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Connectivity in Displacement A study on the relational identity of Syrian and Palestinian refugee women in Jordan

Simone Heidenrijk

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Connectivity in Displacement A study on the relational identity of Syrian and Palestinian refugee women in Jordan

Simone M. Heidenrijk Student number: 890706318060 MSc International Development Studies (SDC) Wageningen University

Supervisor: dr. Bram J. Jansen Chair Disaster Studies Course Code: SDC-80733

Cover page: Wedding celebration in Hussein refugee Camp, Amman, Jordan. (drawing by author)

August 2018

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Table of Contents

Problem Statement ...... 5 Chapter 1: Background ...... 7 1.1 The Product Design ...... 7 1.2 The Body of the Refugee...... 8 1.3 Women Refugees ...... 9 1.4 So … What Now? ...... 9 Chapter 2: Theory...... 11 2.1 Relationality...... 11 2.2 Embodied Experience ...... 13 2.3 Gender ...... 16 2.4 Patriarchal Connectivity...... 17 2.5 The Everyday ...... 18 Chapter 3: Methodology ...... 20 3.1 Access – Mannshiyya and Mafraq ...... 20 3.2 Access – Moving to Amman ...... 21 3.3 Multi-Sited Research...... 22 3.4 The Chicken and the Egg: Finding Translators and Respondents ...... 24 3.5 Research Methods in the Field ...... 25 3.6 Research Assumptions ...... 26 Chapter 4: Gender ...... 27 4.1 Gender in Connectivity and Displacement ...... 27 4.2 Love is the Basic Thing ...... 29 4.3 They Saw My Wife’s Face...... 30 4.4 Conclusion ...... 33 Chapter 5: Encampment in Jordan ...... 35 5.1 Home is Where the Family is...... 35 5.2 The Camp as Precautionary Punishment ...... 39 5.3 The Ghost of the Camp ...... 42 5.5 Conclusion ...... 46 Chapter 6: Manaeesh and the Mortadella Revolution ...... 47 6.1 Hospitality for Refugees ...... 47 6.2 Home Made ...... 49 6.3 Circadian Struggle in Syria ...... 51 6.4 Changing food practices in displacement ...... 52 6.5 The Mortadella Revolution ...... 55 6.6 Conclusion ...... 57

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Chapter 7: Violence ...... 59 7.1 Women as Shock Absorbers...... 59 7.2 Torture ...... 62 7.3 Violence in Hussein Camp ...... 63 7.4 Conclusion ...... 66 Chapter 8: Conclusion...... 68 8.1 The Engine of Refugee Production ...... 68 8.2 The Un/Making of Women’s Identity ...... 69 8.3 Women as Home Makers ...... 69 8.4 Women as Shock Absorbers...... 70 8.3 Women are Culture-Creators ...... 70 Acknowledgement...... 72 Photo plates ...... 73 References...... 77

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Problem Statement

The building shook on its foundation, with a heavy thumping that turned into a helicopter-like drone. A string of Hashem’s friends hooked arms. The muscles in their upper arms strained to steady each other, and jolted anyone back in line who delivered a kick out of cadence. The string gathered more people and vehemence, unfurling into a collective charge against war, exhausting its participants into oblivion. They danced dabke. A Palestinian dance on our Ammani rooftop, performed against the cruelty of war in Palestine and Syria. Most representations of refugees in politics and the media frame refugee lives not in terms of cultural expression, but solely in terms of war and exile. Their experiences are often lost in the big apparatus of politics and humanitarianism (Bakewell, 2008; Law, 2015). Their lives and stories are absorbed into the greater debate as if they fit tailor-made into the news on the Syria crisis, Assad’s war crimes, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, unrest in the Middle East, the refugee crisis, shelter in the region (Holmes & Castañeda, 2016)–take your pick. At best, refugees’ experiences are framed into a human-interest story, as an instrument to make the abstract idea of war conceivable (Cozma & Kozman, 2015). In these stories, refugees often are assumed to be victimized by trauma and survival (Malkki, 1996). This is especially so when they are women (Utas, 2005), something that is caused by the fact that rendering women with a double label of female and refugee –only when refugees are not men will they be accredited gender (Edwards, 2010)–, feigns the belief that these categorizations are exhaustive (Butler, 1990, p.3). Women are then portrayed as cut off from most of what they ever loved, and represented as if in an ever- expanding limbo, willing a new life to start, perhaps in a better place; a depiction as if they are not a whole person with a history, a past, a future, a culture, a family, a life. And not with a previous life that existed before the war, but a life that is being lived now. I set out not wanting to write this thesis on the premise of gender, because it fetishized women refugees. I felt that categorizations (gender or otherwise) obscured the humanity of people in displacement, and should be irrelevant for their story: lives could not be compartmentalized into separate parts, they had stories that unfold seamlessly (Becker, 1997), that do not cease to exist, and cross generations or oceans. Instead of picking and choosing what elements of women refugees were meaningful, I felt that we must understand their historicity; not through the lens of international law, politics, or humanitarianism, but through the lived experience of women affected by displacement. I nurtured this idea, but it chafed at the explanatory potential of this thesis; categorizations were necessarily embroiled with inquiries into gender and displacement. And more so, it felt somewhat like a personal relinquishment to admit the reality of gender categories in Jordan. I had expected that in Jordan I would be scrutinized on the parts of my gender identity that I consciously presented as female. I never realized that my entire performance was gendered, and would be assessed on its gendered norms, and above all, that I would feel that I was failing thoroughly in my gendered presentation across all registers. The gender paradox was therefore that I, in an effort not to define and categorize women’s issues myself, leveled the scope of my research to a plane wherein all subjects broached by my respondents mattered. A futile effort, because this made it impossible to limit the thesis subject, it denied the need for categorization, and erased the reality of gender in the field.

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This thesis therefore grew from an iterative approach that was vital to crawl out of the analytical hole I dug myself into, and that made it possible to recognize the ambiguity of gender and forced displacement. I argue for an understanding of women in displacement that is relational, and that acknowledges the contingency and opaqueness of gender, war, and displacement. (Dis)place(ment) is a moment (Brun, 2001, p. 19), what came before and what will come after shaped that moment, and it cannot be understood without seeing life as a process. Therefore, this thesis is a bricolage: an aggregate of experiences and moments, that together make up someone’s idea about what life is “The story will never end, Simone. Everyday there are new stories and nobody will hear about it” (Abu Ahmed, interview 31). The story –the rise and fall of igniting conflicts around the world and the news beat following its status quo– will never stop, and the stories of those experiencing this –stories fraught with fear, with violence, with fleeing, with longing, with family, with laughter, with happiness– will never be heard. So this is my attempt to let those speak who have experienced all that, and more.

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Chapter 1: Background

The following chapter will show how the figure of the refugee has become a product of international law and humanitarianism. Modern refugee categories reproduce historical and political norms and are constructed from a cultural western perspective that still reverberates in the representation of refugee identity, in particular that of women, today. Paradoxically, refugees are framed along a discourse of universal humanness that forecloses a critical inquiry into the history and modern day implications of refugee law. Without awareness of the Eurocentric and masculine bias in refugee law and governance, the normalization of refugees as products of intervention remains uncontested in public and political discourse. The understanding that the label of refugee is external to its recipients in the first place, and the apprehension of how refugee identity is produced in international law and policy, frees up analytical space to acknowledge the paradox of refugees existing corporeally and simultaneously on a plane of imagined political construction. Classifying people as refugees in international law, humanitarianism, and in this very thesis, whilst also analyzing how this categorization impacts people’s lives, is an ambiguous venture. Much like Haddad (2004) already wrote, “...the categorisation of concepts that are at once descriptive, normative and political would appear near impossible” (p.1). The tension between the opaque and conflicting realities of refugee identity and gender in Jordan kept me flustered throughout this research process, but it is through the encounter with politically constructed refugee categories and the humanitarian intervention where refugee identity as lived experience enfolds.

1.1 The Product Design Refugees are an inherent aspect of how humans organized this world. They are constructed in international legal and political practice, and have specifically been constructed in the context of the global nation state system (Malkki, 1995). The political development of a worldwide state system in the second half of the 20th century was the background against which the figure of the refugee developed (Haddad, 2003). Borders demarcated where citizenship was suspended and who did or did not get access to the territory of the nation-state. The state during this time thence became the ultimate paradigm along which citizen identity was framed: “the state acts as the ultimate receptacle into which these processes –of the constitution of identity, heritage, kinship- are channelled” (Rajaram, 2002, p.251). Identity, culture, and kinship were thus framed as if they were irrevocably bound to the territory of the state. The rise of nationality meant that simultaneously, refugees emerged as antithetical to citizenship, and as the “side-effect” of sovereign states (Haddad, 2003, p.297), because the exclusion of refugees from attaining citizenship was an intrinsic part of the making of the nation- state system. Thus, statelessness originated by virtue of citizenship; “refugees act[ed] to reinforce the imagined construct of the nation-state by forming the ‘other’, the ‘outsider’ in relation to whom the identity of the nation and its citizens can be perpetuated” (Haddad, 2003, p.298). Thus both citizen and refugee identity revolved around who or what was in- and excluded from the nation state system; the citizen acquired their identity and culture from their state ‘membership’, whilst the statelessness of refugees rendered their political identity lost.

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1.2 The Body of the Refugee On account of having abandoned the territory of their nation-state, refugees were assumed to have left their identity behind –as opposed to their counterpart, the fully identifiable citizen- (Malkki, 1992). Replacing the lost identity of refugees was a familiarity with their universal humanness, whereby acquaintance with the body substituted for the mind –after all, we did not know what occupied refugees’ minds, but we did have a fairly accurate idea of what their bodies looked like, based on the familiarity with our own bodies. This meant that in humanitarian- and media discourse refugees were often represented in biological terms, as mere bodies bereft of speech or identity, creating a “biological corporeality” (Rajaram, 2002, p. 252). In spite of a heightened focus on the body (especially women’s bodies), this attention to corporeality came with the analytical implosion of the person into their body, whereby the concept of the body absorbed the definition of the person. Because the western citizenship- model was the benchmark against which refugees were politically constructed (Haddad, 2003), the body was conflated with the person in refugee law and humanitarian practice. “[T]he individual refers to the fact that humans can be identified in single bodies, regardless of what we conceive the nature of them to be. The person, in contrast, is a cultural category that refers to how we conceptualize the nature of the self” (Hayden, 2006, p.481). Western culture in general defined the individual body as the same as the person and their sense of self. This resulted in the body being conceptualized as an individual entity, and this individual body being almost always adopted as the object of humanitarianism1. This amalgam of person and body is therefore what made the notion of refugees as object of intervention persistent; the refugee was debilitated to a voiceless body, thus an agency must speak on their behalf. As the figure of the refugee developed in international law and humanitarianism, and the corporeal aspect gained prominence, a biological managerialist practice (Bakewell, 2008) in humanitarianism resulted in refugees’ bodily needs becoming the exclusive receiver of humanitarian assistance2. Refugee’s experiences were then primarily identified in terms of survival. Ironically, the focus on the body resulted not in an embodied understanding of refugees, but reinforced the production of an institutionalized refugee identity, and systemized it along a more or less linear process. To illustrate; certain hallmarks could be ticked off; like crossing the border, registering as refugee in the host country, being assigned a shelter in a camp, finding a sponsor, bailing out of the camp, applying for resettlement, and so forth. This red tape of refugee governance standardized refugee lives into a managerial procedure. The production of refugee identity along a procedural timeline uncoiled any kinks in the political construction of refugee identity that did not fit the institutionalized frame, thereby “speed[ing] up the evaporation of history and narrative” (Malkki, 1996, p.387). Alternative cultural ways of identifying the self gradually erased from public understanding. Most relevantly, ways of understanding the individual as distinct from their person were abandoned from public belief. In spite of the fact that the norm in other contexts often defied the western understanding of the individual body as synonymous with a sense of self. Other social units, such as a village

