indeed, the righteous will be within gardens and springs, [having been told] ‘Enter it in peace, safe [and secure]’” and similarly Surat ad-Dukhan (The Smoke) 44: 51–52 says “Indeed the righteous will be in a secure place; with gardens and springs”.

This finding both confirms and extends Habashi's (2011) findings about the increasing importance of an Islamic religious identity to Palestinian children's political agency. Habashi (2011) finds that Palestinian children articulate a politics of transnational solidarity, Palestinian nationalism and resistance to global cultural hegemony in largely Islamic religious terms. While this research also found religion to be an important aspect of children's political agency, what is interesting here is how an Islamic religious imaginary infuses the practice of everyday life as well as hopes and desires articulated in terms other than the familiar language of political resistance.

I will be grappling with this issue in a forthcoming paper.

Indeed, raising the political stakes of this discussion on aesthetics is the role of art in portraying the ‘humanity’ of Arabs (simultaneously placing their humanity in doubt), as well as the use of beauty, culture and art as a ‘civilising’ tool in youth development projects (see Winegar, 2008, and 2009).