Storytelling from the Heart: A Feminist Decolonizing Humanism Free

Abstract

Drawing from feminist Indigenous decolonizing authors who developed critical approaches to the research process, this article elucidates the methodological approach that emerged from the author’s encounter with the former hunger strikers in Israeli prisons in colonized Palestine. This research topic is very sensitive and necessitates empathy, not only to gain access to the research participants but also from an ethical humanist perspective. The author emphasizes the question of empathy in exploring human suffering and discusses the limitation of the language and the search for the “language of the heart” within the framework of a feminist decolonizing research. Articulating some of the research interviews in a storytelling narrative reflected the immersive and empathetic engagement with the research participants. The author foregrounds her storytelling on feminist ethnography and presents these accounts as an example of decolonizing feminist humanism that characterizes the writing from the heart. The author’s approach entails disrupting boundaries between knowledge and humanity and in this manner “writing from the heart” is a critique of the liberal paradigm.

This article is based on in-depth interviews between 2015 to 2018 with Palestinian former hunger strikers who were protesting their administrative detention in Israeli prisons. They recounted their experience of hunger strike after their release reached through agreements with the Israeli Prisons Authorities. It generates important questions and pathways of decolonizing research methodologies both within and beyond Palestine studies. I introduce a model of research approach as a form of decolonizing feminist humanism that departs from liberal Western humanism, which is centered on legal constructions of humanity. My approach foregrounds Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and other decolonial scholars’ radical humanism and shows the importance of the heart, intimate listening, and storytelling practices in order to present their stories.

In her exploration of Fanon’s work and her ethical investigation of human and humanity, Wynter contributes to decolonial thinking and the advancement of decolonial knowledge. McKittrick and the authors of Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015) unpack what being human means in relation to the Western world of colonization and racism, and reconceptualizes humans in that we reinvent ourselves by telling stories of where we come from and what we are. Consequently, we need a form of knowledge that is adequate to the fact that “humanness is no longer a noun” (2015: 23). For her the emergence of humanness is from a process of rebirth—from a biological being into an origin story that tells us who we are and what we do. In this vein “Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes” (Ajour 2021) is centered on the dispossession of humanity. It articulates the hunger strikers’ philosophy of freedom within the weaponization of their bodies as a means of reclaiming dignity and humanity for the colonized subject within the space of the prison. This humanity is not centered on the liberal human rights approach that is linked to the judicial system and laws. Samera Esmeir (2006) in her article “On Making Dehumanization Possible” argues linking humanity to laws and judicial system transforms humanity from something we were born with to something that can be granted or taken away. The judicial system has the power to decide who is human and who is dehumanized and in need of humanization. In this colonial rationale, the idea of humanity is linked to Western civilization and constructed to undermine non-Western frameworks and consequently legitimizes colonialism. The hunger strikers are not waiting for humanization to be granted by the human rights judicial institutions that are controlled by Western power. The research participants expressed how they saw themselves as owners of the research and pointed out how they wanted the research to convey their counter-story. For example, after his interview, Salim Badi said he hoped that I would be able to produce a critical study that distanced itself from the liberal discourse of human rights that reproduces the image of freedom fighters as victims.

They articulate a form of humanism tied to sacrifice and love for their political cause and capture their humanity in their praxis of resistance. For them humanity is reborn out of the “inhumanity of racism of colonization” by emphasizing the inhumanity of the occupation.

It is normal when we live under these conditions that we quest for our life and humanity, we quest for our subjectivity. When I live under inhuman conditions, I decide to reject dehumanization. I want to expose the inhumanity of occupation, and by our resistance our humanity is reborn . . . resisting racism and assault is a form of humanity.

I reflect on the ethnographic fieldwork journey and the interviews with the former hunger strikers and discuss the positionality of the researcher as being embodied in the colonized space and the difficulty of detaching myself from the subject matter, given my immersion in the context and participation in solidarity events with the dying prisoners before and during my research. In recounting my engagement, I record the features of my methodological approach that underpins the theory and ethics of knowledge embedded in it. The interviewees reported that words won’t do justice to such experience, and I felt that scholarly language, which required a level of critical distance and controlling emotions, often failed to capture the depth of the lived experience. I discuss the limitation of the language and the search for a “language of the heart” within the framework of a feminist decolonizing research when the boundaries between researcher and interviewee become blurred.

Despite my background as a Palestinian, I was confronted by things in the process of my research that I hadn’t expected. This often disturbed me deeply and ultimately changed the way I see the world. I have witnessed human intensity, pain, and the complexity of extensive resilience, as well as total heartbreak. The research was very painful and emotionally exhausting; while reporting my first-round field visit in 2015 in an academic circle when I returned to the United Kingdom, I found myself bursting into tears. I had to be the container of this pain I had absorbed in order to be able to digest it later, but I experienced difficulty in writing up the interviewees’ transcription. In the first stages of the writing process, my strategy to deal with such intense narratives was to escape from the empirical data, which is very rich and complex and required resilience to deal with and make sense of. I reached the point where I was considering a period of interruption to help me cope with all the different pressures and enable me to complete the research. I didn’t follow up the suggestion to seek counseling to deal with the emotional toll entailed by this work, especially as I don’t see my pain as an individual pain, but rather as connected to the pain of all Palestinians, a collective pain. I needed to address it through writing because I took to heart Ruth Behar’s comment that “anthropology that doesn’t break your heart just isn’t worth doing” (Behar 1996: 177). To overcome this challenge I also tried to articulate some of my research interviews in a free writing semifictional form in parallel to my academic work (see the section with Salem’s and Bilal’s stories).

