Pitcher, l. Divine Impatience Palestine

"The Divine Impatience": Ritual, Narrative, and Symbolization in the Practice of MartyrdomPalestineAuthor(s): Linda M. PitcherSource: Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 12, No. 1, The Embodiment ofViolence (Mar., 1998), pp. 8-30Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649475 .

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ARTICLES

LINDA M. PITCHER Medical Anthropology Program University of California, San Francisco-Berkeley

"The Divine Impatience": Ritual, Narrative, and Symbolization in the Practice of Martyrdom in Palestine

Violence is obscured by habits of thought, which predispose us to reject that which falls outside of our notion of "normal" human behavior. By dismissing as incomprehensible, or "pathologic," embodied practices that do not correspond to a "rationally ordered" everyday life, some anthropologists concerned with issues of violence forsake a fundamental responsibility to foster an understanding of phenomena that affronts, offends, or questions our own cultural norms and assumptions. Situations of violence, whether due to contextual or individual instability, by definition defy pregiven notions of "rationality" and "normal behavior." This article is about Palestinian martyrs, youths killed in confrontations with the Israeli military. It seeks to identify the cultural and psychological processes that make Palestinian martyrdom possible within the specific context of Israeli military occupation. It elaborates the ritual, narrative, and symbolic dimensions of a practice that exists within a Palestinian discourse of sacrifice and of national liberation. [Palestinian, martyrdom, embodiment, psychoanalysis, violence]

The shebab [Palestinian activist youth] began to throw stones. Then the shooting started. One boy was shot dead.... Maha's fiancee picked up the body and started a funeral procession to the cemetery. The soldiers called a curfew, but no one paid attention. They moved in on the procession. Maha told the shebab to flee and tried to slow the encroaching soldiers. She stopped to confront them. They backed her into a corer. She began fighting with them hand to hand. They said, "Stop resisting or we'll

Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12(1):8-30. Copyright ? 1998 American Anthropological Associa- tion.

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"THE DIVINE IMPATIENCE"

shoot." "Then shoot me," she said and made a break to escape them. She ran ten meters before they fired and Maha fell.

-Maha Hamdi, 19 years old, martyred December 11, 1987, as told by her brother, September 5, 1991, Nablus City, the West Bank

Listen: When you lose everything, your homeland, your freedom, your right to move freely, when the universities are closed and you can't go out at night.... What can you do? Believe me, it's a dignity problem. Even to die is better. Of course we love life, but to have dignity you have to be strong-sometimes stronger than life.

-Hassan Abu-Ahlem, student activist, July 29, 1991, the Gaza Strip

his article is about martyrs. It is about young people trapped in circumstances beyond their control. It examines a group of individuals who live on the

margins, for whom the context of life has become untenable, and who create for themselves "another scene" in the contemplation and endeavor of death. Through the ritual of shahada (martyrdom), these youth speak. They enact a

performance that enables a voice to escape the confines of military occupation. This article elaborates the intersection of ritual, narrative, and symbolization in the space of intentional death. It posits the dual face of the martyr, the shaheed, as the self of

becoming and the self of sacrifice.

The Martyr Stage

Navigating dark alleyways and remote corridors centuries old, Fahim guides me through the casbah of Nablus, the largest city on the West Bank. In a dry sew-

age underpass, a group of teenage boys sit nervously waiting. We approach them. With a dramatic and sweeping gesture Fahim announces, "These are the leaders of the intifada." ' Embarrassed, the six laugh. If not the leaders of Palestine's future, they do indeed embody its present. All six are "wanted" by the Israeli occupation's intelligence division, "Shinbet." All have warrants out for their arrest-two for or-

ganizing demonstrations, one for smuggling "subversive materials" (letters and books) into an Israeli prison, two for throwing stones, and the last for throwing a Molotov cocktail at an army jeep. As they recount their transgressions, none ap- pear to me to be "a guerrilla fighter." Thin and fragile, their stark appearance smacks more of horror than of heroism. They fear the interrogation, the humiliation, and the beating they say will certainly accompany "turning themselves in" to the occupation authorities. Living hidden amidst the ruins of the old city, not one has seen his family in six months or more. Ahmed, who has been imprisoned twice before, tells me,

The Shinbet controls everything here. They are our "government." They follow me because I have experience, ... experience they gave me by putting me in prison. I am "wanted" because I understand that this is occupation and I have a right to this land. And yet I feel freer inside prison than outside. Outside I am always looking behind me for soldiers. Outside we live under this horrible tension.

In prison we lose this tension because we are in control. We hold classes and daily activities. Some of our best youth are there. In prison we have dignity, integrity. We have control. [Nablus City, August 30, 1991]

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MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY

We speak a few moments longer, until the conversation abruptly stops. The subtle crackle of an approaching hand radio, like an explosion, brings a panic that sends all six fleeing in different directions. In seconds they have vanished. "Keep walking," Fahim whispers with controlled urgency. Moving mindlessly, I am stunned. Three heavily armed Israeli soldiers emerge from around the corer. They are laughing. I am sweating profusely. They smile as they pass me by.

There are 900,000 children living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, all raised by military occupation and by political struggle (Garbarino 1991). Their encounters with the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) range from the routine stress of school closures, curfews, travel restrictions, and identity card confiscations, to the acute trauma of beatings, deportations, demolition of homes, separation of families, even witness to death or injury of a parent or loved one. These events, combined with the over 1,600 military orders regulating the daily lives of Palestinians under occupation, have assailed the very definition of childhood in Palestinian society. To say that fear and vulnerability are experiences familiar to many Palestinian youth un- derstates the profound impact these emotions have in formulating the identity, the self-perception of these children as a collective whole. Their lives are shaped by the perceived threat of a powerful and ever-present "authority," the Israeli military, inherently uninterested in the security and well-being of their people. This sense of violent vulnerability evokes a compendium of emotional response, ranging from defiance to despair with shame, rage, and political resolve located prominently there between. It initiates a process of transformation that at best results in the mindful assertion of Palestinian ethnicity, and at worst facilitates the perpetuation of violence that consumes their world.

In the summer of 1991, I conducted fieldwork in the Occupied Territories on the effects of trauma on the identity of Palestinian youth. During the course of three months, I lived with four families2 and held over 60 formal interviews. Residing in refugee camps, suburbs of East Jerusalem, and a remote desert village, I was exposed to the everyday life of military occupation. Attending weddings, funerals, celebrations, and religious ceremonies, I began to understand how the occupation touches every aspect of Palestinian life.

Interviewing students and shebab (activists), artists and political prisoners, fellahiin (peasants), academics, and health professionals, I explored issues of anger and outrage, of helplessness and despair, and of strength, hope, and identity.3 Among the accounts I recorded were those of shahada, stories of "martyrdom." These were shared with me by families and friends of Palestinian youths killed in the intifada, and in conversations with individuals about violence, sacrifice, and dying under military occupation.

When I initially reported my findings on traumatic response (Pitcher 1992), I put these martyrs' stories aside as exceptional cases. It was not that I failed to recognize the significance of such accounts, nor that I lacked a desire to examine them in their intimate detail. Rather, it was the daunting task of revealing the complexity of such highly charged symbols as the bodies of martyrs and those who deliber- ately put themselves in harm's way, compounded by my sensitivity to a "first- world" prejudice toward viewing Palestinian activist youth as "irrational" and "un- tamed," that persuaded me to lock these tales away.