1 The homepage of UNHCR describes ‘safeguarding individuals’ among its core tasks. (http://www.unhcr.org/safeguarding- individuals.html) 2 The UN and its partners in Jordan have a joint response plan to the Syria crisis based on a basic needs approach, which is divided in multiple sectors. The sectors are protection, food security, education, health, shelter, non-food items, cash response, and WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene). With the exception of education, all are primarily concerned with assistance focused on bodily survival. See further: (http://www.unhcr.org/syriarrp6/docs/syria-rrp6-jordan-response-plan.pdf#F) and (http://www.unhcr.org/590aefc77.pdf)

Heidenrijk/9 community, a family, or a form of tribal kinship (Al-Ramahi, 2008), were frequently a more defining organizational unit of society in other parts of the world (Zetter, 1991). In Arabic society, people identified themselves according to their relation with their next of kin or their extended family (Joseph, 1999). The corporeal understanding of institutionalized refugee identity was therefore problematic, because the categorization of people into the product of refugee, endowed them with a new and different meaning and identity –particularly as individualized bodies of intervention- from whatever they identified themselves as. This process modeled refugee identity as a pre-wrapped package in media and public discourse, while social relationships, personality, and intimacy receded from the public persona of refugees.

1.3 Women Refugees Gender was another departure from the categorical identity of the figure of the refugee. Plagued once more by the historical construct of citizen identity, refugee identity was highly male-oriented (Edwards, 2010). Citizenship has historically been modeled on the western philosophical idea established during the Enlightenment (Hayden, 2006), of a citizen as an individualized contract- maker who could agree to and act on a social contract autonomously from the community (Joseph & Stork, 1993). The citizen was able to acquire ownership contracts over objects in the natural world, and not in the least over his own body. This understanding of an individualized contract-maker implied a male figure –because men were the only ones allowed to enter into a formal contract– and excluded a range of people, among which women and minorities, for whom self-determination was not feasible (Joseph & Stork, 1993). As a result, in the 1980s critique arose for the first time that sex never had universal stature within the Refugee Convention of 1951, and that the structure of the Convention was laid out along an essentialized (i.e. archetypical heterosexual) male body as the norm for the entire population (Edwards, 2010). Critics renounced the Refugee Convention as it only bound states to its charter, thus acknowledging refugees at risk of state-based aggression, but obscuring women’s risks, because the violence they encountered often occurred in the private sphere and was refuted as personal instead of political3. This made women’s rights a matter of sovereign states to deal with under domestic laws, thus obscuring women from the Refugee Convention in the process (Firth & Mauthe, 2013, p.476). Attempts since to represent women better in humanitarian practice, through for example ‘gender mainstreaming’, created a more fetishized gaze on women, because women were then regarded in how they differed from the standard (male) rights. Utas (2005) posed therefore that the focus on women as victims is not simply an account of women’s experiences in war, but a reproduction of ruling cultural norms whereby women were represented as victims (Utas, 2005, p. 406). Whilst men could be viewed as persons, women could only be conflated with their bodies, creating a more focused biological corporeality that never allowed the representation of women to being free of their gender, and to be regarded solely as persons (Butler, 1993, p.18-19).

1.4 So … What Now? Academia has often examined the efficiency of refugee law (Juss, 2013), but has mostly taken for granted the conditions of its existence, that is, the fact that forming “the basis of much of

3 Even though violence such as rape was not categorized as a basis for individual persecution because it was thought to happen almost exclusively in the private sphere, it has been widely used as a political instrument of war. See further: Buss, D. E. (2009). Rethinking ‘rape as a weapon of war’. Feminist legal studies, 17(2), 145-163.

Heidenrijk/10 contemporary progressive politics” (Malkki, 1996, p.379), including the basis of refugee law (Durieux, 2013), is a narrative of universal humanity. Though this frame of universal humanity seemed like a recognition of embodied experience, it burgeoned a bureaucratic design that reduced individuals to a socio-technological challenge of successful intervention and management. But, in this research, the particular resists the frame of universality. Through studying the everyday, the habitual, the intimate, and the vernacular, I want to uncover how the people concerned by this frame un/make these historical developments in their daily lives. Hence the following main question:

How do women experience their everyday reality, and their relation with others, in displacement?

In my sub questions, I consider how a collection of grand and abstract themes are enacted and interpreted through the everyday performances of women in displacement. Throughout this research, I regard ‘refugee’ as but a moment in time and place, and women as the agents of what this moment entails and how their everyday experiences are constitutive of the structural developments of the world. This allows for a perspective that is vital for understanding refugees firstly as persons separate from the label of refugee, and only then as persons interacting within this new context of displacement and newly acquired identity of refugee.

1. How do women experience gender? 2. How do women perform their cultural identity? 3. How do women experience feelings of belonging in displacement? 4. How do women make sense of the violence they encountered?

The accessibility of the idea of the refugee as universal political figure, is challenged by the opacity and confusion of real lives (Becker, 1997). Only idealized notions can be fully universalized or categorized. This research will show that the definition of refugees as objects of intervention is too narrow to fully encompass their everyday experiences. It will show how women stretch the bounds of their institutionalized identity, and resist the categorization of refugee.

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Chapter 2: Theory

Existing literature have situated refugees as a social construct developed in the framework of the nation state, and authors have subsequently problematized women’s underrepresentation in policy on forced displacement (Freedman, 2010). They have made a strong case against women’s voicelessness and their victimization (Malkki, 1996; Utas, 2005). These scholars have shown that women have their own issues which hitherto have not been addressed, and shown why it is important that they should get addressed. These advances have been extremely important, but representation has not moved out of categorizations whereby identity is framed along refugee identity and female identity as primary/significant identity markers. They are then represented as integral to the humanitarian landscape and taken out of the context of their everyday life. These are etic representations of women in a humanitarian landscape, not emic representations from women in displacement. For example, even when (women) refugees do self-represent, these self-representations are then re- represented through images of images in western media (Chouliaraki, 2017; Risam, 2018), or self- representation is conditional as others set the terms on which refugees can speak (Georgiou, 2018). It seems almost impossible in western culture not to reframe refugee identity into a culturally comprehensible and coherent narrative. This elides the performativity of these representations, a paradox that runs like a red thread through this research too, because the narrative of the refugee women I spoke with is also (re)contextualized in a new analytical framework. This theoretical framework encompasses theories that emphasize relationality. I use Actor- network theory as a baseline from which to look at the world, and have conceptualized how relationality can be applied on the more intimate level of embodied experience and gender. These theories do not set the terms or subjects on what gender or displacement mean to refugee women in Jordan. It thereby does not frame women and their experience as objects to be represented, but rather allows for an understanding of how women enact their life in displacement. It acknowledges the performativity of cultural heritage, violence, home making, and gender roles, and thereby solidly locates women as active performers, holding enormous creative shaping capacities.

2.1 Relationality Of great importance and of particular influence on my thinking throughout writing this thesis was the concept of relationality. After the analytical hurdle of uncovering the origins of the separate aspects of refugee identity –as descriptive marker, political category, and as lived reality– as described in the previous chapters, the idea of relationality aided me in embracing the ambiguity of these aspects simultaneously existing in the same person. To me, seeing the world not in terms of solid objects, but in relational terms changed the spectrum of what knowledge and understanding meant; objects in the real world, like the bodies of refugees, and intangible concepts like the political categorization of refugees, could never be fully known, as they were an ever-changing collection of coexistent manifestations of refugee identity. Refugee identity was then not a once-seen-then-knowable concept, but comparable to Brun’s (2001) characterization of space; “a particular articulation [..] in those networks of social relations and understandings” (p.19).

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Getting to grasp with the concept of relationality was a reflective process, since the ruling idea of reality in the west is that it has an “…alleged stable, given, universal character” (Mol,1999, p. 75). This idea of reality is necessarily self-contained; because we are embedded in this world ourselves, and cannot look beyond and see another world. Compare it with, for the Disney enthusiasts, lion cub Simba looking out from a mountain when his father says: “everything the light touches is our kingdom”4. There really is no way to get around this worldview, because the horizon will expand no matter how far you go, so the land will not cease to be touched by the light. In spite of that, actor-network theorists have contended that reality, or the natural world as single universal object, is a “historically, culturally and materially located” construct in itself (Mol, 1999, p. 75). The universalist narrative of refugee law and the urgency of the humanitarian endeavor –acting now versus later- is therefore a prime example of the erasure of the historical, cultural, and political situatedness of the construction of refugee identity and of humanitarianism. This frame of universality forecloses a perspective of refugees other than that as objects of intervention, and hides the identity, kinship, and social and intimate relationships of refugees. The construct of the natural world existing outside of human doing developed during the capitalist revolution of the western world starting in the 16 th century. This revolution ushered in a new way of thinking, influenced by philosopher René Descartes, whereby empirical knowledge became the singular most important means of understanding the world (Moore, 2017). This resulted in a divide in the sciences whereby the outside world of objects and nature came to be seen as separate from the inner realm of the psyche. This was followed by two strands of academic approaches; positivism, that adhered to the natural world outside of human intervention as an empirical source of knowledge, and constructivism that adhered to the inner workings of the mind and the meaning given to outside phenomena as the principal source for understanding the world. Though scholars from both strands disputed how the material world could best be represented, through nature or culture, both approaches assumed representationalism of the world in general was an adequate method of knowing the world (Barad, 2003, p.804). A “Cartesian by-product” came therefore in the guise of representationalism (qtd. in Barad, 2003, p.806). As an ever greater legitimacy was attached to written knowledge, and the advancement of writing spread with the arrival of western colonizers, performed knowledge, often used by indigenous societies, was depreciated. Thus establishing the legitimacy of representationalism on a global scale (Taylor, 2003, p.18). Ironically, representationalism was therefore in itself a practice that was historically and culturally situated in western societies. The division between the external natural world and the internal psychological world lead to the conviction that knowing reality could happen successfully through representationalism. This differentiation between reality and representation meant that academics believed representation to be exterior to an entity, and which could only come into existence after a person or object existed in the natural world. “The idea that beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation, is a metaphysical presupposition that underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism” (Barad, 2003, p.804). Representations thus locate a person’s being as fundamentally inside themselves, fully formed in the physical world (in their bodies, if you will). This anchors a person’s characteristics as essential to themselves, instead of enacted in their performance (Barad, 2003). The way in which the world