The Embodied Researcher in the Colonized Space and the Challenges of Researching Human Suffering

The above quote from Edward Said, emphasizing that the positionality of the researcher, is significant for any reflection on the process of knowledge production. Feminist epistemologists argue that knowledge is always socially constructed and therefore situated in specific locations (Gunaratnam 2003; Haraway 1988; Harding 1990). Most Palestinian researchers find themselves involved in topics related to Palestinian reality, as there is no escape from issues that affect our lives linked to the Israeli occupation. These research topics run toward us before we run to them. I carried out my research fieldwork in Palestine, the place where I belong and where I lived all my life until I moved to the UK in 2014 to work on this research. I have experienced the impact of occupation on my life and loved ones, and, as Jaggar argues, it is impossible to assume that emotion and value will not be present in our research (Jaggar 1989). The prison as a site of resistance gained my attention for my research. I was not in prison like my research participants, but living under occupation is in many ways to live in an open-air prison. In a militarily colonized space, the idea of prison surrounded us. Like prisoners, we are completely restricted in cantons since we don’t have freedom of mobility and are denied movement due to closures, checkpoints and a segregation-apartheid wall. Before moving to the UK, I lived in Ramallah in the West Bank, but I am totally separated from my family in Gaza—my place of birth. I can’t go to Gaza or Jerusalem or Palestinian lands occupied since 1948, unlike my foreign friends who come to Palestine and have the freedom to reach (and research in) these areas.

We are often impeded from writing about our own communities, unlike external researchers, because of the obstacles facing us as Palestinian scholars. As with most Palestinians, I have been exposed to Israeli occupation practices, ranging from curfews and house invasions to gas inhalation at checkpoints and denial of access to Palestinian cities due to closures. For many long years, I have been separated from my family, who have lived under three cruel wars in Gaza. The Israeli Ministry of Interior rejected travel permits for me and my children, denying them access to their familial roots in Gaza. My children only met my family once in their entire life and therefore haven’t developed a close relationship with them. Even when my father went for surgery in a hospital in Jerusalem, I couldn’t go to see him, even while he was in a critical condition.

Many Palestinians are denied access to study abroad and I experienced difficulty in returning to the UK after my 2017 field research due to the collective punishment imposed on people born in Gaza by both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Authority. I had to involve the British Council, who required an official letter from the institution before I could leave Palestine; to obtain a visa to attend a conference in Berlin in 2018, I was told that the German visa department wouldn’t recognize my Palestinian passport and that I had to apply from Palestine, despite the fact I study in the UK.

This geographical segregation creates a feeling of being captive and makes us internalize a sense of confinement. Yet living in an open-air “prison” is a privilege compared to the hostile environment of the Israeli jails. As Mazin Natcheh, one of the participants said “[if you] don’t leave your room for four or five continuous days [you could] experience our feeling,” but he added, “Note this is voluntary in your comfortable home, so imagine if you are forcibly held under detention for long years and you don’t know when you will be free and you don’t know why you are in prison.” In the context of hunger striking I’m trying to imagine being in my room without food or drink, not only for a few days, but for sixty or eighty days like the hunger strikers. I am both an outsider and insider researcher—outsider, since I have never found myself in the condition of captivity but insider because I am a participant through my informed ethnographic engagement, shared social experience and political solidarity. With reference to this positionality, Said argued, “As I wrote, I found myself switching pronouns, from ‘we’ to ‘you’ to ‘they’ to designate Palestinians. As abrupt as these shifts are, I feel they reproduce the way we experience ourselves, the way ‘you’ sense that others look at you” (Said 1986: 6). Linda Alcoff (1991), in her article “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” pointed out that there is no such thing as a homogeneous group and there will always be differences and similarities between people. She argued that we are never just one category, and the Palestinian collective is no exception. This to some extent problematizes claiming commonality between researcher and research participants.

Them and Me: Toward a Decolonizing Feminist Humanist Approach

The approach I have taken toward my research falls within the broader intellectual project of decolonizing the pursuit of knowledge. As Edward Said reminds us, if knowledge is intertwined with power, knowledge producers such as sociologists must assume responsibility for their practices (Said 1994; Seidman 1996). Feminist researchers and decolonizing scholars (Gunaratnam 2003; Haraway 1988; Smith 2013) have critically explored the problems of power and reflexivity in the research process. My approach is grounded in this critical epistemological framework, alert to power differences. It negotiates the boundaries of power relations between the researcher and research participants, on the one hand, and institutions of knowledge production, on the other, all the while remaining conscious of the colonized people whose own knowledge has been undermined in the interests of dominant institutions. Research “occurs in a set of political and social conditions” (Smith 2013: 4), and as researchers we are not isolated, objective, and empty vessels, but rather, partial, involved, and relational, especially with regard to power. When a number of the research participants first found out that I was doing my research in a British academic institution,¹ they commented that “Britain is the source of our tragedy.” I asked whether they were talking about the Balfour declaration, but in fact they were referring to the practice of administrative detention, since it was based on the British Mandate law in Palestine and later adopted by the Israeli occupation.²

One benefit of a research approach grounded in critical feminist and decolonializing epistemologies is that it can situate and connect the research encounter to a broader historical global system. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues in Decolonizing Methodology, theory is a tool, a means to “write back” against the dominant narratives and constructions of history and society: “Having been immersed in the Western academy which claims theory as thoroughly Western, which constructed all the rules by which the indigenous world has been theorized, indigenous voices have been overwhelmingly silenced” (Smith 2013: 30). In the context of dispossession of land and uprooting from their geographical space, the historical narrative of the indigenous and colonized can help prevent their erasure from history and is a crucial aspect of the decolonizing project. Authors such as Robert C. Young (2004), in White Mythologies: Writing, History, and the West or Janet Abu-Lughod (1989), in “On the Remaking of History: How to Reinvent the Past,” provide critiques of dominant Western histories that have developed alongside colonialism and imperial beliefs about “the other.” The anti-colonial framework of my research hopefully helps provide a space for colonized people to articulate their counternarrative.