My own desire to explore these narratives unsettled me. Only an outsider could inquire into the quotidian experience of intentional death with a sense of

10




wonder. As Jean Genet noted, curiosity is a comfort afforded from "the rear" of the battleground and ivory towers farther afield (Genet 1992). And whereas a pen may render these acts of sacrifice "readable" as texts, no one at a distance can hear what the martyr whispers to himself on "the front." I did not wish to capture this voice. I felt compelled only to acknowledge that these accounts had moved me to question what pushes someone to stand before his or her own purposeful destruction. I thought about the martyr's thoughts. Was his journey to the frontline not a wonder- ing of sorts, a speculation responsive to the tensions of occupation spoken through the script of his body?

The legacies of these deaths, and of the pain of recounting them by those who knew al shuhadaa, leave me uncomfortable. The Arabic word shahada means "to bear witness," witness to that which life deems impossible in the Palestinian history of Israeli military occupation. Witnessing these stories, I entered into a relationship that bound me to an explicit responsibility. For five years4 I have not ful- filled my expressed commitment to convey the accounts of Palestinian shuhadaa and of those who live on.

Once this dossier is closed, harsh and bleak as it is, it might be wiser for persons of discourse such as we are ... to respect the seal this life affixed to itself and to keep silent. Yet ought we to leave without an echo, a speech whose resonance in us has lasted to this day and which in consequence generates words by virtue of the passage of time? We have not discharged our debt to these corpses. [Favret and Peter 1982:175]

Yet how is it possible to bear witness to a ritual that is marked and sealed in the same moment? There are only these stories of martyrdom, spoken by would-be martyrs and others, of those who became shuhadaa only after their deaths. In them, these martyrs are a living absence, a pain, a break in the narrative of self that re- turns in the memories of others. Describing Palestinian guerrillas killed in warfare on the border of Jordan and Israel, Jean Genet evoked this paradox:

[T]he death of a... fedayee made him all the more alive, made us see details about him we'd never noticed before, made him speak to us, answer us with new conviction in his voice. For a short time the life, the one life of the now dead fedayee took on a density it had never had before. [Genet 1992:82]

In an attempt to give forum to the broken narratives of shahada, I will present them as I encountered them, and as they were recounted to me, with all their ambiguity intact. How do we begin to interpret a ritual bound to an ineffable death, an expression that is tied to the past, and projected into the future, through the body of a subject who is no longer able to speak? How do we speak of a performance inevitably approached from "the outside," the space of the living (De- Certeau 1988)? My aim is to suggest an interior state of the martyr who is both subject and object, psychic and corporeal, an embodiment of alterity that "reason" conceals (1988:250). What I am hoping to reflect is a refractory image that touches the "real" without consuming it, that hints at something unfamiliar while respecting its unknowability.

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The Story of Faheem Nezam

Faheem Nezam was martyred March 17, 1989 at the age of 17. The story was told by his mother on August 10, 1991 at the Balatta Refugee Camp, Nablus City, the West Bank.

It was Tuesday. Many houses had been demolished that day because the shebab were throwing stones at army jeeps. At 3:00 A.M. the Jesh [Israeli Army] called curfew and sealed off all of Nablus. My son had been sleeping, but was awakened by the loudspeakers. He wanted to be with the other shebab, he needed to be with them, so he went out into the night after curfew.

They were together in the old city when "a collaborator" [a Palestinian infor- mant] spotted them and told the soldiers where they were hiding. The Jesh came with their machine guns ready. They were looking for the boys involved in the earlier actions of the day-which was not my Faheem. As the soldiers approached them, Faheem didn't know where to run. He tried to escape up some stairs to the roof of an old house in the casbah; that's when Captain Abu-Daoud saw him and fired. Faheem was wounded but kept climbing. He made it to the roof. He turned to face his home and said, "Tonight, I will be martyred."

The soldiers came running because they thought Faheem was someone else. They shot him many times, in the neck, in the chest, in the stomach, in the kidneys. He fell from the roof. When they went to retrieve his body, they discovered that he was the wrong person. My Faheem was still breathing. They tried to massage his heart, but this only aggravated his wounds. A Red Crescent ambulance came and took him to the hospital. There he died.

When my sister told me that my son had been martyred, I started wailing. My husband was shouting and the children were crying. The soldiers outside came to investigate the noise. We refused to let them in, but they broke in anyway. They told my husband and I that we must come with them to see our son and buy a permit to bury the body.

When we got to the station, the soldiers told me not to shout or scream when I saw the body. They opened the door and there was Faheem, lying naked on the floor. He was full of bullet holes. They had stolen everything, even the watch we had given him. They told my husband and I to bury him right away, before the sun came up, without a funeral, only the two of us.

Before we put him into the ground, my husband saluted his son and cried. I kissed Faheem and told him, "You are the best soil of Palestine." Afterwards, I let out a zagrout [celebratory trill], so that all would know my son was a martyr. You know, my son ... he was not just a boy; my son was more than a man.

The Body Inscribed

The Palestinian uprising, the intifada, entered its eleventh year on December 8, 1996. Despite the current political climate of Palestinian/Israeli negotiations over territorial "autonomy," a majority of the Occupied Territories remains firmly under Israeli military command. For many Palestinians, the intifada continues to this day. In its first thousand days, one thousand Palestinian men, women, and children lost their lives; 100,000 people were injured (Institute for Strategic Studies 1991). In 1989 alone, the Israeli Defense Force arrested in excess of 25,000 Pales- tinians in connection with the uprising on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip (Amnesty International 1990). Civilian hostilities spill over the Green (Armistice) Line from Palestinian and Israeli quarters alike, while the Israeli military revises its

12




administrative practices from using plastic bullets to using live ammunition to maintain the occupation (Institute for Strategic Studies 1991). From December 1987 to March 1991, 52,107 unarmed residents of the Gaza Strip (population 700,000) were injured by gunfire, beatings, and tear gas. Since 1982, Israeli rules of military engagement have been extended to include Palestinian children, thereby lowering the permissible age of interrogation and imprisonment to 12 years of age. Ten thousand Palestinian youths have been shot by "nonlethal" ammunition, including rubber bullets, plastic bullets, stones, and tear gas (Institute for

Strategic Studies 1991). Since the onset of the intifada, in excess of 240 children under 16 years of age have been killed by the Israeli Defense Force (Usher 1991).

The Palestinian body is inscribed by conflict. As it struggles to speak, it is written on by others: the intifada, the occupation, its inheritance, the promise of its legacy.

You know, when I see that [the Israelis] are using experimental tactics, like breaking bones at the joints to permanently disable, or using new bullets, I feel as though they are using us as laboratory animals. No one is immune. No age, no sex, no one. [Dr. Ahmed Yazigi, July 29, 1991, the Gaza Strip]

A detailed explanation of the purpose and effects of ammunition used by Israeli soldiers elucidates the extent to which even the interior of the body cannot escape the superordinate confinement of military occupation. Dr. Ahmed Yazigi, former director of General Surgery at Gaza Governmental Hospital, provided the follow- ing description:

In my position as supervisor of General Surgery, I received about 70 percent of Gaza's intifada injured in the first year. During those first few months, most of the injured arrived with bullet wounds. There are several types of bullets used by the Israeli military, each intended to inflict a different type of wound.