4 The Lion King. Dir. Allers, Roger and Minkoff, Rob. Walt Disney Feature Animation, 1994. Film.

Heidenrijk/13 was regarded thence turned in favor of seeing agency exclusively as a human quality, thereby rendering the physical world as a collection of objects that existed outside of human agency. It thereby “imposed an ontological status upon entities (substances) as opposed to relationships (that is to say energy, matter, people, ideas and so on became things)” (qtd. in Moore, 2017, p.605). Hence why, helped by the written description of refugees in the Refugee Convention, refugees were canonized as a political category, their persona’s were fixed in a frame of biological corporeality, while their agency was often “...represented in the passivity of their suffering, not in the action they take to confront and escape”(Ticktin, 2016, p.259), and not, I might add, in their actions that are motivated by other things then displacement or humanitarianism. An alternative to the belief in representationalism, or to the idea that a fully formed world exists ‘out there’ that can be represented, came with actor-network theory. Proponents of Actor- network theory resist the universalist claim that there is one essential metaphysical world with different perspectives on it, and instead approach the world as made up of multiple realities or ontologies. “Talking about reality as multiple depends on another set of metaphors. Not those of perspective and construction, but rather those of intervention and performance” (Mol, 1999, p.77). This therefore does not mean that there are different (cultural) perspectives across the globe in making sense of a ‘universal’ metaphysical world, but that the metaphysical world is not separate from the world of agents, so that persons, inanimate objects, speech acts or locales are actors that shape the world (Law, 1999). Thus, actor-network theory “…treats reals as effects of contingent and heterogeneous enactments, performances or sets of relations” (Law, 2015, p.127). Reality is then not approached in terms of entities and objects in a generalizable independent world outside of human doing, but rather as relations that connect these entities and as enactment of agents that create the world. This causes all metaphysical objects, including nature and culture, to be “produced in relations” (Law, 1999, p.4), meaning that it is in their interaction that entities are created, shaped, and maintained. This makes the metaphysical world a performed environment; it is acted out by entities, not merely represented by them. Reality is then “done and enacted rather than observed” (Mol, 1999, p.77). The physical world’s coming-into-being is thus not outside of human doing, but is performed by our own actions and is made and remade with every thought and action that we utter. On its turn the metaphysical world is connected to us; it makes us. Reality is therefore perpetually crafted in our everyday practices.

2.2 Embodied Experience An important analytical shift of the enacted reality is that human bodies are intrinsic to the workings of the world. Bodies are not simply a creation of the natural world, only able to navigate cultured civilization as vessels captained by the concoctions of the mind; their material properties guide behavior as much as the mind. Moreover, bodies are elementary when understanding the world in terms of performance and enactment; the body, the disabled body, or missing body parts are crucial to how someone experiences the world. Only recently a paradigm shift in academia occurred that recognized bodily experience as innate to emotions. Before that, the body as a physical entity existing in the natural world was separated from the sense-making facets of the mind, therewith dividing the combined biological matter of the body and mind along much the same lines of reality and representation (corresponding to nature and culture) in the sciences. The body was therefore always seen as antithetical to emotions, and both were isolated as separate areas of scientific interest. (Gorman-

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Murray, 2017, p.357) This was problematic because identity was felt and experienced through the body; it is not just a vessel needed to live (Connell, 1995). Studying matter, including bodies, as possessing agency and historicity (Barad, 2003), meant that we could analyze how bodies of refugees were a cultural and political space of contestation (De Craene, 2017), and how embodied experience was moderated by gender:

Among its contributions, this work [on embodied geographies] underlines the politics of the body and its emotional resonances, including the ways in which our experiences of our bodies and their spatial encounters are inflected, connected and differentiated by gender, race, disability and sexuality, inter alia. These embodied, emotional processes are both inscribed on the corporeal surface and embedded viscerally beneath the skin, informing notions of self, identity and interpersonal dis/connection that locate us in grids of social power involving both privilege and marginality. (Gorman Murray, 2017, p.356).

The recognition that materiality and performance matter for embodied experience resists the notion of refugees as corporeal beings devoid of identity or speech. Instead, emotions are felt through the body; life experience materializes in the body; the knowledge that a person has accumulated in life has been lived through the body and has marked the body in the form of scars, injuries, wrinkles, posture, and behavior. The embodied experiences people have are forged over a long –and ever developing– lifetime. “In old age, embodied knowledge represents the accumulation of a lifetime of self-understanding. Embodied knowledge encompasses peoples’ historical experience of their bodies” (Becker, 1997, p.89). In order to understand the experience of persons in general, and particularly understanding persons as gendered agents, “[w]e need to assert the activity, literally the agency, of bodies in social processes.(...) I want to argue for a stronger theoretical position, where bodies are seen as sharing in social agency, in generating and shaping courses of social conduct.”(Connell, 1995, p. 60) This means that bodies’ physicality play their own role in how someone is positioned in society, and even possess agency to behave in a certain way. “Bodies cannot be understood as a neutral medium of social practice. Their materiality matters. They will do certain things and not others. Bodies are substantively at play in social practices such as sport, labour and sex” (Connell, 1995, p.58). It is for this reason that “embodied cognition claimed that cognitive processes depend on experiences that come from having a body with particular sensorimotor capabilities interacting with the surrounding world.” (Lindblom, 2015, p.82) The shape and anatomy of the body thus matters in how someone experiences and understands their lifeworld5. The concept of affect is among the analytical notions that came forth from understanding the body as biological object in consonance with the body as social condition. (Thrift, 2008) Affect is a felt experience of the body. It is a sensation inherently relational and created through the interaction and encounter with the environment, others, objects, or sounds. Affect is a sensation that is experienced before “will and consciousness” (Nayak & Jeffrey, 2013, p.289), and that comes before interpretation, and before it is outspoken. Affect exists therefore as a mode of understanding free from representationalism, and that is understood as virtually the only cross-

5 De Waal even discusses how animal cognition is highly dependent on anatomy, body shape, and bodily abilities, to understand how animals experience the world. For example, elephants’ trunks could be important contributors in their intellectual abilities. (De Waal, F. (2017). Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.; https://www.groene.nl/artikel/mieren-staan-nooit-in-de-file)

Heidenrijk/15 cultural phenomenon that is experienced by all humans, because it is seen as existing independent from (cultural) interpretations of reading a particular emotion, feeling, or instinctual urge into a person’s responses. “[E]motions are everyday understandings of affects, constructed by cultures over many centuries and with their own distinctive vocabulary and means of relating to others.” (Thrift, 2009, p.80) The practice of representing emotions as if they are universally shared across cultures (Thrift, 2008, p.221) is often accepted in refugee governance. The way in which the humanitarian intervention affects the local population is thence interpreted through emotions that are considered a universal token of the felt experience of the displaced, for example through the idea that refugees are grateful recipients of humanitarian aid (Harrell-Bond, 2002; Kibreab 2004), or through pathologizing refugee experiences as a condition made up of trauma and disorder (Malkki, 1995). This represents the personal experience as knowable independent from intimate bodily affect, cultural expressions, or historicity, and ultimately labels people’s identities as essential. Yet representationalism does matter when looking at how people vocalize their embodied experiences, because people use narrative as a medium to negotiate their bodily reality. Most people seek for coherence in their life course, and they “maintain continuity with the past amid the facts of change by interpreting current events so that they are understood as part of tradition” (Becker, 1997, p.4). The tradition in which these bodily experiences are framed are intimate, but oftentimes simultaneously relational because its affect is interpreted through emotions and cultural and social mores. Embodied experience thus elicit interpretations based on their affect, but this interpretation is contingent on how people make sense of their experience in such a manner that culturally accepted emotions, understandings, and morals fit with these experiences. The problematization of representation lies not solely with cross-cultural interpretations that essentialize the individual experience, but with people making sense of their embodied experience by comparing them to an ideal-typical representation of the life-course in their culture. “[B]ut when this concept of the life course is translated into experiences of individual people, there is a great deal of slippage because real lives are more unpredictable than the cultural ideal” (Becker, 1997, p.5). Thence it is through narrative that embodied experiences can be mended so that they fit within someone’s sense of self. Degenerative bodily experiences, especially that of aging, physical deterioration, or pain, are thence mediated and made sense of through narration. “The experience of present-day impairment is infused with a sense of being seamlessly connected to past, present, and future experiences and identities, both actual and idealized or expected” (qtd. in Becker, 1999, p.89). The quest for cohesion in life is thence partly negotiated through the retelling of events that have already taken place with a person’s current sense of identity. Transformations are then interpreted as a natural process of embodiment whereby the present and the past are united in the body, and the ultimate relationship between the Self and the body is forged over the years in the embodied life experience. The recounting of war and life in displacement can then be seen as an attempt to dialectically mend bodily ruptures and restore a wholesome embodied reality. The body itself and embodied experience then represents the life course and whatever a person has experienced. Narrative is thence an expression of the conjunction between the body and mind, and can provide enlightenment on how people make sense of their embodied experiences and internalize them as part of their identity.

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2.3 Gender Gender is an overarching theme to this thesis because of its fluidity and performativity. Gender seems to be a biological fait accompli, and gendered behavior seems to logically follow from its natural state. But rather than an essentialism, gender is a state of consciousness that, though informed by the body and its biology, is significantly influenced by the mind. It is thence an embodied experience that informs someone’s sense of self, and is a (sub)conscious presentation and performance that is relative to its context. Depending on someone’s surroundings, social relations, disposition, or their feelings, the presentation and interpretation of gender identity and gendered behavior can vary. In the cross-cultural context of displacement, gender becomes an extra salient and fluid point of reference for women’s self-perception, as women refugees must necessarily relate to their gendered-self in a different environment and among a changed identity. The traditional idea of sex and gender is that these are self-evident concepts that exist in nature, as a biological-given fact of life, before people have put any thought in them or attached meaning to them (Butler, 1990, p.21). But various scholars today argue that sex is not inherent to gender differences or gender identity. Instead they argue that the male and female identity are socially constructed (Nayak & Jeffrey, 2013). In this view, sex is an inherent attribute of the body whereby the biological characteristics are either male or female; sex category is the presentation of defining characteristics that place someone in either category; while gender is the performance of certain conduct that is considered male or female (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Gender can thus be culturally located, but as culture is not static, Butler (1990) brought forward her theory on the performativity of gender. She follows Simone de Beauvoir’s line of reasoning that gender, as opposed to sex, is not a born attribute, but one that is acquired. As a result, gender is not something that any person is, but can rather be seen as a perpetual state of becoming. Butler sees gender therefore not as a static identity marker, but an activity: Gender is performed every single day. “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler, 1990, p.33). Gender is created in interactions, because people behave themselves with the specific purpose of enacting gender, and having their behavior interpreted by others as gendered (West & Zimmerman, 1987). West and Zimmerman (1987) argue that “virtually any activity can be assessed as to its womanly or manly nature. And note, to “do” gender is not always to live up to normative conceptions of femininity or masculinity; it is to engage in behavior at the risk of gender assessment” (p.136). Thus, all human behavior is gendered, and doing gender is inescapable because every person is held accountable for if and how their behavior fits in their perceived gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987). This starts at a very young age, when children are taught to behave well, by responding and adjusting their behavior to being called a ‘big girl’ or ‘big boy’, as opposed to a ‘child’ or ‘baby’. Children are then brought up to recognize only these two genders, and begin to self-regulate their behavior and that of others in order to enact the ideal female or male attitude (West & Zimmerman, 1987). The performance of gender is significant in particular in distributions of tasks, for example in the household; it is through specific tasks that people perform their gender, and tasks are allocated to either women or men because they are seen as essentially male or female (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Our bodies, and how we inhabit them, are then culturally determined, which means that people are socialized ‘into’ their bodies, even though most aspects of behavior or posture may