Most of the participants expressed the wish for their stories to be heard. They think that their counternarrative has been silenced and misrepresented and that the unjust conditions inflicted on them in Israeli jails are meant to dehumanize them into passive victims. As Mohamad al-Kik put it, “Israeli propaganda made us into terrorists, racists and suicidal, and through our stories we want to show who the terrorist is.” Shari Stone-Mediatore, in her book Reading across Borders (2004), argues that storytelling and knowledge of resistance makes room for the power of stories originating in marginalized peoples’ experience and, as she puts it, counteracts “the disempowerment of people who have been excluded from official knowledge production, for we deny epistemic value from a central means by which such people can take control over their representation” (Stone-Mediatore 2004: 2).

The participants were very motivated to engage in this research and strongly welcomed being interviewed. Most of them were proud of their hunger strike and aware of the popularity and support they’d achieved. Therefore, they were motivated to talk about their resistance in Israeli prisons and interested in disseminating their stories in the media and research projects. They often spoke publicly about their experience in ways that overlap with my interview material, and, after getting their consent, I chose not to keep them anonymous. The interviewees assume that the research is bearing witness to their suffering, and this was a key reason for them agreeing to be interviewed. None of the statements made in their interviews are ones that they wouldn’t also announce publicly. However, not being anonymous in a media context is quite different from not being anonymous in a research project that raises issues of research ethics, particularly in regard to putting the participants at risk, taking into account that the Israeli state can hold Palestinians under administrative detention just for announcing their affiliation with political parties. Despite this, participants gave their consent and expected that their names be mentioned and their stories be made public. Indeed, their expectation of me was that their voices will be heard to expose Israeli practices.

Being embedded in institutions that are implicated in the colonial histories that produced the current context of the research participants requires, in line with Said, to think about how I should assume responsibility and be accountable in my research practice. Hesse-Biber claims that feminist researchers should practice reflexivity and focus on the relationship between researchers and participants to balance different levels of power and authority. According to her, reflexivity is “a process by which [researchers] recognize, examine, and understand how their social background, location and assumption can influence research, reflexivity is a way for researchers to account for their personal biases and examine the effect that these biases may have on the data produced” (Hesse-Biber 2013: 3). A reflexive experience in which a specific mode of subjectivity comes into being is conditioned in part by how the subject relates to the other. Our subjectivity is shaped and transformed by research processes and interactions with research subjects. But how do we overcome the dilemmas that arise when the topic of research is one that we are politically, emotionally, and intellectually invested in from the start? Cheater explores our commitment to our dual roles as “citizen and intellectual” and the repercussions of ignoring either of these positions. She highlights the researcher’s conflict between two subjectivities: her own and that of the multiple “research subjects,” along with the obligations toward the respondents; this reflection on the problem of subjectivity is crucial to attain critical reflexivity about one’s research and its outcomes (Cheater 1987: 168–71).

Research is more than the mere extraction of data. It involves a relational experience with interviewees shaped by the stories they tell. But does the way I listen to their stories as a “human being” operate at the same level of listening to them as “researcher”? In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Smith’s critique of Western paradigms of research and knowledge from an indigenous and colonized perspective, she states that “research is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary.” (Smith 2013: 1). According to Smith, “decolonization” is concerned with gaining “a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values that inform research practices.” Gunaratnman and Oliviere comment that “reflexivity involves a critical stance to existing concepts and research methods, recognizing that these are not objective and value free but rather are influenced by social context, that they both affect and produce what we know” (Gunaratnam and Oliviere 2009: 57). In the name of objectivity and professionalism, some academics are often removed from human compassion and emotions, not only in politically charged issues but also in those research encounters that appeal to our human empathy.

In her discussion of the role and responsibilities of the scholar and intellectual in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Sara Roy writes, “The issue of objectivity as a utopia for scholarship is not a given despite current protestations to the contrary. The great philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that truth cannot be found in the aggregate but in the subjective, on the individual’s consciousness, ‘on what could not be regimented in the totally administered society’” (Roy 2007: 55). She continues with a criticism of neutrality in the critical task of the humanist scholar who writes on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: “Neutrality is often a mask for siding with the status quo, while objectivity—pure objectivity at least—does not exist, and claiming it is dishonest. My commitment is to accuracy, to representing the facts to the best of my ability. The commitment, fundamentally, is to be as close to knowledge as possible rather than to truth with a capital ‘T’” (Roy 2007: 58).

The stories of hunger stories are testimonies that form part of Palestinian history and contemporary reality. They and I are not talking about “truth” but rather about what happened in a specific set of circumstances. I also recount my engagement, performance, and challenges in an attempt to elucidate the features of my approach that underpin the theory and ethics of knowledge embedded in it.

Our Interaction in the Interviews

The one-to-one interviews were essential to gain insight into the hunger strikers’ experience and how they understood their own subjectivity. I met some participants in the prisoners’ clubs’ various branches in the West Bank. Others invited me into their homes and shared their hospitality, or to public spaces such as cafés or restaurants. The research is sensitive, as it looks at an experience of self-determination in the midst of an existential conflict that is a matter of life and death. As such, it entails a high level of intimacy, which, in my view, was able to generate human bonds in an interview situation that I endeavored to treat as a shared space that encouraged genuine dialogue. Trust was built up gradually. In the beginning some participants tried to maintain a distance and did not open up easily. For example, at the beginning of our engagement Munir Abu Sharer was very formal and controlled, and reproduced a standard political discourse about the hunger strike, which kept his experience and its suffering at bay. But when I asked him about the human trajectory of his experience,³ he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “There are things that are not said but are wept.” After a short pause I felt that, while I had in a sense stepped into his world, I needed to step back. This process is discussed by Les Back in terms of the “value of returning” to our sites of research to offer greater understanding and proximity (Back 2007: 35).