A dum-dum bullet is made up of a group of iron needles placed inside the bullet's shell. Upon impact with the body, the bullet explodes, spreading iron fibers throughout the immediately surrounding flesh. This inflicts the maximum damage possible. A high velocity impact reflects the use of dum-dum bullets.

Then you have the modified dum-dum bullet. Instead of putting needles or foreign metals inside this bullet, they make the casing itself-the high velocity body of the bullet-so explosive that it spreads large chunks of shrapnel throughout the body. These are more lethal than the original dum-dum.

They're also using a new bullet now. They call it a plastic one but it is not plastic because it contains only 15 percent plastic material. They put zinc and other types of metals inside a plastic casing. The difference is that it inflicts a mono-injury rather than a multiple one. There is no shrapnel inside.

Rubber bullets. My children like to take these from my coat pocket when I come home from surgery. A rubber bullet is a casing of rubber surrounding a piece of heavy metal inside. They use these to disperse crowds from a close proximity. They are often lethal, like regular bullets. They say that they are not supposed to penetrate the skin, but I have X rays of them penetrating the chest, the skull, even the heart, fatally.

Under military occupation, the body is the locus of displacement (Feldman 1991). Beatings, bullet wounds, harassment, and interrogation violate the intimacy of the body, yet are representative of a larger, collective, and systemic displacement: the displacement of Palestinian refugees evicted from their homes now in-

13




side Israel, the displacement of an entire population denied the authenticity of a homeland. "In a political culture, the self that narrates speaks from a position of having been narrated and edited by others-by political institutions, by concepts of historical causality, and possibly by violence" (Feldman 1991:13).

The Palestinian body is a collectivized body that is encoded with social meaning. It is granted Palestinian privilege in the political sphere, a domain that allows individual expression where expressive options are limited. Under the restrictions of occupation, educational opportunities and vocational ambition are luxuries that Israeli military control does not allow. Such individualistic attempts at self-deter- mination are futile under present circumstances. Components of individual identity are necessarily secondary to the social exigency of survival and resistance under occupation. Identifying with the national struggle serves two functions for Palestinian youths: it staves off danger, and it facilitates solidarity. Prioritizing the political instrumentality of the body accentuates a Palestinian awareness of the coercive tensions of living under occupation. It fosters a vigilance that makes peril- ous encounters with soldiers and potential clashes recognizable and meaningful, if unavoidable.

The exalted symbol of the shebab (politically active youth) is an affirmation of the collective Palestinian body. Depicted in art, literature, and music as a youth wrapped in black and white-checked headscarfs, the shebab embodies activism, defiance, and courage. These "fighters" are as visible on the ground as in the folk- lore of the people. One readily witnesses these masked youth confronting soldiers, demonstrating in the streets, spray-painting political slogans, or distributing leaf- lets published by the "Unified Leadership." Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj explains,

When you are a teenager, you need a hero. And when the father stops being a hero, removed from the home by soldiers or deposed of his public status, somebody else must replace him-the masked people, the activists in the intifada. These are the leaders, the heroes to follow. And of course you cannot be a leader without a history of confrontations with the military: how many times you have been beaten, how many times you have been arrested, how many times you have been shot, and how you persist in doing it. [August 22, 1991, the Gaza Strip]

The status of political activity conferred by peers has affirmed the collective identity of Palestinian youth and facilitates an expressive outlet for their anger. Politi- cizing the bodies of Palestinian activist youth infuses them with a sense of purposefulness within the pernicious domain of occupation.

But the social inscription of military occupation and political resistance upon the bodies of Palestinian youth carries a dual objectivity. While it seeks to control and order the body by harnessing it to the "collective will," it simultaneously launches the "self," by virtue of an imposed absence, into the throes of a subjective imperative. The external forces that shape the collectivized subject also initiate an internal quandary concerning subjective experience, individual circumstance, and personal history: how does the self speak amidst the roar of revolutionary politics? Bodily inscription thus serves both a socially cohesive and a personally individuat- ing function. Social cohesion aims to politicize the body in an expression of cultural resistance. An introspective questioning initiates the formulation of an individual system of meaning: the creation of the self. Within the tensions of this

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duality, politically active youths, including those who would be martyrs, are ani- mated.

"Breakfast"-Sawahara Village, July 14, 1991

Nida and Wisam are awake by 6:00 A.M to prepare a breakfast of leban [yogurt], khubuz [flat bread], and jibna [white cheese] with zatar [wild thyme]. From the garden outside, Nida picks fresh mint for the morning tea. Their mother, Um- Abed, is up at the same time. She tunes the radio to a Palestinian news channel broadcast from Syria, and begins work on a needle-point pillow cover she is preparing for export.

The sonic booms of Israeli military jets practicing maneuvers over this desert village on the West Bank begin around 8:00 A.M. Until that time there is peace. The deafening blasts furiously shake the windows of my host-family's home 10 or 12 times per day. The intrusion elicits little response from those for whom this has become "normal" under the routine of military occupation.

The radio is left on all day, a vital connection to a world inaccessible by telephone. Curfews, road closures, travel restrictions-all are announced daily over the airwaves to an isolated yet ever-attentive audience. And then there is music, a mix of traditional folk song and nationalist hymns. "This is my favorite song. It's by Ahmed Kabour," Nida comments as she pours the zatar into a dish. She begins to sing, "Lena was a child making her future. She was shot, Lena fell, but her blood was still singing, .. . for Jerusalem, for Nablus ... Palestinians on the West Bank make your flesh a bridge so that others can return."

An announcement interrupts the scheduled program. Another youth has been beaten and arrested in confrontations with soldiers in Arab East Jerusalem. The boy is 18-year-old Tamir Nassif of Albireh village.

The clatter in the kitchen quiets. The girls search their memories for any acquaintance with the Nassif family. Wisam redirects the task at hand. She heads for the family library hidden behind the kitchen pantry. It is there because the last time soldiers entered their home they confiscated books outlawed by the occupation. She takes a volume down from the shelf, flips to the back and dutifully records the young man's name and village, as well as the time, place, and circumstance of his arrest. The pages of this log are filled with handwritten entries and newspaper clippings. Photographs from political magazines vividly depict the more gruesome aspects of occupation. She stops at a portrait of a young boy dated 9-12-88. "This is Mohammed Naim. We called him the 'Palestinian miracle.' He was shot with a dum-dum bullet that exploded his stomach. He lived for two more years and when he died, they honored him as a hero. It was a beautiful celebration."

After breakfast, the girls take me into their bedroom. "I want to show you something ... ," Nida confides. She shuts the door, closing her parents and little brother out. She pulls a notebook from under the mattress and hands it to me. In it I find poems of liberation, drawings of national struggle, pictures of flowers, of youth, of the land. One page reiterates the Palestine National Charter, another the lyrics to a song. "I want them to find this book after I am shaheeda (martyred)." Nida looks at her sister and says, "That will be the proudest day of my life."