Heidenrijk/17 become so habitual that we do not realize that these are not naturally occurring (Connerton, 1989, p.73, 84). Gender is thereby reproduced in our own behavior and in societal institutions, but rather than looking critically at gendered structures, individual persons are held accountable if their behavior does not hold up against gender norms –by denouncing their personality, intent, or choices. Behaving according to sex category thence becomes normalized in society, which opens up space to perform ‘natural’ male or female qualities. If these qualities are dominance in men, and compliance in women, then “...the resultant social order, which supposedly reflects “natural differences,” is a powerful rein-forcer and legitimator of hierarchical arrangements” (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p.146). Social hierarchy in Jordan meant that the rights of men, but also those of elders, were privileged over those of women and youngsters. I follow Joseph’s (1996) definition by defining “…patriarchy in the Arab context as the prioritising of the rights of males and elders (including elder women) and the justification of those rights within kinship values which are usually supported by religion” (p.14). Though privileging elders and men, this does not unequivocally mean that women in the Arab world are oppressed, a view often exploited in western discourse and politics to disguise neo-colonialist attempts at furthering the western international political agenda (D’costa, 2016). Moreover, forcing western theories of gender upon women in the Middle East was a form of cultural appropriation, and the implication that a different understanding of gender or womanhood was primitive both pathologized different cultural ideas, and was a form of orientalism (Butler, 1993, p.3). Butler (1993) argued that it is impossible to isolate gender from its cultural and historical context, because the way in which it is understood differs from place to place, which as a result moderates the understanding of women’s experience. During my fieldwork I recognized how inadequate the narrative of oppression of women in the Arabic world was. Rather, as West and Zimmerman (1987) so eloquently expressed, women and men in Jordan try to live up to their own idealized gender category, rather than asserting themselves as different from the opposite gender. In other words; not a everyone is an agent, and there are no definitive classifications for oppressed or the oppressor.

2.4 Patriarchal Connectivity Nevertheless, as Joseph (1996) suggests; men did experience relatively more freedom and privileges than women in Jordan. Because women actively pursued, presented, and performed female roles and activities in their daily lives, it befuddled me why they then seemed to confine themselves to the gendered bounds of life. I found some revelatory observations in Suad Joseph’s collective body of work, wherein the interplay between kinship and reciprocity is accredited with quite a measure of control over retaining the hold of patriarchal connections in the Arab world. Thus, to provide a culturally sensitive explanation of the structure of Arab society, I use Joseph’s (1993) idea of patriarchal connectivity to determine Jordanian’s and Syrian’s sense of self. The concept is a conflation of two interlinking phenomena; relationality and patriarchy. “Connective relationships are inherently neither gender specific nor hierarchical” (Joseph, 1993, p.453). Rather, connectivity means that a person does not identify his- or herself as an autonomous individual, but considers their spouses and direct family members as part of their identity. People’s sense of self thus expands beyond their individual body and own emotional mentality to include the needs and mentality of their family members. In fact, a person will only feel whole when they experience the emotional investment and moral guidance of others. They expect to be directed, filled in and anticipated in their needs by others, and another’s actions in

Heidenrijk/18 turn determines in great part a person’s confidence, determination, self-esteem, honor, and respect (Joseph, 1994). The familial self is often defined as dysfunctional from a western perspective because relationality is seen as antithetical to autonomy, and many western scholars have assumed that the latter is only possible if a person sees her- or himself as separate from another. These scholars believe that identifying oneself as separate is fundamental to reaching adulthood and similarly necessary for developing a person’s agentic abilities (see further: Joseph, 1999). This individualistic perspective fails to notice that a construct of self that includes connective relations is not dysfunctional. By characterizing a single construct of the self as successful these scholars pathologize any sense of self other than the individuated self. Many persons I got to know in Jordan –Jordanians, Syrians as well as Palestinians–, raised their children to balance a network of connective relationships. This network also expanded beyond the nuclear family circle to include extended family, neighbors, and friends. “Relationality, then, becomes ... a description of a process by which persons are socialized into social systems that value linkage, bonding, and sociability” (Joseph, 1999, p.9). I soon discovered the pervasiveness of connectivity in daily life, because it not only defined intimate family relations, but shaped the greater social relations in society as well. “In a culture in which the family was valued over and above the person, identity was defined in familiar terms, and kin idioms and relationships pervaded public and private spheres, connective relationships were not only functional but necessary for successful social existence” (Joseph, 1993, p.452-453). For example, a custom of addressing parents not by their individual names, but by titles that denoted their position as a mother or father of their eldest son (or alternatively their eldest daughter) was common. To illustrate; my host family was made up of two parents, three brothers and two sisters, with Yaasiin being the eldest son. Yaasiin’s mother and father were respectively being addressed as Umm Yaasiin and Abu Yaasiin —literally mother Yaasiin and father Yaasiin. This naming system thus emphasized the identity of a person in relation to their kin, and in particular celebrated being a parent and elder and revered having a family as a source of respect. More broadly, the individuated construct of self was therefore not culturally sensitive, because it failed to take into account the diverse practices of ‘selving’ in countries outside the west.

2.5 The Everyday Relationality as a theory is used in this thesis to open up a debate on categorizations. In doing so, it breaks up the self-contained idea that the world is classified and distributed in taxonomic categories. Relationality enables us to see how these categories are actually normative ordering principles that have developed historically to arrange our world. In light of this thesis, it allows us to see the world betwixt and between objects, and shows us that the ethereal world of connections is revealing of the affect that displacement and formal refugee management have on refugees. The analytical framework of relationality will therefore help to recognize the affect of refugees’ normalization as objects of intervention. Embodied experience as a theory challenges the separation between body and mind. Embodied experience effectively draws the body out of its object-status as part of nature, and assigns it with as much meaning and agency as emotions and thought processes. It thereby resists the bodily corporeality of formal refugee categorization, because it emphatically centers the Self as constituted by bodily attributes that regulate emotions (Gorman Murray, 2017), and meaning- giving (Becker, 1997). Moreover, the understanding of affect as autonomous sensation,

Heidenrijk/19 independent of representationalism, defies the culturally contingent indivisibility of the individual body with the person. Embodied experience thence allows analytical space for an unconditional understanding of personhood, because it facilitates the study of how women refugees define their sense of self, whilst recognizing from an analytical point of view that the selving process of women in displacement not naturally exists as contingent with their institutionalized refugee identity –but that this process is an external influence on their self-identification. As such, embodied experience shows how bureaucratic identification methods affect women in displacement emotionally, and shows how this institutionalized identity is then embodied, internalized and resisted by women. Gender as performative aspect ties into the theories of relationality and embodiment because it challenges the idea of gender as a cultural aspect that is separate from the natural sexed state of the body. The importance of the performativity of gender in this research appears through the essentialisms that are often ascribed onto women in the Middle East. Though women perform gender in numerous ways, women’s categorization along gendered classifications by humanitarian and government actors sorts them consistently into a rather arbitrary collection of requisites. These are formed by conditions and demands that are thought to be appropriate for people sorted in that particular categorization. For example, the categorization of women is often merited with demands related to protection –safe spaces for women, programs to prevent gender-based violence-, the assumed condition being that women are vulnerable In comparison, the theory of patriarchal connectivity does allow for a relative understanding of gender. This concept also relates to the theory of relationality and embodiment because it innately resists the western idea that conflates the individual with the person. Instead, it allows for an understanding of personhood and gendered experience that is subjective and based on reciprocity. All of the analytical frameworks in this theoretical chapter concern the taken for grantedness of categorizations and taxonomy that inhabit international refugee management. Scholarship that is looking critically at the historically contingent ways in which orderings and classifications became the norm, can set the tone in the debate on how the assumption of ‘normality’ is born from essentialisms. Through this research I intend to show that normality is a standard that was humanly established –it cannot be taken for granted that we consider refugees as object of intervention as normal, because it is us humans who have constructed it as socially, culturally, and politically acceptable. The notion of performativity and multiplicity that all these theories have in common therefore allow an understanding of refugee identity that is created by a myriad of variables in the everyday complexity of intimacy, emotions, and personal experiences of refugee women. This understanding is not supplied by the meta narrative of universal humanity in the Refugee Convention or humanitarianism, but generated by the vernacular of regular people.

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Chapter 3: Methodology

3.1 Access – Mannshiyya and Mafraq My introduction to Jordan was through a host family living in the small village of Mannshiyya6 in rural northeastern Jordan. The family had five children, three sons and two daughters, and it was here that I got a grasp on Arab family life. I particularly got a keen conception of the roles of members of the household, including that of my own. I found that being a guest is as much a performance as being a host, because I was expected to enjoy the family’s hospitality, a practice inherited from Bedouin times when guests were likely to have walked days before arriving, thus being exhausted and needing to be catered to. Thence, my stay taught me the details of the guest reception etiquette, which I could practice elaborately when the family moved to another house where every day new family members were received and shown around the new home. In their old home, it took me two days to discover which room in the house was actually the living room (that which had frash arabi, mattress-like cushions lining the four walls), and which was the guest room (the best room in the house, furnished with sofas). During my interviews with displaced families, the knowledge of how to perform the role of guest well was important to reciprocate respect to the host. It also helped me to contextualize how very little families in exile owned, for they had neither the room, nor the furniture to receive me in a guest room. Yazan, the oldest son worked in a local development organization doubling as a community center in the neighboring city of Mafraq. The center was located in one of the poorest neighborhoods, where many Syrian families rented homes. Its aims were to develop projects around professional skills, crafts, or simply over a free meal, but always with the underlying goal of connecting Syrians and Jordanians and build their network. This was very necessary , as with the beginning of the Syria crisis, the number of inhabitants in Mafraq doubled7, and this exponential growth spurred grievances by Jordanians that rising housing prices, schools functioning at or over capacity, and harsher competition for jobs were the result of incoming Syrians.8 The staff of the center were paid Jordanians, while voluntary positions were occupied by Syrians and rotated every three months. The center was my host organization and gave me an initial experience of a work environment in Jordan. I soon found Jordan to be a high-context culture, wherein social hierarchy is deeply intertwined with individual lives, and communication is highly contextualized (Kim, D., Pan, Y., & Park, H. S., 1998). In practice this meant that social talk was essential for the smooth daily running of the center, and work and private was never separated (hence why Yazan’s family had agreed to hosting me). The community center was also my initiation into a high-context culture wherein men and women who were unrelated spend much time working together, but were unable to associate further with members of the opposite sex. I gradually began to understand how my colleagues were continuously managing their (gendered) social standing in their community. Only through a mishap of my own making did I discover that the line they balanced in managing this was

6 Arabic phonology is quite hard to transcribe in the Latin alphabet, hence place names are transcribed rather arbitrarily and differ even on local place name signs. [for figure: Fig. 1: Population density of Jordan (inhabitants per km2) by governorate in 2010. (Ababsa, 2014)] 7 200,000 people (http://www.jordantimes.com/news/local/mafraq-ramtha-population-doubled-start-syrian- crisis%E2%80%99) 8 Buryan, E. (2012, October). Analysis of Host Community-Refugee Tensions in Mafraq, Jordan. Retreived from http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/download.php?id=2958

Heidenrijk/21 delicate. Jordanians communicated much, not only through verbal communication but also through physical contact, but touching, even in passing, remained reserved to members of their own sex. Hence why I had not thought twice about posting a photo of the workplace on Facebook wherein two female employees were posing together, while a male employee had leaned sideways in order to get in the frame as well. Though the picture clearly showed the women sitting at least a meter-and-a-half behind him, one of them sent me a panicked app message requesting the photo be removed from Facebook. When I asked her why, she said that she could not be associated with her male colleague in any way. Them being photographed together, however physically removed from each other, would lead people to gossip that she liked him. The male employee never mentioned anything to me, though he had plenty opportunity to do so, which led me to think that keeping up a chaste imagery was chiefly a woman’s job.