However, the way Munir looked at me, mentioning my name as if he knew me for a long time, generated a sense of closeness. We both “stepped back” to reflect on this intimate moment and then returned to our conversation. After this turning point, I felt the rhythm of the dialogue changed and our interaction transformed. These moments, which entail feelings and emotions, connected us on a human level and illustrated the ways that language is inadequate to express the lived experience of the hunger strike. This is a theme of considerable importance to the research since this experience is at the limit of conceptualization in that there are some aspects that are not interpretable. The participants could not rationalize their experience and accordingly developed their own nonmaterial interpretations of it.

Through these moments they took control over the narrative, which unfolded on their own terms. They had the choice over what to tell and which part of the stories they wished to narrate. Not only Munir Abu Sharar but many other participants were deeply affected by recalling intimate moments with their loved ones. The most heartbreaking interviews were with the mothers of the hunger strikers. I felt terrible when one of them said, “I don’t know what shall I tell you—they are dying and we are dying with them” (interview with the mother of two brothers, Mohamad and Mahmoud Balboul, 2016). I felt compelled to stop the interview out of respect for their situation. This happened again in my interviews with Nora Hashlamoun, when she cried during our conversation. In addition, some interviewees asked me to stop recording when they talked about sensitive and private matters, for example, on the post-traumatic effects of hunger strike on them and their families, and I did not incorporate this information into my account.

The interviews were a space for expressing and constructing subjectivity in a self-reflexive process. Hasan Safadi was surprised at what emerged during our conversations:

Most of the interviewees shared this surprise about the way the interviews went. For example, Abd-Razek Faraj has a reputation as a taciturn person. Yet at the end of his interview, he commented, “Usually I am very silent. I am surprised I did all this talking today.” I interviewed some of the hunger strikers a few months after their release. Some of them had been subjected to long terms of isolation in prison and were hesitant about being interviewed because solitude was one of the social impacts of solitary confinement. For instance, Adel Hiribat told me, “I am sitting now with you naturally but it is possible that after five minutes I will not be able to complete the interview. Sometimes I leave my family and my children to walk in the balcony alone as I feel as if I’m in the prison.” In the end, Hiribat spent more than three hours sharing a rich account of his experience with me. We had met in the prisoners’ club office in Hebron and the interview was terminated because people came to say that they needed to close the office, otherwise we would have carried on. At the end of the interview, he expressed surprise at the amount of time he was able to spend talking.

Not all interviews produced positive results. In one, for example, there was tension when I was asked to veil and cover my body. This affected our interaction and when I asked the participant certain questions, he responded with irritation: “I am not a philosopher to answer these questions.” In the second round of interviews in 2016, Hiribat had changed. He was silent. I was surprised, as I had expected to receive another rich account, as in the first interview. I came with new questions, but Hiribat did not have any interest in providing information, particularly about his relationship with his political organization. He told me that he had isolated himself from his own political party and needed to focus on his family rather than political life. The post–hunger strike period is very important and has particular effects on the interviewees; it is a case of how temporality is crucial to which stories we tell (Gunaratnam and Oliviere 2009). This takes us back to Back’s “value of returning” (Back 2007: 35). However, most the participants provided as rich a narrative in the second interview as in the first, and were keen to engage with me again, and I generally received positive feedback from them. For example, Shadi Abu Mali’s brother said, “We did not expect such questions, because you went to the depth by asking existential questions about the meaning of being human, and the meaning of Al-Watan (homeland).” I even developed friendships with a number of the hunger strikers and maintain contact and meet up with some of them when I visit Palestine. It was particularly special to meet one of the participants who had been in contact with my father before the interview. When I interviewed Mahmoud Sersik, a former football player, he commented, “How could I not know captain Najy Ajour, he is a loved celebrity in Palestine.” My access in this case was enhanced by the fact that my father had been a respected and well-known footballer in Palestine.

Empathy, Dialogue, and Compassion

Because the research topic required compassion, the boundaries were disrupted and shifted. Although I am a compassionate insider, I am also an outsider. That said, the outsider status linked to me is based in England and this might have contributed to their opening up to me, because of the way I was coming in and then going away with their stories. It was difficult for me to keep my distance and detach myself when I dealt with their suffering. In narrating their stories, I could not set boundaries between them and me and be a passive listener while they recalled their pain and sentiments involving traumatic situations. This vulnerability affected the way I interacted and led to a free dialogue, often revealing a rich and complex account from “the heart.” As Bilal Deyab put it in a message he sent to me after the interview, “Many people came to interview me and wrote about my hunger strike but I found the interview with you special because I felt my interaction was high due to the way you talked and asked questions. I felt your interest and motivation. Therefore I spoke from heart. Your commitment made the words come from the heart.” Although I prepared semistructured interview questions, I didn’t restrict myself to them. At some point I felt my identity as “researcher” diminishing as we questioned together the mystical aspects of their experience and the limitation of language and rationality to capture it. We talked informally at some points and they got a sense of who I was, as a human being not a researcher. As Freire argues, the dialogue founded on humility and love can become a horizontal relationship in which mutual trust is the logical consequence (Freire 1970: 72).