De-limen-ating Subject Shapes

People in a liminal condition are without clear status, for their old position has been expunged and they have not yet been given a new one. They are "betwixt and between," neither fish nor fowl; they are suspended in social space without firm identity or role definition. [Murphy et al. 1988:237]

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The concept of "liminality" was first explored in anthropology by Arnold van Gennep. In his work The Rites of Passage, he describes three stages of "life crises" and other passage rites: separation, transition, and incorporation (van Gennep 1960). Through a series of ritual ceremonies-traditionally marking birth, the coming of age, marriage or death-individuals enter into these stages as one type of person and exit with an altered identity. During this transition, subjects are on the margins of identification. Victor Turner extended this analysis by identifying specific qualities in the experience of liminality: suspended conventional status, tumult, isolation, and transformation (Turner 1967). When the concept of liminality is applied to social conditions less structured than traditional rites of passage-physical impairment, illness, poverty-it raises compelling questions regarding the social place of people with ambiguous status such as "the disabled," "the sick," and "the poor." In the radically disjunctive "events" of neocolonialism and revolutionary politics, the nature of liminal transitions become paramount to cultural survival. In short, liminality marks a period of alteration, a process of becoming. From out of the uncertainty and disarray of occupation, the Palestinian subject emerges transformed.

Palestine presents a liminal context of the most challenging form. Military occupation creates a continuous state of crisis that inhibits social organization and subjective control. Where there is no unfettered space, no place for personal being, the occupation has succeeded in implementing what Michael Taussig calls "the strategic art of abnormalization" as an effective measure of social control (1990:219). Living under occupation offers no clear path to achieving what is perhaps most important in times of social upheaval and political crisis, a grounded sense of identity. But in the cultural flux of occupation, the possibility of transformation and the cultivation of a more situated identity remains.

Under occupation, critical events (e.g., arrests, beatings, collective punishment) confront the cultural norms and social standards that traditionally sketch the parameters of "identity" on both individual and collective levels. When one's internal and social continuity is challenged by a real or perceived life-threatening event, the relationship between individual and environment is severely disrupted, compelling the survivor to probe deeper into definitions of self and agency in an ef- fort to reclaim a sense of identity and control. A young Palestinian boy, taunted by nightmares of soldiers breaking into his home, throws stones at them in waking consciousness and feels relief. A Muslim girl defies the traditional segregation of public and private spheres to demonstrate in the streets against the occupation. These scenarios are not uncommon in the Palestinian experience. Embedded in these moments is the possibility of a situated "mindfulness," an emergent awareness that some components (social, cultural, psychological) of "being" exist without significant reason or practical utility, while others necessarily need to be em- phasized or altered to respond to the demands of survival. When the precariousness of a liminal context is experienced by an entire population, as under military occupation, its effects serve to transform conventional conceptions of social roles and cultural practices.

Now we are going through a phase in which a lot of determined values are being challenged. Many of our feelings, thoughts and roles are up for discussion. [Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj, August 22, 1991, the Gaza Strip]

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Occupation is a transitional period, one in which we are trying to recapture our identity. [Dr. Shafiq Masalha, August 12, 1991, Bir Zeit]

Despite the trials of occupation, these statements testify to something con- structive in facing adversity.

With all the difficulties, with all the suffering that goes on in Palestine, there is still something very positive, something powerful about life here. The occupation brings the inner you outside. The unspoken struggle here is to be yourself. It is to know yourself as a Palestinian. [Sa'eb Erikat, political science professor, August 6, 1991, East Jerusalem]

Liminal situations produce liminal bodies. In the Occupied Territories, they are the bodies of those that express the tensions and transitions of a culture in crisis. Liminal people are in the process of being reclassified; "they have died in their old status and are not yet reborn into a new one" (Murphy 1988:237). Under occupation, some individuals are more liminal than others. Because of the lethal risk involved in publicly expressing their outrage against the occupation, shebab bodies are pronouncedly more "liminal" than others. Activist youths consciously decide to forsake their historic role as children in Palestinian society (submissive to authority and deferential to the traditional leadership of their fathers) and accept the potential consequences of beatings, arrests, or imprisonment. For these individuals, participation in the intifada is the vehicle of transformation. It directs the trauma of occupation away from individual incapacity and internalized "pathology" and toward a collective and proactive affirmation of Palestinian identity.

The shebab are creating new symbols of resistance (the martyr [shaheed], the political activist [shabab], and the political prisoner) and new principles of Pales- tinian ethnicity (steadfastness, perseverance, and sacrifice). They embody a vision of Palestinian identity and agency more responsive to their current circumstance than the exclusive legacy of traditional familial and social structures. They are con- structing a distinctly subjective and indigenous subversion of the experience of occupation. They not only resist the coercive force of the Israeli military, but embrace the change necessary within their own cultural context to facilitate the formation of a Palestinian state. The shahada (martyrs) take this quest one step further. Death enters their vernacular as a noncompliant alternative to life under occupation. Their acts atone the failure of generations to cast off the chains of the occupier and clear a space for the next step forward (Fischer and Abedi 1990). They are youth at a threshold: sacrificing themselves to bring a nation closer to life (Murphy 1988).

Words around Martyrdom

In the face of violence and political oppression, Palestinian martyrs stand together with others across time. The Jews themselves were martyrs-remember the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Krystal Nacht, and Auschwitz. Becket, Bonhoeffer, the Iranian Baha'i, and Tibetan monks were martyrs to faith and religious practices. Depending upon how and when one interprets history, Irish revolutionaries, soldiers of Vietnam and of the Second World War, citizens of East Timor, Cambodia, Eritrea, and Kazakhstan, as well as children of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Sal- vador, gave their lives for a nation. Croatian women raped by Serbian militias might be considered martyrs. Certainly the man standing before the tank in Tianan-

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men Square was prepared to be martyred-ready to die for an ideal of freedom, of liberation, perhaps the vision of a new China. Martyrdom has touched all reaches of the globe. Why, then, do we continue to shroud its meaning with mystery? Why is martyrdom so frequently scorned by "more rational," less invested minds? Must we gaze upon al shuhadaa in dumbfounded silence? We have only to remember.

As in Christianity and Judaism, Islam grants martyrdom a hallowed place. The Qur'an states, "Consider not those slain on the path of God to be dead, nay, alive with God; they are cared for" (Sura 3.166). The Qu'ran goes on to elaborate, "And as to those who fight for the cause of God, God will not suffer their works to

perish. He will guide them and bring their hearts to peace and lead them into Para- dise which He has made known to them" (Sura 47.4-6). In the Hadith literature, one who dies in the performance of a meritorious act dies a shaheed and is seated nearest to God in heaven (Gibb and Kramer 1974:515-516). The contemporary conception of shuhadaa has undergone important extensions to accommodate the social and political peril modern Muslim communities face. Such is the case in Pal- estine, where traditional notions of martyrdom are suited to the affliction of Israeli

occupation. For Palestinians, the discourse of martyrdom has come to include children

killed in demonstrations and clashes with soldiers.