3.2 Access – Moving to Amman Through one of the English-speaking staff of the community center I conducted my first three interviews, who introduced me to Syrian families in the neighborhood while joining me as a translator. She, like the other staff members, had her own work tasks to finish, and throughout the first few weeks there was little to be done for me at the center. I increasingly felt both disconnected from the people and constrained in my freedom. The former because I could not participate in a large part of the working day at the center, for I could not engage with the conversations of employees due to the language barrier. I also grew apprehensive staying with my host family, because I felt like I was lazing around and could not bridge the distance to the other family members, unable to ‘earn my share’ in household tasks, or even to reach for my own glass of water. More severely, rural Jordan was conservative, and the threshold for women (especially those with a foreign look; including myself and many Syrian women) to wander outside private homes or workplaces was tremendous, because it elicited an almost constant barrage of street harassment. I wrote the following on my fifth day in Jordan, when going out felt like entering a minefield, having no idea what conduct was appropriate, and even the intention of going out was countered with the utmost concern by my colleagues:

There are so many things that are potentially holding me, and I think women in general here, back [from participating in public life]; clothing, the attitude of people or gossiping, sexual comments and stares, but even the most basic things such as bad public transportation, or places that feel comfortable and safe without the need to be in a high intensity state of impression management. (Fieldnotes, 15 July, 2015)

The threshold to go out was also heightened in a more practical manner; By moving homes, my host family had moved out of the proximity of public transport, which made me almost entirely dependent on two sons of the family for moving around. I felt increasingly constrained in my independence because I could not choose when or where I wanted to go, and though Yazan took me with him on some occasions, and my friend Nihad invited me out for shisha (which was in itself a violation of cultural norms; women hardly ever smoked shisha in public, and certainly not when they were young and single and accompanied a married man who had children), I felt increasingly locked up in the family home. I was aware that this gave me a firsthand experience of how women in Jordan lived, and a better understanding of many Syrian women, who confided in me that they felt bored in Mafraq, where they were not able to go out much, and often felt

Heidenrijk/22 discriminated and harassed on the street when they did. Yet this confinement stretched my need for independence; I felt confined in my agency and ability to make decisions, including those concerning my fieldwork. Thus, I decided to move to Amman, where I, as a foreign woman, could live in a shared apartment with peers, and could independently create and shape my research. Moving to the capital meant I began my research from scratch, while I continued to travel to Mafraq and Mannshiyya at least once a week. Initially, I maintained contact with the community center because I feared I would be left empty-handed if contacts and interviews in Amman were hard to establish. Within weeks, however, I had elaborated my research locations to Zarqa, the second largest city in Jordan that had been absorbed by Amman’s urban sprawl; to Jabal Al- Hussein Camp, an overcrowded and dilapidated9 Palestinian refugee camp that had since its establishment in 1948 become gradually part of the metropolitan area through Amman’s continuous expansion; and to Za’atari village, a village adjacent to Za’atari camp, where houses were intermittently interrupted by scatterings of tents. The latter location was termed by humanitarians an informal tented settlement (ITS). The clusters of tents belonged to displaced Syrians and were often organized along tribal lines; their inhabitants left Za’atari camp due to social tensions (often to do with differing tribal affiliation), and who were unable to secure formal housing. 10 The composition of its residents and their actual location changed relatively quick, because both were dependent on the availability of work in the surroundings and the possibility of staying in a particular location (its inhabitants either legally or illegally lived on land owned by someone else, or lived on land that was not ordained to be residential in local planning). I soon recognized that experiencing the different locales gave me a profound understanding of the subjectivity of Jordanian culture. For example, it was not until I met Jordanian women and female expats in Amman who seemed to elide many gendered expectations, that I understood how effectively locale influenced the stringency of (cultural) norms and values. For example, simple feats like driving a private car instead of traveling by public transport saved many Ammani women from being ushered to a different bus seat because a man arriving late could not possibly sit next to a woman.

3.3 Multi-Sited Research My fieldwork thus rather unexpectedly became a multi-sited ethnography when I moved from my initial research location of Mannshiya and nearby Mafraq to Amman. Originally staying in the margins of Jordanian society however became invaluable in terms of understanding the greater social geographical context. It soon proved to be an invaluable experience to get a broader understanding of Jordanian society. Marcus (1995) outlined how an ethnography that analyzes multiple locales is powerful by studying seemingly far away objects under the same terms: “To do ethnographic research, for example, on the social grounds that produce a particular discourse of

9 The estimated number of residents of Jabal Hussein Camp reached well into the 50,000, while UNRWA’s official numbers only counted 32,000 individuals, meaning that overcrowding and miscellaneous building materials posed health risks due to buildings’ dampness, poor ventilation, and vulnerability to cold. (Oesch, L. (2010). Proceedings from IFI-UNRWA Conference: From Relief and Works to Human Development: UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees after 60 Years. Beirut) (https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/jordan/jabal-el-hussein-camp) 10 Alshedeifat, N. (2014, June). Internal Memo: Informal Settlement Standards Operating Procedure and Implementation strategy. ACTED.

Heidenrijk/23 policy requires different practices and opportunities than does fieldwork among the situated communities such policy affects” (Marcus, 1995, p.100) The fact that multiple locales inevitably influence, shape, and produce each other, means that if they are studied personally by one researcher their mutual connection is experienced and understood; as opposed to these sites being analytically separated. Its strength is then that though the methods and results may vary in approach and even quality depending on the local context, a multi-sited ethnography analyzes all components as relational to one another. Multi-sited research then assumed that places and cultural structures are never disconnected from each other and systemic developments. For example, through my fieldwork I began to recognize and locate practices like hospitality etiquette not only as particular to my own culture or my host-culture, but as distinctly national, pan- cultural, or simply a quirk of one person or family. Hence why I discovered after having experienced the indulging hospitality in a Jordanian family, that Syrian hospitality was built around the ‘my house is your house’ precept, treating long-staying guests as if they were an intrinsic part of their household, who could thus serve themselves or do the dishes (interview 6). This does not mean that locales cannot display gross variation. Instead, the boundary on scope and research population that is framed in every research for analytical purposes no longer isolates a single geographical location, but studies locales as diverse but relational. I would argue that the disconnect between different locales is moved; it is no longer digested by the analytical process but must be internalized by the researcher as s/he moves from place to place. Within the scope of this research, the disconnect between different contexts materialized in the form of a major divide between center, Jordan’s capital city Amman, and periphery –the largely rural rest of the country. Amman and its surroundings (including Zarqa) comprise half the total population of Jordan, with extreme highs of 30,000 people per km2 in impoverished neighborhoods in Amman and Zarqa. (Ababsa, 2014, p. 257-267) When I moved from Mannshiya to Amman, the divide between these two contexts became palpable. It was in fact so profound that many inhabitants of Amman were shocked that I had lived in Mannshiya and made weekly trips back to Mafraq. Alternatively, people I knew in Mafraq said “Amman is Europe”, indicating the relative freedom of behavior and cultural expression in the capital. I had by then grown more comfortable taking up my place on the streets and gotten used to street harassment, but I continued to feel the pressure of needing to represent myself appropriately, not simply as a researcher, but as a woman. Like many displaced women I met, to fit within the bounds of what a woman could do and be in public in conservative places in Jordan I had to erase parts of my identity which did not fall within the realm of womanhood, or resist gendered expectations. Moving between two profoundly different locales in Jordan –the relatively liberal neighborhoods in Amman, and the impoverished and conservative neighborhoods or rural areas in Jordan-, often on the same day, made the cognitive dissonance for me profound: after three weeks in rural Jordan, I was shown around Amman by a male acquaintance. One-on-one contact with the opposite sex in itself had been quite enough cause for commotion in Mafraq (I had been warned not to heed invitations without consulting a close friend), but when we ended the day he offered me a beer in a café. I was shocked. While looking stealthily around, I asked “ is this is a trick question?”. He laughed and said, “look around you; everyone is drinking beer, no women here are wearing a veil, and the waitress is female, which is very exceptional in Jordan.” On top of that, seated next to us was a woman sitting in a short dress that left her shoulders, legs, and a large part of her chest bare. Strangely I had not noticed up until now, but when I did I immediately thought it was quite scandalous, followed by an internal reprimand for judging

Heidenrijk/24 someone else’s clothing. I had apparently internalized both a western and Jordanian conception of cultural mores, and they were wreaking havoc upon my own conception of identity. Nevertheless, this disconnect between both contexts became a vital line of understanding ‘the field’.

What is not lost but remains essential to multi-sited research is the function of translation from one cultural idiom or language to another. This function is enhanced since it is no longer practiced in the primary dualistic “them-us” frame of conventional ethnography but required considerably more nuancing and shading as the practice of translation connects the several sites that the research explores along unexpected and even dissonant fractures of sociallocation. (Marcus, 1995, p.100)

Multi-sited research inescapably produces experiences and data that is ambiguous and enacts diverse and contradicting practices. This makes it virtually impossible to understand the research site exclusively in postcolonial terms. If tension does arise solely from the researcher grappling with one different (non-western) cultural context, the researcher might interpret it exclusively according to how it differs or relates to their familiar context, ultimately revealing more about the researcher’s own culture and identity than that of the context studied. Research in multiple locales leaves the researcher no choice but to recognize the varied spaces, people, and practices that shape and produce life. It thus helped me to understand the different locales better, to see how discourse shaped the environment. And even made me understand how refugees feel in a foreign country.