My humanistic approach sought to foreground Said and Fanon’s radical humanisms and their legacy of emancipation. As Said comments, “Humanism . . . is about transition from one realm, one area of human experience to another. It is also about the practice of identities other than those given by the flag or the national war of the moment” (Said 2004: 80). Said wants the intellectual to push the boundaries, to reconcile their identity with other identities and other people rather than dominating other cultures. It is a universalization that does not entail losing historical specificity.⁴ Said was both a Palestinian nationalist and someone who always maintained critical distance from national discourse. He works toward the goal of political liberation, but it is a form of liberation that extends beyond the confines of limited national or cultural goals. This transitional form of universal humanism suggests reconciling differences through the empathetic connection between me and participants, which contributes to overcoming the power relation and privilege.

The Search for the Language of the Heart: The Feminist Decolonizing Ethnography

The participants’ stories raised the problem of language and its limitation. They reported that “words won’t do justice to such experience” (Munir Abu Sharar); I felt that scholarly language often failed to capture the depth of the lived experience. I needed to produce a scholarly knowledge which required a level of critical distance, controlling emotions and bracketing feeling. At the same time, the meanings that emerged in the research are broad, complex, and rich on a human level, and the challenge was to convey this richness and depth. This required extending the methodological and theoretical frameworks we normally use, which say little about the heart and intimacy. When the hunger strikers were dying, experiencing their limits, their narrative accounts and their wills and messages frequently conveyed their love for everything—children, mothers, Palestine, the martyrs of Palestine, and the whole world. Fraser and Puwar (2008) address the production of intimacy in research and the way in which it informs the making of knowledge. They discuss the concept of intimacy to challenge the boundaries between creativity and analysis, and this offers insights for the methodological questions that arise from this research.

Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (1997) offers a paradigm of intimate research through her practice of a humanist anthropology in fieldwork. Her writing proposes that anthropology lived and written from the heart in an intimate personal voice can give in-depth understanding that a more detached approach cannot. Behar immerses herself in the subjects of her study and becomes one of them in turn by bringing her personal experience of loss into her research. Her essays emphasize the attachment to those we study; these subjective feelings generate a more humane and sympathetic understanding of the lives of people we observe (Behar 1997). Ronald J. Pelias’s A Methodology of the Heart: Evoking Academic and Daily Life also suggests the need to write from the heart and introduces researchers to the vulnerability of emotions and the sensuality of language in a poetic form that can bring us closer to the subject we study. His book invites identification and empathic connection that makes the researcher foster connections and open spaces for free dialogue and healing (Pelias 2004).

The broader argument is that researchers can yield genuine knowledge if they write from a position of immersive empathy with their participants. This entails some risks and dangers, but we can also affirm the need for an intellectual space in which to experiment and try new things. This approach to writing up fieldwork avoids rationalizing pain, in contrast to a reified approach the “scientific method,” which merely rationalizes the experience. The latter is like a sharp knife that deals with the very intimate phenomenon of our human existence in order to draw “objective” and “neutral” conclusions. “Writing from the heart” is a critique of the liberal paradigm of thinking that is based on instrumental rationality and the domination of reason. Even some materialist philosophers accept the nature of this colonizing operation: “Science is not to be dragged down to the region of sensibility, but the sensible is to be lifted to the dignity of knowledge,” wrote Terry Eagleton (1990: 17). But, he adds, rationalist philosophy’s approach to sensory experience functions as a form of colonization—“the colonisation of reason” (Eagleton 1990: 13–15).

This suggests expanding the framework of thinking and embracing new tools and languages. Kamala Visweswaran’s Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (1994) blurs ethnographic and literary genres in her writing about women in India. She devises a new approach to feminist ethnography in these essays by utilizing history, fiction, autobiography and biography, deconstruction, and post-colonial discourse. In the process, she reveals the “fictions in anthropology and the anthropology in fiction” (Visweswaran 1994). Visweswaran and Behar offer examples for academics who face epistemological and political issues in their research. However, this raises the further question of how fictionalizing can overcome the problem of objectivism, in that fiction writers often don’t consider themselves to have any particular ethical commitments. In this context, James Clifford and George Marcus’s edited collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography is a key text in critically approaching the debate around fictionalizing anthropology.⁵ The book revolves around three themes that raise important challenges to the abovementioned literature: ethnographic truth, rhetoric in ethnography, and the writing of self. It is related to the narrative turn in anthropology on the basis of seeing ethnographies as texts which use literary devices, and this is a radical move offering different epistemological and methodological approaches in anthropology (Clifford and Marcus 1986).

A Storytelling from the Heart: A Decolonializing Feminist Humanism

To deal with the challenges I faced as an embodied researcher, I articulated some of my research interviews in a storytelling form of writing. This storytelling narrative emerged throughout my intellectual journey and in writing up the research, which reflects the humanist empathetic interaction I experienced with the research participants. This immersive engagement gives some insight into the methodological approach I developed during my research journey, resulting in the language of the heart.

I wrote the Salem story in September 2015 after I finished my first round of fieldwork and that of Bilal in September 2016 when I came back from the second round of fieldwork. I foregrounded these stories on feminist ethnography and present them as an example of decolonializing feminist humanistic methodology that characterizes the writing from the heart. I theorize “language of the heart” as a contribution to decolonial research methods, which takes distance from the liberal rational paradigm of thinking based on the domination of reason in research methods. This storytelling from the heart is inspired by feminist ethnography, wherein we as researchers can produce genuine knowledge when writing from a position of immersive empathy with our research participants. In the context of researching human suffering there is no place for “objectivity,” which sometimes strips us of our human compassion and empathy. By contrast, the embodied researchers are able to produce research that is faithful to people’s suffering, and Bilal’s and Salem’s stories are the outcome.