The concept of martyrdom in our society takes on a different meaning. Martyr in English means nothing more than a crazy lunatic. In Arabic, shaheed ("martyr") is the ultimate. It's a different concept than what Americans are used to thinking about. It is not "pathological" in our society. It is a matter of context. To become a shaheed is very honorable. From a psychological perspective, to reconcile the possibility of death in a situation such as ours is a release. Yes it is extraordinary, yes it is uncommon, but it can be understood as a healthy release. I have interviewed many young people who have considered dying for Palestine. For them, the ideal of the shaheed is not primarily an outgrowth of despair. [Dr. Ahmed Baker, director of The Jerusalem Family Counseling Center, August 30, 1991, Jerusalem]

I don't think someone puts himself in the place of the martyr just because he wants to be killed. I think most martyrs die in the course of committing some act of resistance against occupation. He does not expose himself to death recklessly. Generally speaking, the event of martyrdom is ascertained very well. Parents, friends, relatives accept it with tremendous sorrow and forbearance but also with great self-control and gratitude. This is important because here you have a situation where a person is fighting for the sake of the country, fighting for himself. We must respect this. [Dr. Haidar Abdul Sha'afi, president of the Gaza Red Crescent Society, July 29, 1991, the Gaza Strip]

As a youth who wants to become politically active, you are bound by competing feelings. You want to fight a soldier armed with a machine gun, but at the same time you realize that you are totally exposed and vulnerable to him. You are very fearful and you must come to terms with that. To deal with that is a very complex thing. First you have to deal with your fear of dying, to conquer death. You must glorify it as a necessary means to an end-Palestine. In these terms death is no longer something to be afraid of. Secondly, you must believe deeply in the notion of sacrifice. You must believe that your death will aid in the struggle of those who survive you and call more fighters to the field.

Of course, this transformation is not happening among all young people. But it

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is happening within groups of activists. Many of them make a conscious decision to die. And when they face that decision, they must also face its consequences-leaving people behind. They start acting very favorably towards family and friends because they want to be remembered in good terms; also, because their death will cause great pain. They want to leave something good of themselves so that others will not feel indifferent towards their memory. Particularly, we find that those who would be martyred go out of their way beforehand to reconcile personal conflicts or pay off old debts. If you inquire about these cases, you will find that many shaheed have done this months before they die. [Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, director of the Gaza Mental Health Care and Community Center, August 22, 1991, the Gaza Strip]

There is a tension in all of these accounts between the psyche of the shaheed and the object of his or her action, between the internal continuity of survival and the external demands of sacrifice, between life and death. These extremes, however, are not permanently polarized. Rather, they are equally magnetic, pulled together at the core of the martyr. The words that describe what motivates the shaheed reflect a duality in the performance of an act that is at once profoundly subjective and ultimately objectifying. The contemplation and enactment of martyrdom exists in a differently ordered realm of consciousness, one that centers the individual in his own free will, his own autonomy. Martyrdom creates a cognitive place more spacious than one bound by a strictly externalized notion of "reality." The martyr stage allows for the telling of an autobiographical "tale" that reshapes its material components. Here fact follows fiction; the narrative of the martyr leads with certainty while everyday "reality" lingers in ambiguity.

The story of the martyr is a tale of heroism and sacrifice. He is a figure who in death achieves that which is unattainable in life-a union between freedom and control, between the past and the future, between the individual and the collective. He is a figure who enacts a dream amidst a living nightmare. Treading the margins of life and death, he steps out of the confinement of occupation into a world less ordered: a place of great danger and of great potential.

For those too grounded in life to consider the risk of death, the martyr is but a player in a romantic tragedy that awakens in the living not only a sense of self and possibility but also the pain of loss and the pain of living. For the "actors" themselves, their death holds promise for both the nation and the individual in chains. The ritual space of martyrdom opens for them the "other scene" where the contemplation of "another life" (a memory of the past, a fantasy of the future) is possible, can be cultivated, and will grow. The martyr's story functions as a mirror stage, a reflection that establishes a relationship between the self and its reality that is referential to oneself. It is a subjective tale available only in a refractory image of occupation-a means of formulating a more permanent "I" in a climate that denies its existence.

The Story of Nasser Abu-Bakeer

Nasser Abu-Bakeer was martyred September 11, 1987, at the age of 24. His story was told by his mother September 5, 1991, at the Balatta Refugee Camp, the West Bank.

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My son was politically active from the very beginning of the intifada. You see, my father was martyred in the slaughter of 1948, so my son felt very committed to ridding us of this wretched occupation. He was PFLP [People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine] and had been "wanted" by the Shinbet for a long time.

One night, the Shinbet called my home and demanded that Nasser tum himself in. He refused. Instead, he went underground. He moved out of the house so the rest of us would not be in any danger, and went to live in the ruins of the old city with the other "wanted" shebab.

Then we got a second call from Shinbet. They say that by the second call the shebab has less than 6 months to live. By this time the "special units" have his photograph and know his history of political activity. At night, they go hunting for these "wanted shebab" with heat-sensing guns. The second time Shinbet called, they threatened me. They said, "Give us Nasser or else we will take your daughters!" I was very afraid and tried many times to communicate with Nasser. I had no idea where he was living. I sent messages with other shebab to find him and tell him what the Shinbet had said.

Nasser decided to surrender. He went to the authorities and turned himself in. They arrested him, interrogated him, beat him, but they refused his surrender. The Captain said, "I don't want you alive, I want you dead. This is not a hotel! You cannot stay here."

On the day Nasser died, there was a great escalation of activity in the camp. Children throughout the camp were throwing stones at all branches of the military: the foot patrol, the border police, the special units. The soldiers were running and shooting in all directions.

Nasser was also fighting. He was spotted by a patrol. An IDF soldier recognized him and said, "Let the others go. We have Nasser Abu-Bakeer." The whole patrol came chasing after Nasser. They shot him three or four times in the legs. Nasser fell. While he laid there bleeding, they interrogated him. They roped his legs and dragged him on his face to the first gate of Balatta Camp. From there, they took him to the civilian administration building in Nablus where they beat him and interrogated him for six hours. They shot him again. Then, at 12:30 A.M., they called Makassed hospital (an Arab hospital in East Jerusalem, two hours away). They said, "There is a dog here, come and take him away."

When my son arrived at the hospital, an employee recognized him and called our home right away to tell us that Nasser had been badly injured. When we got to the hospital Nasser was still conscious. The doctors told us that he had nine holes in his body and that the soldiers claimed that he had been caught in cross-fire. But there was much evidence of torture. Nasser had internal bleeding, not only from the gunshot wounds. His body was badly bruised, his wrists were purple. His skin was shredded from being dragged. The hospital staff said they were going to file an official report against the military. He lived nine more days in the hospital. When he died we honored him with a wedding ceremony, a beautiful marriage of our Nasser to the land of Palestine.