3.4 The Chicken and the Egg: Finding Translators and Respondents Shortly after I moved to Amman I found myself, instead of keeping a reserved demeanor, wandering into shops, cafés, asking around for help with my research. “Opportunities in Jordan are literally found on the street”, friends of mine had said. And indeed, I was always welcomed and helped. I met only a handful of Jordanians outside of international humanitarian organizations who could speak English (including the people who have translated for me), despite the fact that English was taught as an obligatory subject in high school. Hence why I scoured the streets for people willing to translate for me, and was secretly in luck that it was the height of summer, as a few of the women who helped me translate had a bit of free time on their hands. So the most complicated and serious task turned out to be finding translators to accompany me on interviews. It was a kind of chicken-and-the-egg dilemma; virtually no Syrian or Palestinian women spoke English so I needed a translator before interviewing them, but I needed to know when and where interviews were taking place before taking up precious time from my translators. The solution came (mostly) in the form of translators who also functioned as contact persons through whom I could also arrange meetings with women willing to be interviewed. Throughout my time in Jordan, I was accompanied by seven different translators. Two of whom I met through the community center in Mafraq where one member of staff arranged my first three interviews, and where a family friend of another staff member went with me on another interview. Another two translators were staff members of organizations I contacted to seek out permission to interview their beneficiaries. The interviews I held with UN organizations or ngo’s were all held in English. Three women became my main translators; Tamara, Shahed, and Abra.

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I bumped into Tamara seated outside a tiny café in my neighborhood where many regulars came to enjoy coffee, social talk, a spray of watery mist from their vaporizers (not a luxury in over 43Cº), and a piece of watermelon shared by the owner to every guest sitting at his establishment at around four in the afternoon. She was my only regular translator who accompanied me on interviews around Amman whereby I had laid contact myself with ngo’s that had consented to me interviewing their beneficiaries. I met Shahed, the niece of one of my friends in Mannshiya, while seated around the kitchen table in Nihad’s home, which had become the default gathering place for a handful of his female family members. To my growing luck, she had just passed her tawjihi, Jordan’s final highschool exams, had learned English at a young age by talking with a young American PeaceCorps volunteer who stayed for some months at her home, and was becoming rather bored with waiting out the summer until she could start university. She proposed to become my translator, and throughout my time in Jordan arranged and translated various interviews in Mannshiya and Mafraq with women who were friends or acquaintances of her family. Abra I met for the first time at a gathering at my apartment’s roof terrace. She was a friend of my Syrian roommate, whom he had called upon after I had asked if he knew anyone capable of translating. Though Abra and I lived in the same neighborhood, a somewhat more expensive neighborhood, she had lengthy experience working as a social worker in one of Amman’s main Palestinian refugee camps. The families and women living there had become her friends, and she took me to see them as a chance for me to interview them and as an opportunity for them both to catch up.

3.5 Research Methods in the Field Daily existence is filled with tedious routine and with notable events, but precisely this is what shapes people’s behavior and invokes their sense-making abilities. Their perception of everyday social reality is what people experience as their true lifeworld (Ashworth, 1997), and to truly understand this, merited ethnographic research. This allowed me to familiarize myself with the people and their environment, and to submerge myself in their rhythm of life by doing participant observation. A significant part of ethnography involved spoken narratives. Many scholars have argued that knowledge is created in rhetoric, not just on a personal level, but on a broader social level so that it forms the zeitgeist of a particular time and culture (Foss and Gill, 1987). Abu Yasir explained how personal stories compared as a reliable and consistent reference to the chaotic discourse and structural developments.

I’m ready to speak anywhere, anytime. The system in Jordan, the media; they received the army, the Free Army, the system army [repectively: The Jordanian army, the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian army led by Bashar al-Assad]. The media are with both sides, you never know their alliance. If you say in Arabic ‘nam’, it means yes. ‘La’ means no. But you have in Jordan ‘lam’, which means both. So you will never know the real alliance. (...) I’m here for four years and no one listened to me, so ask strong questions because I have a lot to say. (Abu Yasir, interview 32)

The humor and humanity of these stories framed the everyday experiences and formed a personal (hi)story that countered the political discourse often broadcasted in the media. I found Arabic culture to be very much a relational culture, wherein people’s sense of self extends beyond their individual person, and includes direct family members. All my interviews

Heidenrijk/26 took place therefore with at least two women, and sometimes with up to six women at the same time. Finding more respondents therefore also came logically in the form of snowballing, getting referred to women by women I had previously interviewed or by my translators. Though I did not conceptualize gender as solely comprised of women, I only interviewed women –with the exception of four interviews-,because I found that once men were present among a mixed gender group, they would automatically assume the role of speaker, while their wives seemed content only to add to the conversation when they thought differently about a subject. Towards the end of my time in Jordan I had four interviews with husbands and wives, where mostly only the men spoke, but that was beneficial to me because I wanted to understand men’s view on their experiences and on women’s experience too.

3.6 Research Assumptions There was one important research assumption that was inherent to my research. This assumption was not so much a product of my data gathering, as well as a conscious decision beforehand about how I conceptualized my research. This assumption was significant because it shaped my understanding of my research conceptualization, and eventually affected the phrasing of my questions in the field, and indirectly influenced my research location as well. The assumption I had made followed Vigh’s idea of ‘crisis as normalization’ (2008). Vigh’s theory decontextualizes crisis from its temporary character and embeds it as a baseline from which people make sense of the environment. In Syria and in those affected by the Palestinian diaspora, this means that crisis is not a momentary shock, but a condition from which they experience and live their world day to day. Nordstrom said that “[t]he truth of war for those who live in its midst is a far more encompassing reality than one of battles, casualties, and survival skills. It shapes the very context of being” (Nordstrom, 1997, p.7). She meant that the turmoil violence stirs within a person is where wars are fought: the manifestation of war, of flight and displacement is thence identified in the everyday experience of someone who lives through it (Nordstrom, 2004). Crisis thus becomes an ordinary frame of reference and in the course of time is normalized as a daily context. These conditions persists in host countries where the fluid circumstances and instable environment characterizing crisis equally continue through the unsettled existence and in the thoughts of the displaced. Because the crisis as chronicity frame presumes the everydayness of being affected by war or displacement, agency must develop naturally like in any other context, not despite of war. This mode of thinking thus denounces that identity and agency are solely dependent on normative or political categories. I grasped the truth of this statement years later, when I realized I had not only interpreted the experience of my respondents in their host-country, but also my own experiences in Jordan along a paradigm of war –despite the fact that Jordan is a peaceful country that has only known brief conflict in 197011 and I had thence not experienced the reality of war firsthand.

11 Michal'ák, T. (2012). The PLO and the civil war in Jordan (1970). Asian & African Studies (13351257), 21(1).

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Chapter 4: Gender

This chapter introduces how gender is engrained in social structures. It will analyze how family and connective relations relate to gendered roles, and analyze veiling as a practice on the identity of women.

4.1 Gender in Connectivity and Displacement I tried to maneuver my legs, one by one, through the open car window. But the window ledge was up too high, leaving me clutching the roof of the car while I was gradually sliding backwards by my own weight. When Abra parked in front of my house and said that I had to climb through the window because her car door was broken, I had said “No problem”. But, aware of the unwomanly maneuvers I was trying to pull in the middle of the street in Amman, I resigned myself with the fact that I was not the flexible and elegant woman I had seen in films who was swinging herself into a car. Women in Amman’s street scene moved with modesty and reserve, so I took a somewhat less public approach from the driver’s seat, which involved an evenly unfeminine route of passage, straddling the clutch and the control panel. Abra was my translator, informant, respondent and way of access into the Palestinian community of Hussein Camp, a refugee camp established after 1948 that had since grown into a derelict, but full-fledged neighborhood of Amman. To me, Abra embodied the contrasts in Arab society; she was bold and independent, and like I maneuvered her car every time we drove to an interview, she maneuvered –less clumsy– Jordan’s gendered society. Gender was performed in every nook and cranny of Jordanian, Syrian and Palestinian society. It informed identity and agency, and infused everything one did. Yet it was also implicit, and was an underlying state of being that was just assumed. “When I first worked in [Hussein] camp, the people there needed to get used to me. They had never seen a woman without a headscarf.” It was a blistering summer and Abra wore short sleeved tops, strewn with colorful flowers on a white base. She used to be a social worker in the refugee camp, and her life moved between friends in the camp, and friends in the richer neighborhood where we both lived. Though nowadays a lush garden with fig trees enveloped her home and the walls were adorned with paintings from her husband and daughter, she endured the same experience of Al Nakba12 when she was a seven-year-old as the families in Hussein Camp. “Someday I will tell you my own story,” She said when we first met. Abra lived in a village in the West Bank, when in 1967 the Israeli military advanced during the Six Day War into Palestinian territory and sent Abra and thousands of other Palestinians fleeing further into Jordan. But even under the extreme duress of violence and displacement, social ordering continued to provide a blueprint for social practice. The gendered structure that was the basis of Abra’s village community was still present during displacement, albeit with a more urgent purpose. Existing gender roles meant that men and women naturally initiated practices normally taken on by their specific gender, but in the new light of day these functioned more as a sort of crisis response.

12 The catastrophe of the Palestinian exodus (https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2013/05/ 20135612348774619.html).

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Suddenly, all the women in the village were out of the houses. The men they have small radio’s, listening to the radio. They said, “There is a war”. The Israeli came to Palestine, came to our country. So we get our clothes, and very important thing I remember now is that my mum, it’s summer, it’s June and the weather is hot, but my mother she put me maybe three trousers. I couldn’t understand why in that time. I thought, “It’s too hot mum”. She said, “Don’t speak. Wear them and jalla, come, and follow me.” So the women –only the old women they stay in the village and the old men– but all the young women with their kids, they are out together. They left everything. I remember my mother took her jewelries only. She put them in her clothes, she hide them carefully. And she keeps some money, in a close place she can, and use them any time. So she closed the door, took the keys, and we walk. While we are walking, there is an old woman she came, she said, “Don’t leave your houses. If you’re afraid, come with me.” So everybody follow her in the fields. And they went into a big cave. And we stay overnight there. Of course the cave is a natural cave, not made by human. So it’s full of small animals; scorpions and this stuff. So all women all the night, they put their kids in the ground and watching the kids. And there is some men out of the cave, if they found a scorpion or something, they call the men and they kill them. The whole night the only thing I saw is big flashes. Like light bombs. It lights the place. So we spend there, and some of the old women go back to the village and cook for us in the morning and they bring food and bread and vegetables. (Abra, interview 35)

During the immediate threat there was evidently still a hierarchy of bodies, whereby normal-day gendered practices such as childcare and cooking continued to be allocated to women, while gathering situational information and physical protection was done by men. This inherent social structure therefore helped develop strategic agency, and the immediate separation between the tasks of men and women sped up the process of reaching safety during that conflict situation. Moreover, innate respect and trust for elders that came with a social system based on patriarchal connectivity was what helped Abra and her villagers survive initially, because they trusted and followed the older woman who showed them the cave they could hide in. Though there was no time to make weighed decisions, the ingrained social structure and gender relations in the Palestinian community enabled them to act swift and efficient in the face of danger. This pattern of gendered practices continued in displacement in Jordan. Abra’s mother moved 130 kilometers away from their home to take care of Abra’s sister, who had fallen ill with cancer and had to be treated in an Ammani hospital. Because her father worked in the military, at the age of eight it became Abra’s task to take care of the household and her younger brother and sister.