Salem’s Story

Once again I returned to Palestine after a brief stay in the United Kingdom. It was a nice afternoon when the car dropped us in Ramallah, a city where everything seemed so familiar to me: buildings, people, noise, weather, even pain, which you feel and sometimes smell. Ramallah was the city that helped me or maybe forced me to choose the subject of my research. A few days later I went to Al-Beirah Library to borrow some books about the prisoners’ movement for my work. I also wanted to stop and greet Salem Badi (he was one of my past interviewees about hunger strike) as he works at the library. As I was approaching his office, I was informed that Salem was in the Israeli prison again. I stopped. I felt as if lightning had just struck me. I was standing where he and I had talked for three intense hours the previous year. Although I knew he was not there, I stayed, maybe hoping for a miracle or a change in facts. Maybe his door would open and he’d greet me, but alas, miracles don’t happen anymore. Suddenly I was able to recall the three hours I spent with him and everything that we talked about.

It was four o’clock, we were asked to leave instantly as they were closing the library. So I gave Salem a ride to continue our conversation. “I really enjoyed meeting you, but honestly I am afraid that you would take the liberal perspective in your research approach.” I knew that he was affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and I recognized the depth of his Marxist revolutionary culture. He had a broad knowledge of leftist literatures and had mentioned some quotes from Notes from the Gallows by Julius Fucik, who was tortured and executed by the Nazis. In addition, he made reference to Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Georg Habash, and others. “I mean I am afraid you would focus on the absurd liberal human rights discourse that assumes the resistant as a ‘victim,’” he added. “Do you think the resistant is always a ‘hero’? Don’t you think the resistant subject could be a hero and a victim at the same time?” I asked. Later in my research these questions led me to the concept of the “active victim,” who has the capacity of transformation to “becoming resistant.” We arrived at Salem’s house and he offered to show me their lands in Al-Beirah. I glimpsed the beautiful land full of olive trees but apologized that I didn’t have time to accept his offer, although I wanted to continue the conversation and enjoy the olive trees, and left. On my way back I rolled down the window and let the wind hit me, as if trying to wake up from a long sleep. I jammed along with “Rabak Lama Yerid”: “Our dreams will be achieved, God willing,”⁶ by one of my favorite singers and was thinking how appropriate this song, these lyrics, these feelings, were now after Salem’s interview. It had been my first research interview in 2015.

What does the olive tree mean to Salem? to me? to the Palestinians? So many questions and so few answers, my brain is continuously asking, constantly churning. Still by Salem’s office, I am standing still as if time had frozen, wandering with my thoughts here and there, feeling bitter about Salem being in prison again. I am still getting flashes of memories of when we spoke last year. He said, “I love life. . . . I didn’t go on hunger strike to die but because I love life. I love my life because I have a just cause. I can’t live my life just to eat and drink and have fun without a cause. . . . It would be a meaningless life . . . my cause gave the meaning of my life.”

“I love life.” These simple three words form a very simple sentence, one that was mentioned repeatedly by most of the hunger strikers in my research. What a beautiful contradiction, they face death because they love life.

This brings me to another conversation, this time with my fifteen-year-old daughter, Tala. “Mamma, why we are Palestinians? Why were we chosen to be Palestinians?” What could I answer her? I thanked God for Salem’s words because they were the answer that rescued me. “We are Palestinians, sweetie, because we have a just cause, that means our life is meaningful. When someone has a cause, their life has meaning.” She looked at me, her eyes filled with pride and happiness, and said with a whisper, “Yes, yes, Mamma, what you are saying is the same thing that one of my favorite poems says; it is written by Rafeef Zidan, a Palestinian Canadian poet. You met her in Coventry.” I was surprised that my daughter made the connection, and even more so for how satisfied she was with my answer. “What poem?” I asked. “We Palestinians teach life Sir . . . We teach the rest of the world life Sir,”⁷ she recited loudly, trying to give the words the proper weight and respect through her voice and body language. I felt I was breathing her, breathing her face and her soul. I think when I gave birth to Tala, I gathered all the things I loved in the world and put it in her smile. Her smile alone takes me to places I have never been. I am very thankful for life because beauty is around me as long as Tala is in my life.

“What if you are arrested again after the hunger strike?” was one question I asked Salem. I also asked, “How did these repeated arrests of administrative detention (eight arrests—thirteen years in prison) affect you?” I wanted to know what his answer was and went straight home to listen to his interview to find out. I must have blanked out on my way home, as it is not common for me to calm my brain down. I don’t remember what I was thinking. When I arrived home, still breathing heavily after taking the stairs, I listened to the interview and heard Salem’s voice;

Salem chose the difficult way and insisted on staying in the train until the last stop. Others choose to leave the train and sell out the Palestinian cause as Edward Said pointed out in his book The End of the Peace Process. The Oslo agreement is “Palestinian surrender” and a “Palestinian Versailles.” In Palestine, at the current moment there are two contrasting approaches. The one, those who surrender national rights and lack the political will to resist. The other, people like Salem who are using the radical form of resistance of open-ended hunger strike in the absence of any other means of resistance. Palestinians who want to stay to the final stop on the resistance train use their body as a weapon to fight. They are a revolution of consciousness in the face of a defeatist consciousness. To those who died silently, the last words in Ghassan Kanafani’s novel asks them, “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you did not say anything? why? why? why?”⁸ They are the ones who decided to knock on the side of the tank! I was slipping away from my dream, escaping probably, but those who decided to stay until the end pulled me back to my beautiful dream . . . I am back hanging tight to the roots of the olive tree. The dream was renewed and continued . . . As Darwish said, “We are alive and we remain as long the dream (of return) continues . . .”