Positing an Interior Future

The wounds and scars that engrave the bodies of most political activists docu- ment their struggle against occupation and reaffirm their identity as Palestinians. But the martyr's case is distinct. His experience and perception of occupation fun- damentally alters the relationship of his body and self to the world. His interpretation of the ominous confinement of Israeli military control reaches beyond his physical being into the realm of existential meaning. Wrought by distressing

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events-the deportation of a sibling or the public humiliation of a parent, for exam- ple-the would-be martyr is confronted with an awesome awareness that life under military occupation has become untenable. "[T]he 'atmosphere of certain uncertainty' that surrounds the body certifies its existence and threatens its dismember- ment" (Bhabha 1994:45). This tension initiates within the would-be martyr the re- organization of a notion of self more firmly rooted in the psyche. His body thus becomes a vehicle, an expressive articulation of that psychic integrity, a self less vulnerable to the occupier. Long before his death, the martyr has yielded the imper- manence of his body to the struggle for an autonomous identity.

The cloak of martyrdom wraps slowly. Although occasionally draped in a sin- gle gesture, a moment of extreme peril (the shebab that defies the soldier's weapon, the "hero" who intervenes to save a loved one from harm), more frequently the contemplation of death is an intrapsychic process that gradually distances the self from the everyday. It is a period tied to a strange temporality guided by the speculation of "living" in an afterlife. Consciousness of the image of death invites an ex- change, an ecstatic relationship that transposes "what is" with "what could possibly be," positioning the more authentically felt "self" of the would-be martyr within an interior future.

It would be a mistake, however, to associate this reflexive state with delusion or pathology. For its purpose is to create order, to make sense of a disordered context. It attempts to conceive of a more autonomous subject, which speaks with "a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; ... a personality that realizes itself only in suicide" (Lacan 1977:6). The division and speculation of the would-be martyr's reoriented subjectivity reveals, in Bhabha's terms, "an utterly naked declivity" wherein an authentic upheaval can be born (Bhabha 1994:41-42). "[T]he state of emergency is ... always the state of emergence" (1994:41). Perhaps the impetus for this shift in consciousness centers on a need for security and stability where little exists, or con- ceivably between the passion to survive and the sense of having already been erased. Wherever the locus, this intrapsychic pressure compels the subject to posit the ideal of another locality, away from the untenable bind of an exclusively material "reality."

It is a creative contemplation, similar to a daydream that vacillates between conscious and unconscious perception in search of a situated identity. In Palestine, the identity imperative for those caught between external contingency and internal uncertainty pivots around death. For the martyr, it is only in the contemplation of death that the renegotiation of his position in the world becomes possible. It is a contemplation filled with meaning, where truth is made manifest in a somber pledge of sacrifice. This situated praxis, a combination of self-reflection and commitment to action, enables the would-be martyr to cross from the exclusive realm of perception into an existentially "real" world of being-a world he now experiences with a fuller sense of control and purpose.

In the contemplative encounter with death the martyr is able to see himself more clearly. The meditation offers a place to consider the meaning of what is "real" to the subject. Lacan identifies this process as that of the tuche, an encounter with the "real" behind a network of signifiers (the automaton) that delimit "reality" (Lacan 1973). The tuche, the real as encounter, may present itself in the form of a

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trauma-a beating or an unexpected clash with soldiers-that carries in it something unassimilable (1973). This speaks to the rupture, the initial alienation of self from a strictly experiential view of life. The unassimilable component, revisited again and again in the contemplation of death, is marked by a subjectifying famil- iarity that finally orients and orders the subject's sense of control. More simply, the would-be martyr comes to associate the experience of his own subjectivity with a contemplation of death in a manner that is self-constitutive; strengthening and re- affirming his sense of self until death is finally enacted. It is an encounter that lib- erates a part of the self imprisoned by reality; an association in the mind of the martyr that has both a text and subtext that reads, "Never will I be so free (so subjectively in control) as in the ultimate sacrifice for my country (in overcoming death)."

I have had clients who I've felt might some day be martyrs. They have no fear of death or punishment, and their confidence is extraordinary. [Dr. Shafiq Masalha, clinical psychologist, August 12, 1991, Ramallah]

The Symbolic Order

Have you ever thought to dress up as a pen, or as a zebra, and to go through the coffin of the universe alive? Or to take off your face? It is a question in the eyes of the quiet who follow disasters in despair.

A lady passed through him and knocked on the table. He followed her.

He wants to catch her to catch her hair. But she broke her shadow and put her hair on the ground.

She followed the poet and dressed as the moon. The Genie of history in her hands grew and her legs became very long.

Her hair grew longer and longer past the neck of every passenger trying to kill her.

And as this happened The poet still watched the lady from behind. At her hair and at her legs.

He stands in his place and then he goes.

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This is a very small piece, just a few lines, but it describes the situation here. The community feeling when you lose everything. What are you going to do? In it there is someone who is very concerned about the situation. And someone who is very careless. The lady is the land. The observer is the human, and he doesn't care. He just looks at her legs.

The poem has some jokes and some political standing. There is both humor and criticism. You see, it is very difficult to abandon poetry in the politics of our people. Maybe in other countries people can do this, but here it is impossible.

The life of Palestine is a beautiful lady. And the hero is coming to speak out, to free the lady and give her a crown of victory. Somewhere between the identity of these two individuals lies the identity of the Palestinian people. [Excerpts from an interview with Ms. Hanan Awad, a poet and writer, August 4, 1991, Jerusalem]

Poetry is an interpretive practice that bridges what Lacan calls "reality" and "the real." Tied to "reality," it speaks to what is collectively known and familiar; it is interreferential with a host of externalities among which the subject is situated. Anchored in "the real," poetry also articulates those symbols that signify the rela- tion between the subject and "reality." In this realm, according to Lacan, the symbolic formulates the determining order of the subject (Lacan 1977). The real functions to establish continuity in the symbolic order (1977). Under occupation, the juxtaposition of death with the precariousness of life provides one such thread that holds the symbolic order together. It is the symbolic feature most salient in the lives of would-be martyrs and is present in the art, literature, and music of "martyrdom." It is a trope that extends beyond the martyr, as the symbolic form of the martyr can be read as a metonym for the whole of Palestinian suffering. It is a symbol that is to varying degrees present in the consciousness of all Palestinians.

Loosely applying the notion of dialectics to the symbolic register of the martyr, the thesis presents a fragmentary image of the would-be martyr ensconced in contingency. The antithetical form signifies a negation, an acknowledgment of the subject through its threatened erasure under occupation. This negation marks the onset of "becoming." The martyr symbolically "overcomes" these two dialectic forms in a synthesis that takes him beyond fragmentation and erasure. Synthesis re- positions the martyr within the scope of eternity, solidifying the permanence of his being. When taken together, these three forms mark the process of the martyr's subjectification.

In Palestine, these forms are organized around themes of absence, sacrifice, and triumph. Colors, gender, the body, and land encode these themes, emphasizing their continuity across forms. Red symbolizes "heart," "body," and "blood," the passion of the Palestinian people, the strength of resistance. White signifies "hope," the promise of the future. Black is the night that blankets the "Palestinian condition," while green represents the land, the symbol of permanence uniting past, present, and future. These are the colors of the Palestinian flag, as described to me time and again. The body and the land are conflated across symbolic forms and artistic genres. Sometimes this occurs through association, as in the lyrics to a song by George Cormos entitled "Ana ismi Sha'b Filistini" (My name is the people of Palestine):

Palestine, I have no one but you. I am your name, I am your son, I am your people. I am worth nothing without you. My name is the people of Palestine. Today I die, today I fight, today I live. I have no other name but Palestine.