So I’m responsible for the family while I’m eight years old. And of course at that time there is no electricity and I have to bring water from the well. And there is no washing machine of course, I have to wash in my hands. And I have to make flower to make bread. To take it early in the morning, at 5 o’clock in the morning, to make it in a special place. I have to cook. I have to do everything. And I have to go to school. So our house is very close to the school. We have a wall between my house and the school. (..) So I have to wake up in the early morning, prepare the baby, clean her, feed her, and go to the place to make bread, get dressed and make breakfast for my brother, and go around the house to go to the school. Oh! And I have to take my own chair with me to the school, there are no chairs in the school. So my father he was very genius. He bring a rope, put a big needle in the wall, and he put the chair with the rope. So I can throw the chair over the wall and

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take it from the other side. And I was so clever, when I was a child I was so cute. So all the teacher they likes me. (..) Because I’m very clever, because I can read, I can write everything. At 12 o’clock I go back to my house, I have to feed the baby. And sometimes when she wake up, while I was in the class, I hear her because I leave the window open. So I say “Miss! I wanna go home.” She knows our story, so I go back to the home. Feed her, clean her and make her sleep and go back. We spend there four years. And now when I speak about it, it happened. But in that time it was very difficult for me. (Abra, interview 35)

Abra was raised in a gendered society; and her experience of gender roles was somewhat of a concentrated version of greater Jordanian society. Gendered patterns were instilled from a young age in children in Jordan. Though Abra was an eight-year-old, children in Jordan are expected to take on various tasks in the household. In poor circumstances boys would sooner be employed outside the household to earn an income, while girls were expected to dedicate their time to the household and family. It was therefore characteristic that Abra was assigned the care for her younger siblings and the household. Education for girls was encouraged in Jordan, but this did not translate in a belief that the primary duty of women was work instead of care-taking of the household and family (Rabo, 2004, p.165). Similarly for Abra, caretaking tasks remained of primary importance, even though she did attend school. Even nowadays, women in Jordan experience more difficulties in completing their education because they are often expected to remain heedful of their lives and duties at home and are not allowed to move closer to college, despite long commutes (Allaf, 2012).

4.2 Love is the Basic Thing I realized how much family was prioritized in the overall experience of women’s lives when during one of my interviews, a young pregnant Syrian woman said; “I study in Syria; here it is so boring, so I’m looking forward to the baby. Maybe I will have a goal in life when I have children. When you play with kids and they’re happy, everyone becomes happy. And when they’re sad and cry, everyone tries to make it better” (Eshaal interview 7). For this young woman, having children and establishing a family was seen as a phase in one’s personal development. In fact, in Arab societies adulthood was enacted through the balancing and maintaining of multiple connective relationships (Joseph, 1993). Personal development was therefore experienced by many women as cultivating an unfolding network of social and intimate relationships. A milestone in reaching maturity was therefore marriage, shortly followed by having children. This conception of adulthood was even tacitly shaping my fieldwork. Assuming that ‘women’ as indicator for recruiting interviewees was as inclusive as I could be, I noticed that my mobilization efforts for women respondents resulted in a research exclusively populated by mothers. Though my idea of women included adolescents, the idea of a woman in the Arab world was someone who was married and had children. In spite of this, family in relation to displacement in the Arab world has not been a topic of academic scrutiny (Naber et al. 2004). Nevertheless, many Syrian women felt that family establishment as personal development goal was not prioritized by Jordanian women.

We are talking about the women here, they are so empowered, which is good. But at the same time it’s destroying the institution of marriage. That’s why the divorce rate is getting higher. Wives here look at the guy as a source of finance; a mobile bank. She doesn’t look

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at him as a partner. So she doesn’t look at him with compassion, with love. Because love is the basic thing. This is what I noticed through socializing with Jordanian women here. Because for me marriage is based on trust, based on love, based on sharing responsibilities. It’s not based on material things. And I noticed that it’s material things here. I feel that men are oppressed here. Women are being unfair to men here. Because women are in control here in Jordan, and there’s nothing wrong with a woman being in control, but she’s overdoing it in a way that she’s not taking care of her kids, she’s not taking care of her husband. She’s independent when marrying the guy. But she’s not acting like she’s independent later on. She’s depending on him but she’s saying, “I’m independent”. But at the end of the day she’s depending on him. When he comes back [from work], he’s supposed to provide so many things. The woman, she’s not listening to him, she’s not taking care of how his day was, by just listening to him. And while he’s talking she’s like, “You didn’t bring this, you didn’t bring that.” We heard a big argument yesterday, from another neighbor, because he didn’t get the notebooks of the kids. (..) Here they see marriage as just a contract, and it’s dull, with no spirit. There is no goal of constructing a family, having goals and moving forward. They first problems comes up: They get divorced. They are not considering the wellbeing of their kids. (Nadia, interview 24)

Nadia saw women’s personal development that was not enacted through relationships as a deterioration of the entire family harmony. She believed women empowerment and individual development to be a trade-off. To Nadia, dependency was not, as it was often seen in western discourse, necessarily an unequal relationship, but a quintessential attribute of a working entity. Nadia recognized personal development that was individualized as dysfunctional because it undermined a woman’s role in the family. A woman’s primary role was to take care of her family and ensure that unity and harmony in the nuclear family continued. Because of women’s relational sense of self, any break in this family-oriented paradigm undermines her own mental wellbeing too. On a larger scale, Nadia understood marriage as the institution that formed the building blocks of a society based on kinship. Because she felt that in Jordan marriage had turned from an emotional endeavor into an economic endeavor, she felt this was eroding the institution of marriage. Marriage then becomes a commodity and family members become individualized. She juxtaposes between individualization and commodification, and a kinship and family model.

4.3 They Saw My Wife’s Face Debate in western public opinion and academia on gender identity in the Middle East is often held along the subject of the veil (Bilge, 2010). I initially wanted to ignore the subject, precisely because I felt that the emphasis on veiling was predominantly western, and women’s rights were often mobilized to legitimize (neo)colonialist attempts at western interference in Arabic countries (Fenster & Hamdan-Saliba, 2013). To me it seemed to be of a rather fabricated significance to be debating the veil as a definitive signifier for muslim women’s identity in the Muslim world because veiling is such an everyday practice in Jordan that rather than wearing a veil, not wearing it was considered a statement. Nevertheless, I could not ignore the fact that the change of environment that people experienced in displacement influenced their attitudes regarding veiling. For example, when Abu

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Ahmed crossed the border between Syria and Jordan, his stance on the veil of his wife changed rather decidedly:

My wife used to cover herself in Syria completely, including the eyes with niqab. In the border, they wanted to check her face because they want to be sure she is not a man, so she had to remove the cover from her face. After this they saw her face, so I allow her to take off the cover now. (Abu Ahmed, interview 32)

Abu Ahmed had a very exact idea of the veil; he saw the veil as functional, and not as religious in itself. Religiosity and morality were not innate to the veil, thus it did not matter much what style of veil a woman wore, or that Christian women in Jordan wore no veil at all13. Abu Ahmed meant that dress functioned as a proxy; he felt that seeing the veil as innately religious or moral mistakenly essentialized attire into a religious and moral prerequisite. Instead, the morality of a woman lay in her character as a human being, not in the material and transitory value of her veil. The functionality of the veil to Abu Ahmed lay in the different practices of veiling: veiling was functional in the sense that it was performed to enact morality. Abu Ahmed himself practiced veiling as a performance of morality. Had the veil itself been essentialized as moral, it would mean that Abu Ahmed’s wife having to show her face at the border would be a dishonor; and the consequences certainly would involve stricter veiling practices instead of Abu Ahmed’s relaxed attitude of adopting opener veiling practices. Instead, Abu Ahmed’s response to his wife lifting her niqab was highly functional; by allowing her to wear a less covering veil, he invited others to look at his wife and his family as righteous new neighbors. A less covering veil functioned thereby literally as a sign of more openness towards the community, and invited others in their new community to acquaint themselves with his family, while it vice versa invited his family members to start associating with their new community and its members, thus creating a new social network On the other hand, prompted by my question what the relation was between veiling practices and conservativeness, Abu Ahmed resumed his story to remark that women who covered up more when they arrived in Jordan sought to enact virtuousness through their veiling.

These people who become more religious here, they have something to hide. Most of them because they are prostitutes. In the religious areas, the women are more open in Syria with their relatives. When visitors come she prepares the coffee and food and she talks with the relatives. The people who change when they come here have something to hide (Abu Ahmed, interview 32).

Abu Ahmed thought that to these women, veiling practices functioned as a distraction. They were foreclosing opportunities to question their morality, while actually, they were hiding their immoral behavior. Morality was therefore to Abu Ahmed performed in consonance with establishing community relations. It was not inscribed into a veil, but it was a performance that was relational in nature. At the same time, debate often cemented veiled Muslim women as lacking agency (Bilge, 2010), and therefore as subjected to oppression by the patriarchal community when ‘men’ decided whether or not and how a woman should be veiled. But in the Arab world, veiling is performative. This means that its meaning and manner is constructed in

13 A small minority of around 2% of Jordanians are Christian. (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/geos/jo.html)

Heidenrijk/32 the everyday practices of women and their relations. It is then in the relations and negotiation between different people that veiling acquires meaning in their daily lives. It is not something any one person decides and it is often seen as reciprocal. In practice this meant that although Abu Ahmed assumed the role of decision-maker over the veil of his wife, he simultaneously made his wife’s morality contingent on his authority. For Abu Ahmed, the fact that he had decided his wife’s value lay not in her veil inscribed her virtue as an individual person, and extended her morality as a wife. The latter because it signified his wife’s respect for his decisions, thereby developing their reciprocal relation and the interdependence between his wife’s identity and that of his own. As a consequence, it was through the relational makeup of Arab communities that veiling acquired its meaning. Women’s morality was forever performed and negotiated, and although their morality did reflect on their families or communities as a whole, it lay not inscribed in their veil. Such essentialist understandings were impossible in the everyday mesh of Arab communities, because contrary to western belief, veiling was not simply negotiated by men too, but it reflected their identity as openly as it did women’s. For Rania and Nadia, it was obvious how men were agents in the performance of veiling. They experienced and shaped men’s roles firsthand when they were stereotyped by other women in their host community. Because men were identified along the practice of veiling as well as women, they must perform morality too. Therefore Nadia literally pulled her husband by the hand into her performance of morality, and paraded their dignity and maturity –virtues that are associated with marriage- by interlocking hands in front of their neighbor. With the same amount of vigorousness, her neighbor attempted to attain morality by withdrawing her husband from the performance by –quite literally– drawing the stage curtains. Men in this case were just performers, whereas women directed the play. But it was also women for whom the immediacy of performing morality was directly palpable in their interaction with community members. Therefore they played the lead role in resisting stereotypes and performing morality.