Bilal’s Story

As I write my story about Bilal and Riva in October 2016 in the UK, my mother is in critical condition in the hospital in Gaza waiting the Israelis’ permit to be able to travel to Jerusalem for urgent heart surgery. My mother was taken by ambulance to the Erez crossing but was sent back to Gaza and denied access to Jerusalem until the permit was confirmed by the Israeli authorities. I received this news a few days before my participation in a British Council event in London that October. I was invited to talk about my experience. I felt I needed to be with my mother and wanted to travel to Palestine but wouldn’t be able to enter Jerusalem because I would need a permit as my address is Ramallah/West Bank. These permits are very difficult to obtain. In 2013 my permit was rejected, and I could not go to Jerusalem to be with my father, who came from Gaza for surgery.

The effect of the Israeli occupation and the restriction on Palestinian freedom of movement has dire impacts on our life and humanity. It deprives us of our human needs. Why can’t the Israeli authorities allow a patient with a serious health condition to enter Jerusalem for urgent treatment? What has happened to humanity? Why can’t they allow me to go to Jerusalem to be with my sick parents after long years of family separation (despite the fact that we live in the same country) due to Israeli’s ongoing blockade of Gaza? Why can’t we be with our beloved ones in these critical moments? Why have my parents had to witness three tragic wars in Gaza? Why have I had to inhale tear gas at the Qalandia checkpoint on my way to work in 2001 during the second intifada, an incident that endangered my first pregnancy? Why are my children, Tala and Kareem, denied access to Gaza and deprived of knowing their roots? Why are they deprived of a close intimate relationship with their grandmother and grandfather and their relatives in Gaza? Why can’t I go to Gaza’s sea and enjoy it? Why can’t I smell Gaza’s orange trees, the places where I spent my childhood? Why can’t I hug my father and support him in these difficult times? Despite of all this, I will never lose my faith in humanity. But I do ask when will the light of humanity emerge to overcome this darkness?

I read some parts of my story at the British Council’s event that October, where I met Palestinian scholars from Gaza who recently received British Council scholarships. They actively engaged with my presentation and spoke about their own experiences and pain. People from Gaza remind me of Hemingway’s quote, which I used in my research: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.” But why do we need to live in these severe conditions that break our hearts in order to be strong? Fortunately for the participants, the British Council had helped them obtain Israeli permits to travel to the UK through the Erez crossing. I remember that in 2003 my brother Reyad was not given permission and could not leave to study in Italy. By the time he was finally able to do so, he had lost his scholarship and had a very tough time there.

On my way back home I talked with my mother on the phone and heard her praying for me. She said, “You brought me good luck habebti. The moment I heard your voice, the ambulance arrived and this time with a confirmed permit.” I said everything will be all right, shed a tear, and sent her all the love in my heart. After I finished the transcription of Bilal Diab’s interview, I was exhausted emotionally and felt I needed somebody to listen to how I felt about it. There is no way to express my deepest love for my brother Reyad, whom I shared the story with. Thank you Reyad for always being there for me . . . and this is my story . . . “Tears of Humanity.”

“Tears of Humanity”

I spent three and a half hours with Bilal Diyab traveling together in the flow of his lived experience. The past continues through the present with the vivid meanings he gave to his experience. At some point our conversation brought tears to our eyes. Why don’t we always want to reveal our vulnerability? It is our vulnerability that makes us human and draws our deep feelings of human connection with others. I like myself when I weep a tear if something touches my heart. It makes me feel things deeply as if the tears let us know that our hearts are bound with life and love, as if the tears are the pulse of life. These tears connect me with Bilal and create the “common humanity” between us.

These tears took me back three years. A beautiful scene was taking place; I was offering flowers to a girl whom I wanted to reward for her hard work on editing my master’s thesis. I was impressed by the beauty of her devotion to work. She even worked on my thesis after her working hours. When she had finished printing the thesis, I was so happy, I felt I wanted to surprise her with a gift. I came back with some sweets hiding the flowers behind my back, I shouted her name angrily; RIVA! She ran down the stairs toward my voice, obviously nervous. I smiled and offered her the flowers. Shocked, she put her hands on her heart, trying to comprehend what is happening.

“Oh my God, I was so scared when you called my name, I thought you came back because you found mistakes in the thesis’s text,” she said. I couldn’t believe what she just said. She is still thinking about work, she was afraid she made a mistake and I was unhappy about that. Her devotion to work became an obsession. I laughed. I handed her the flowers. I saw her tears falling down her cheeks. I could only cry. I hugged Riva and thanked her while we were both weeping. Still trying to wipe my tears while paying the owner; “you are very lucky to have Riva, actually she is a treasurer not an employee.” I mumbled something. “And by the way her birthday is today,” he said. I looked at Riva surprised and said, “Oh my God, what a coincidence it is the first of May, it is Labor Day!” Riva said happily, “My previous employer in the UN called me every first of May to congratulate me on my birthday and Labor Day together. He always said, ‘I have never ever met an employee like you who is as faithful and committed to work as you are.’” “Happy birthday, Riva,” I said, hugged her again, and left.

I contemplate my inner world while trying to understand what is going on inside me. I shed more tears again while I was walking toward my car. I wondered why these tears? I wondered that I just met Riva few days ago, I don’t know the girl. Why she cried? Why I cried? Why we weep when we are touched? Why humans cry even in moments of happiness? I sat in my car and put down the seven copies of my thesis, took a long breath, and comforted myself. I reflected that although I do not know Riva very well, what connects us is common humanity.