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Other times the confluence is material, a tangible embodiment of land as both male and female.

Sometimes I write about Palestine as a beautiful lady. I interchange woman with the feminine word for land, ard. Love is in the womb of Palestine. It gives new meaning to unity. The way to love is to fight for that lady, to bring the soil and the people together. It gives meaning to what is right in the end.

But Palestine, in my view, is also a man. We use also the Arabic watan, which is the masculine word for land. When I say "my homeland," I sometimes use the masculine. I construct a beautiful man. He is the hero. He is the land. [Hanan Awad, poet, August 10, 1991, Jerusalem]

Blood is another potent symbol that unites the Palestinian body to the land. Throughout the Occupied Territories there are poems and songs about blood that nourishes the land where a shaheed has fallen in clashes with soldiers. In the practice of burying a martyr, the blood-soaked clothing always remains on the body to fertilize the soil and symbolize his sacrifice. These codes mark the symbolic space of the martyr present in speech, poetry, song, and performance.

The first order of symbolic form, the thesis, reflects the circumstance of the symbolization, the context of the subject. Perhaps it is best understood as the field of the "imaginary world," the register of images, perceived or imagined, that com- prise the martyr's "reality." Walking down the streets of Kalandia Refugee Camp on August 27, 1991, I watched this order unfold as I bore witness to a hauntingly reconstructed world of play enacted in two scenes. First, I watched two young girls hunting around the gutters and garbage on a street where, I discovered later, there had been a confrontation between soldiers and youths the day before. When I approached them to see what they were looking for, they opened their hands and showed me their findings: bullets, both plastic and lead. They held them up to their shirts, dangling them there like a badges of honor. Symbols of children's heroism, they were soldiers' bullets that had missed their targets. Next I saw a group of boys playing "Soldiers and Shebab." Those playing soldiers carried sticks tied to real (though empty) rifle clips. Those playing "the heroes" were swathed in kufiyas, Palestinian headscarfs. The culmination of these "cat and mouse" games were mock clashes, played over and over again. One time, the game ended with the shebab luring the "soldiers" into a triumphant ambush. Another time, a boy was "shot" and whisked away by his fellow "guerrillas." A third encounter simply ended in a tumble of wrestle and play. More than charades, these games symbolize the "order" of these youths' collective "reality" and their subjective place within that reality. They reflect the macabre conflict that surrounds the youth of Palestine.

The foil to this symbolic form, the antithetical form, might be termed "the loss of subjectivity"-that which disorients in madness, which pains under occupation. In this form a split occurs in the symbolic order of the would-be martyr. Evoked by a traumatic event, a quiet "death wish" germinates. Amidst the political, cultural, economic, and agential demands that consume these individuals' world, the voice of the subject is muted. In the ritual process of the martyr, this voice finally speaks in a silent dialogue with death. The absence of "self' imposed by occupation burrows deep into the symbolic order of the martyr, assuming the distinctive features of sacrifice, memory, and erasure.

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Sacrifice is the acceptance of loss or destruction as a means to an end; the ful- fillment of an ideal. The call to sacrifice within a living subject whose psychic "wholeness" has already been subsumed by external contingency presents a re- demptive invitation. For the would-be martyr, it is an opportunity to gain subjective control of life through death, with the added promise of securing a legacy that will carry his memory (however objectified) into the future.

I was talking to one of my clients. He was 15 or 16. He said, "There will be many deaths before we can liberate Palestine. We cannot liberate a country without blood. And I am willing to make that sacrifice." Three weeks later he was dead, shot fighting in the intifada. Children all over know these stories and cherish them. This is how the meaning of sacrifice is passed down generation to generation. [Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj, psychiatrist, August 22, 1991, the Gaza Strip]

Sacrifice is an ideal shared by many who have come close to death. Interviewing a group of politically active youth at Bethlehem University, they proudly showed me their scars from bullet wounds and beatings as evidence of their commitment to the intifada. These indelible brands sketch the boundary each has pushed between life and death in the name of sacrifice.

"Loss of subjectivity" is further expressed in the exaltation of memory. Mem- ory is something that serves to bring to mind an event, person, object, or circumstance that has passed. The memory of a homeland, the memory of shuhadaa who have fallen, the memory of a time when the "self' was freer before Israeli occupation: these legacies interweave to gauze the space of an absence. For those too young to remember what it was like before such things became memories, the legacy is more a phantom, an image passed down through the memories of their parents and friends like a shadow that looms in the presence of their everyday lives. One day, when I was coming home from a long trip touring camps in Gaza and interviewing refugee families, the proprietress of my hotel, Um-Khalil, greeted me at the door. With knowing eyes and a smoke-filled laugh, she inquired about my day and invited me to join her for some coffee in the sitting room. I noticed a needle- point poem hanging over the fireplace and asked if she would read it to me. She approached the hearth and read,

I walk between darkness and light the night of exile and the shinning memory of home. The land I knew is given up to strangers There in the sunshine do they feel my shadow?

From out of the circumstance and loss of subjectivity, a reordering occurs between the subject and "the real" in the formulation of a synthesis. Symbols are erected to create continuity within the martyr's world, a synthesis that consolidates the subject. Through these symbols, the martyr gains a sense of presence, however altered in its subjectivity. They present the fledgling scene of a new reality; a type of subjectivity closer to symbol than subject that assuages the need for a sense of self. "Presence" of this order is experienced to varying degrees of tenacity among

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Palestinian youth, the most frail of which is reflected in the commonplace symbol of the Hanoon flower. A young man who had been imprisoned several times told me,

We are like the Hanoon; you know, this brilliant red flower that grows wild here in Spring. If you take us from the ground, we will die in an instant. But as long as we remain in the soil, we will thrive and return every season. [September 2, 1991, Jerusalem]

"Presence" is more stridently articulated in the expression of sumud, or "steadfastness." Sumud permeated the ethnic consciousness of virtually every Pal- estinian I spoke with about the occupation. It is present in the literature, the poetry, and the politics of the people. Sumud illustrates a deeply held conviction of Pales- tinians, young and old, to bear the hardships that they face daily under occupation in the hope of one day outliving the alienation, oppression, and marginalization they have withstood for generations. It is often depicted in the image of roots (al juthur) binding Palestinians to their land. There are roots extending from portraits of martyrs in private homes, roots painted with political slogans on public walls, and of course, the symbol of roots growing from the ancient olive tree-the quin- tessential emblem of Palestinian steadfastness. The perseverance symbolically spoken through the representation of roots reflects the psychic permanence of the martyr in life and in death.

The triumph of life over death in the symbolic form of synthesis is expressed most vividly in the "victory" of the martyr's funeral. It is a ceremony enacted as a wedding, where the shaheed is married to the land, body to soil, past to present-forever.