The moment that brought tears during our conversation is when Bilal described an emotional scene during the seventy-four days of his hunger strike as he was approaching death. Two people from the Red Cross came to see because of his deteriorating health. They wanted to convey his messages to his family, in particular for his mother, who was in a critical situation in hospital and desperate about the situation of her son. What particularly broke my heart in my ethnographic work were my interviews with the mothers while their beloved ones were dying of starvation. Motherhood is one of the strongest instincts, and I remember bursting into tears in my meeting with the mothers of Mohamad and Mahmoud Balboul to the point that I could not continue the interview. When I cried, she told me, “They are dying and we are dying with them . . . that’s all . . . that is what I can tell you, habebti [my sweetheart].” The aunt of Mohamad and Mahmoud Balboul was there during my interview. She tried to comfort me while I was crying: “We are sorry my sweetheart, we did not mean to make you cry, I swear to God it is not fair for you to do this work if you have such heart and compassion,” she said. Her words made me think, How am I going to deal with work that breaks my heart? How am I going to rationalize the pain? How am I going to produce epistemological knowledge about things I understand in my heart but not in my mind?

Bilal describes the scene when the two people from the Red Cross came to convey his messages to his mother:

I was affected by the account and tried to control my tears. I asked, “What did you tell her to write? What was your message?”

“It was my will to my family, particularly my mother who was in hospital and for my beloved brother. It was something very emotional, really it was from the core of my heart, I said things from the depths of my pain. As if these words were the last words for me,” he replied. I did not ask again about the words of his will, the tears in his eyes tell me everything. I knew the words of Bilal’s well. I felt the unspoken words in my heart. I was touched with unspoken words of love he sent to his family. His tears transmitted the loving words of his family directly to my heart. Now I understand what Munir Abu Sharer (one of my research participants) meant when I asked him to describe the intimate moments with his mother. He looked at me and said, “There are things that are not said but are wept.” Yes, there are things beyond words, when language would reduce its meaning. The world of feelings and emotions is richer than any mode of representation.

The untranslated words reached the heart of the Red Cross gentleman who doesn’t know Arabic. He wept without understanding the words. He echoed the tears of the girl and his heart was touched. Tears from his heart signified his gentle humanity. The heart transcended the mind, feelings transcended language and rationalization. Tears of humanity connected us all. The unspoken and untranslated words of love in Bilal’s heart are conveyed and reached from the heart to the heart without words. We were all connected with common humanity and developed a human bond. The force of love penetrates the human hearts without any permission from the mind, without any need for language.

The words of love are born from the core of the resistant subject in the extreme moments where the human exists in the limit zone, the boundary of life and death. The research participants produce authentic love that is born out of special moments. This love touches the soul and spiritualizes the human being regardless of their nationality and language. The inner and truest beauty of the human subject arises in the extreme moments where the human being is stripped of life. In dying moments, hunger strikers speak words of love. When the body declines and fades away, the soul shines with love. At the isthmus of life and death, love springs from the deepest layers of subjectivity. When they are leaving everything in life the only thing that remains is love, as if the core of the human subject is love . . . they reach the mystical meaning that God is love.

This humanity challenges my role as a researcher and challenges the traditional objectivity of scientific knowledge. Tears of humanity emphasize that the objectivity which negates human feelings is a myth. The researcher is a human, and if I wanted to choose between my objectivity as a researcher and my humanity, I would choose my humanity. In my view, humanity is the real objectivity in the sense that if I am an objective researcher I have to convey the truth, the truth of our humanity that is usually negated by the rationality of science. If the researcher is human, he or she will produce true knowledge. Humanity would enable the researcher to produce genuine knowledge. There are two ways to carry out this research. The first is to choose to be objective and neutral. The other way is to choose the human route and to get emotionally involved and feel other people’s suffering, and there’s a great deal of value in that. In this research I write from the heart, and I would argue that the heart is the genuine mind.

Humanity challenges Bilal himself, who never wept in front of the jailers because he wanted to hide his vulnerability, fearing that it would be exploited by the Israeli forces. Emotional abuse is one of the Israeli repressive techniques used to break the prisoners. Bilal’s tears surprised the jailers, who assume that the resistant fighter is an iron man who doesn’t weep, but they discover that Bilal is a mass of emotions. This human emotion connects Bilal with his jailer. Humanity challenges the essence of the jailer’s existence. Some of the Israeli guards wept at the effect of the hunger strikers’ suffering, sometimes at the hands of their Israeli colleagues. Some of them encounter a real internal conflict between their humanity and their role as a jailer in Israeli prisons. Tears of humanity that connect the Palestinian freedom fighters and their jailers say that the Israel/Palestine conflict is a failure of all humanity. However, this complex relation between the Palestinian prisoner and the Israeli jailer is very difficult to be summed up in one sentence. This issue opens the door for a need to write about the humanity and the inhumanity of the Israeli jailers. It is my topic for a new story.

The tears of the jailers are the pure drops that spring from the ocean of humanity, and one day they will purify the inhumanity of the conflict. Despite the existence of the identities of the “prisoner” and “jailer,” the “oppressed” and “oppressor” that were produced by the conflict, at some point humanity will overcome these identities and create a human identity that is constituted by a human bond. In the end, humanity is the light that shines out of the darkness of the conflict.

Conclusion

In exploring human suffering, I discussed the limitation of the language and the search for the “language of the heart” within the framework of a feminist decolonizing research. This article gives an insight into the methodological approach I developed during my research journey, resulting in the storytelling from the heart. It describes the process of interviewing the former hunger strikers, discusses the positionality of the researcher, and reflects on my immersion in the colonized space and the way in which this position informs my research process. The sense of being Palestinian frames my research process and approach, which is influenced by feminist decolonial theories. The boundaries between researcher and interviewee become blurred in this kind of research, which requires empathy and intimacy.

Notes

Works Cited