This is the wedding without an end, In a boundless courtyard, This is a Palestinian wedding: Never will lover reach lover Except as martyr... or fugitive. -What year did this grief begin? -It started in that Palestinian year without an end. [Elmessiri 1982:201]

This "marriage" is the ultimate testament to the "permanence" of the shaheed. It is "an act of homage to the missed reality-repeating itself endlessly in some never attained awakening" (Lacan 1973:58) It is a disappearance from the life stage that enables the voice of the martyr to emerge and be heard (Pandolfo 1997).

These symbols, organized around themes of absence, memory, rootedness, and triumph, spoken through a vocabulary of body and land, designate a symbolic order that locates the martyr at its center. They enable a reclamation of "place" that exists only underground and in a dream. It is a "felt" place that carries the irony of death-of no longer feeling-at its apex. It is not a feeling driven by despair or melancholy. The feeling is one of aspiration, of hope, of the possibility of conse- crating a symbolic order of meaning that is at once self-referential and collectively affirmative in a timeless universe.

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The Story of Maha Hamdi

Maha Hamdi was the first female martyr of the Intifada. She was martyred on December 11, 1987, at the age of 19. Her story was told by her brother, September 5, 1991, Nablus City, the West Bank.

Maha felt humiliated. She was depressed about how the occupation had treated our family. Our brother had just been released from an 18-month prison sentence for throwing stones. Our mother had also been interrogated recently for hiding wanted shebab. She denied having done so and spit on the feet of her interrogators. That got her a month in prison. Maha was outraged. She decided to take action and participate actively in the intifada. She collected stones for the shebab and brought them water during clashes. She was very reliable and well trusted.

On the morning of her death, Maha went to Friday morning prayers at the mosque. When she and the others emerged from the mosque, they were harassed by soldiers. She saw an elderly man being beaten for being out during curfew the night before. Tensions escalated in the camp. The shebab began to throw stones. Then the shooting started. One boy was shot dead.

People surrounded the shebab to protect them. Maha's fiancee picked up the body of the dead child and started a funeral procession to the cemetery. The soldiers called a curfew, but no one paid attention. They moved in on the procession. Maha told the shebab to flee and tried to slow the encroaching soldiers. She stopped to confront them. They backed her into a comer. She began fighting with them hand to hand. They said, "Stop resisting or we'll shoot." "Then shoot me," she said and made a break to escape them. She ran ten meters before they fired and Maha fell. The soldiers left her there on the ground and ran past her to pursue other youth.

The shebab took Maha to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. They returned her body to our house later that day. That night, the soldiers came demanding to take Maha's body to an Israeli hospital for an autopsy. We resisted, but the soldiers broke into the house and beat my mother and my uncle.

Two days later, the soldiers brought Maha back to the house at midnight. They told my mother to bury the body by herself. No one else was allowed to see her before she was buried in the ground.

Conclusion

The ritual of the martyr begins quietly with a thought, the thought of dying, the opening of another scene (Pandolfo 1997). In the contemplative encounter with death, a voice emerges from the conscious, the "real," and the dream all at once. It is the voice of the subject echoing on a stage where "reason" no longer matters. It "touches" the symbol of the martyr and recognizes aspects of itself. But as the self climbs into martyr's clothing, as the performance becomes public, a transformation takes place. The subject assumes an image, an image with a history, an image with a voice. He becomes the mirror of the martyr and only in exteriority can he recognize himself (Lacan 1977). He begins to put himself in harm's way, as a way of re-membering the body of the voice he has found. He becomes narrative (L6vi- Strauss 1967). He becomes an ideal, his self reconstructed in an image. And as he falls before the bullet, he feels no loss, for the performance has allowed that which has been forgotten to be remembered. And somewhere, amidst this crazy gestalt of occupation, the permanence of the martyr's "I" is forever implanted.

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"The act of telling [a story] lends dramatic narrative form to a dialogic process" (Peteet 1994:37). Navigating the contextual ambiguities of occupation, the ritual of shahada enables cultural, political, and intrapsychic tensions to be explored, acted out, and worked through (Hammoudi 1993). Each participant brings to his role an interpretation and each death signifies a unique transformation of

subjectivity marked by a common performative deed. The symbols of martyrdom (blood, sacrifice, death, and marriage) articulate the disparate voices of the per- formers. What is shared is an authenticating enterprise in the space of contextual madness.

Rituals can be read as texts of empowerment, enactments of idealized roles, fictions that explain or vindicate reality (Peteet 1994:32). They are stories that grant meaning in performance. The ritual of the martyr is one he performs for himself and for those who survive him. A relationship is established between the presence of the self articulated in death and an absence that remains in the memory of the living. The death of a martyr marks both the beginning and end of public in-

scription. To the extent the martyr is reconstructed here, and in the retelling of his story by those who knew him, his subjective tale lingers in ambiguity. We can know only the residue of a ritual process that has structured the culmination of a self given in sacrifice to others.

What does it mean to prepare oneself as a sacrificial body, a symbol of life and perseverance in death? The state of emergency from which these martyrs act demands insurgent answers that defy our most fundamental assumptions about rationality, the locus of identity, and the will to live (Bhabha 1994). In death, the martyr has projected himself into the unthinkable. He is absolute subject and object at once (Lacan 1977)-a self freed from external exigency, and a body offered in sacrifice to a nation.

NOTES

Acknowledgements. This article is but a piece of a larger commitment and learning trajectory enabled by many people to whom I am greatly indebted. I would like to thank the friends and families in Palestine who opened their hearts and homes to me, especially Khaled, Ranna, Riham, Ghada and Wa'el. Dick Rohrbaugh and Zaher Wahab nourished my earliest interests in Palestine. Khalil and Anne Barhoum and Carol Delaney at Stanford University guided me through the complexity and nuance of this fieldwork. Along with my family, Gay Becker has been a vital source of support and encouragement throughout my graduate career. Many people offered their comments and suggestion to various drafts of this article. I would like to thank Peter Solberg, Sharon Kaufman, Judith Barker, the editors of this journal, as well as my anonymous reviewers. Last, I would like to thank Stefania Pandolfo. Without her inspiration, this article would never have come to be. I am deeply grateful to you all.

Correspondence should be addressed to the author at the Medical Anthropology Program, University of California, San Francisco, 1350 7th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94143.

1. Intifada is a Palestinian uprising, a principally youth-led resistance movement mobilized to confront the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian homeland.

2. It is worth mentioning that I was introduced to various Palestinian communities through the families with which I lived, families I met in the course of volunteering English translation services to a local press agency. The duration of my home stays ranged from 2 to 4 weeks, often not consecutive. Being personally introduced to significant informants by well-respected families granted me more readily the trust and confidence of the communities

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in which I lived and allowed me access to individuals more difficult to approach "from the outside." While I interviewed a number of political activists and individuals with histories of arrests and imprisonment, my personal security was never at risk; great care and precaution regarding my well-being was taken by all with whom I spoke.

3. The names of Palestinian youth who have been martyred and political activists cited in this article, as well as dates of their stories, have been changed to protect their identities. Real names cited from interviews with academics, health professionals, and public figures are used with their express permission.

4. This article was submitted to MAQ in May, 1995.

REFERENCES CITED

Amnesty International 1990 Amnesty International Report 1990. New York: Amnesty International.

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