Here, we are married, we are covered [veiled]. We try to live a decent life, live after the crisis, and this feeling of threat comes from the Jordanian women. They think that we come here, and we want to take their husbands because we are Syrians. The social structure of getting married here and getting married in Syria is quite different. I started to take my husband, take his hand and walk with him, so she [the neighbour] can see: see, this is my husband! I have a husband, I’m married! And I was sitting with my sister, just sitting and talking and both covered, we weren’t doing anything, and this woman, she constructed a curtain system that she can close so her husband doesn’t see us. I don’t get it, we’re covered and we’re not trying to seduce anyone. And we are married, so every time we go out we take the hands of our husbands so everyone can see this. Actually [my neighbor’s construction] is a balcony, a terrace, and she designed the curtain for the terrace so he won’t look at us. And I thought; ok he can chill inside. You don’t have to allow him to sit outside. And we are just laughing at her, because we think this is kind of silly. (Nadia, interview 24)

Thence, for women the everyday performance of veiling could produce more immediate consequences for how they were identified in their communities. Because they physically wore the veil, women were continuously engaged in the negotiation over its meaning and manner. Like

Heidenrijk/33 the men, women felt that their religious or ideological identity was not inscribed by their veil, but they experienced that their attire was one way to manage their upkeep of morality to others. By performing morality through wearing the veil, veiling functioned as a spatial practice of making public space more accessible to women (Secor, 2002), because it lessened street harassment targeting Syrian women dressed differently from Jordanian women. Abu-Lughod (2002) likened the veil to “mobile homes”, because “veiling signifies belonging to a particular community, and participating in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is associated with the sanctity of women” (p.785). Women’s performance of what was considered virtuous did affect their own and their family’s standing in the community. For women veiling was therefore akin to a rehearsed theatre of morality. Nadia explained how she, as a Syrian woman, used dress as a medium to manage her perceived morality in her new Jordanian community.

We used to wear our headscarf as the first lady [A colored shoulder-length veil loosely gathered in folds over the head, red.] Now we started like this. [A black headscarf made of one piece of fabric, covering head, shoulders and part of the chest and back, red.] So we were wearing like here, and they were always saying, “Ah! Syrian women, Syrian women!”. So we decided to put it like this, because this is the way of Jordanian ladies. So we’re trying to adapt to show that, ok we’re Syrians, we live here, but at the same time we respect you. We respect your culture. We’re trying to find a way to communicate: we are the same, we are equal. We are willing to change our habits regardless. (..) We wanna live here, not according to how Jordanians perceive us, not according to Jordanian’s living standard, but we wanna live here and make Jordanians see us, perceive us as we are. So we wanna live here, and we want to adapt to the society and the culture and we respect that. But we wanna revive our lifestyles from back in Syria here in Jordan. (Nadia and Rania, interview 24)

Nadia planned to mend her negative standing in the Jordanian community by changing her dress style and holding hands with her husband. She expected that virtue was read from the enactment of virtuousness, and that this conveyed to the outside world that she was non-threatening. She felt that it spoke in her favor that she had made an effort to adapt Jordanian dress standards. It struck me at the time of our interview as odd that she did not care what kind of veil she wore one way or the other, a shoulder length colored veil or a black veil draping down to her midriff, because I thought that the style, color, and length of her veil must certainly have an inherent meaning to it. But to Nadia, it was the willingness to change that she felt made her virtuous, not the dress itself. She expected that the other women would recognize her effort of transforming her dress style and adapting it to her new social network.

4.4 Conclusion Muslim women are often essentialized as objects of cultural difference (i.e. they are oppressed) and/or threats (i.e. they will islamitize western nations) in many western debates. Yet I found that gender in Jordan is performative and thereby it is not a stagnant way of being, but it is contingent upon relationships with others, and often reciprocal. Gender was enacted in the everyday routines of life. The assigning of roles, and the ideal image of how one should be or act is often formed. which meant that the rights of men and

Heidenrijk/34 elders were prioritized. In the immediate threatening situation of conflict it functioned as a ad- hoc crisis response because gendered tasks were shared without having to negotiate about them. Despite this obvious agentic property of gender in Jordan, gendered roles are taken for granted by the men and women I spoke to. This created the conflicting situation where everyday practices are heavily shaped by gender identity and gendered roles, but to those who enact them, gender is not a motive or purpose for behavior or thought. Even more so, gender is not even recognized as tacit in every aspect of Jordanian society. Gender is thus a tacit entity in Jordanian society, but one that influences every aspect of society profoundly. The connectivity ingrained in Arab societies meant that identity was relational. Personal development was therefore not an individualized endeavor, but cultivated through the web of different relationships adults maintained. This made gender and gender roles a feature of Arab society that was also contingent on whole communities. The enactment of gender was maintained through relations with others in the community or family. Connectivity coupled with the tacit gender roles in society, this meant in practice that caretaking and establishing a family was seen as a personal development goal for women, thus favoring their relational identity over their personal sense of self. and was reciprocal in more intimate intersex relations. The veil was not essential to the religious and ideological identity of women, but a practice whereby women themselves often saw veiling as a performance of morality. Through enacting dress-styles they could represent themselves as moral, but their true morality lay in themselves. Thus the morality of a typical women’s item, is in fact created in- and meaningful of- the morality of the family and community as a whole, as a consequence of the relational makeup of Arab communities. Veiling practices are used to establish the morality of the whole family. But again, not in the essentialist way whereby many a debate claims that morality is enshrined in the veil itself (source), but in morality as a relational performance.

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Chapter 5: Encampment in Jordan

Refugee women do not simply create their lives in displacement after the image they hold of their communities in their homeland (Malkki, 1995). Whilst feeling a sense of belonging to the home they left, their life is also steered by their agency and negotiation over livelihood and community in their current locality (Brun, 2001). Following the Actor-Network theorists, I am looking at the environment of refugees in displacement as a social construct that is not a static domain outside of human agency, but that is created through social practice, and which on its turn affects social practice (De Craene, 2017). This makes space a cultural construct made up of relations, and place a particular understanding at a particular moment in this social network (Brun, 2001), and identity independent from any one physical space. The spatial construction of communities in exile therefore cannot be understood through their composition in displacement or in the homeland alone. This chapter thence looks at how the social construct of space in displacement affects the experience of the displaced and shapes their identity. This chapter thus assumes that everyday experiences of particular places and spaces are what people draw on to give meaning to their lives. Or, as Nordstrom said it; “[e]xperience is not something that happens to the self, but experience becomes the self –it is that through which identity is formed”(Nordstrom, 1997, p.185). I focus in particular on how women in displacement relate to the camp because they have all directly or indirectly experienced encampment through Jordan’s history of encampment (Chatelard, 2010), and obligatory refugee registration policy in the camps. When seen from an actor-network theory, encampment can be understood as a dynamic and agentic network. I will analyze how encampment is performed by the Jordanian government and how the experience of encampment forms the sense of self of the women in displacement. I propose that the refugee camp has an un/making capacity, and this chapter explains how encampment disaggregates women refugee’s identity, or shapes their identity as part of a community.

5.1 Home is Where the Family is The first time I met Abra, we were seated on my rooftop terrace in Amman, jutting out into the night sky on the top of our jabal, the hill. The views ran unobstructed from the streetlights below in our neighborhood Al-Weibdeh to the next jabal, where up-and-over the Palestinian refugee camp Hussein Camp was located. The camp was one of a handful of Palestinian refugee camps established after the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, when Israel was created. These Palestinian camps emerging in Jordan after Al-Nakba produced guerrillas who began to organize attacks on Israel from Jordan. Almost two decades later, the Israeli’s occupied the West Bank during the Six Day War in 1967, causing the camps in Jordan to further brim with Palestinian refugees who fled from the West to the East Bank (both East and West Bank were then part of Trans Jordan). Under influence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) many began to radicalize, and the Palestinian guerrilla’s now truly established their stronghold in the Palestinian camps in North-western Jordan, which had grown by another six camps after 196714. Their charges at the Israeli military led to Israeli retaliation on Jordanian territory, while the Palestinian guerrillas gradually established their resistance epicenter in North-western Jordan. The growing Palestinian power center in Jordan –a ‘state within a state’-, their refusal to coordinate with the Jordanian

14 https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/jordan

Heidenrijk/36 military, and non-compliance with Jordanian authorities caused growing tension between Jordan and the Palestinians. It eventually drove Jordan to push the militant groups out of the country during an episode in 1970 known as Black September (Michal’ák, 2012). The precedent that Palestinian organization gaining political clout had set in Jordan meant that ever since the military intervention in the camps in 1970, the circumstances for the camp’s residents have remained characterized by marginalization. Nowadays, the camps have evolved into urbanized impoverished neighborhoods that have become part of the city structure of Jordan’s cities15. When I arrived for the first time in Hussein Camp, its urban structure struck me as particularly telling of its past: from the top of the jabal, an earthen alleyway plummeted down the north flank of Jabal Hussein. The alleyway branched into numerous feeble stairs leading up to second stories, above which tangles of electricity cords looped the sky. The makeshift houses bore down onto the road from their hill-side perch, shrouding the ground level in shadows. Abra, eyeing jabal Hussein’s slope, explained how pervasively and comprehensively the physical environment differed for those at the bottom rung. Jabal Weibdeh and jabal Hussein were only a couple hundred meters apart, but separated by the gorge of Al Balat, downtown. Amman is known as the city of a thousand stairs, and a friend of mine once mentioned that the rich lived perched on their hilltops, while down in the wadis the less well-off neighborhoods lay in the run-off. Sometimes literally; less than a month after I left, Al Balat and other low-lying parts of the city were plagued by flash floods, killing four16. Amman’s stairs seemed an ironic reminder of the bars of the societal ladder as Abra, who had much experience as a social worker in Hussein Camp, explained that its residents could spare little time looking for nuances. And that for Camp Hussein’s residents everything was, quite literally, black and white.

We have time to educate ourselves, to dream and think. So when we have time we realize things about ourselves and our environment. So colors for instance, this shirt is maybe soft blue to you because you see and understand the different shades of colors. You have different names for them and you differentiate between them. But to them, this is just blue, and all those other shades as well. Because they don’t have time to think about these things. They have to survive. (Abra, Fieldnotes, August 21, 2015)

Oftentimes during our interviews, Abra and her friends alluded to how the decrepit infrastructure of the Palestinian camps was an international political strategy to break the Palestinian spirit. According to them, the poor circumstances of Hussein Camp’s residents were designed to keep them occupied with survival, and meant to induce submissiveness in its occupants, and in particular in the men to ensure their docility prevented them from political mobilization (Achilli, 2015). Faring well, in the case of the Palestinian community in Hussein Camp, could well materialize in the form of another bout of resistance against the Israeli’s or Jordanian government. The squalor in the camp and the subsequent marginalization that took hold after Black September had indeed succeeded in its goal to distract the young men from political organization, both because they lost their political agency, and because being able to see beyond the immediate need to survive gave men a broader masculine ideal –now incorporating identities of bread-winner and religious piety- and an urge toward better things outside of the camp (Achilli, 2015; Coates, 2015).

15 Achilli, Luigi. (2015). Al-Wihdat Refugee Camp: Between Inclusion and Exclusion. Jadaliyya. 16 http://www.jordantimes.com/news/local/four-dead-heavy-downpour-wreaks-havoc-amman

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On the bottom of the trench-like alley, Abra and I circumvented scattered trash, and talked with the children on the street before entering Nadeemah’s house, where a curtain held aside by a little girl functioned as the front door. Stairs in the hallway provided access to the upstairs family’s house, but the corridor resembled a mine shaft in terms of darkness and confinement. It opened up into a kitchen doubling as a living room featuring some cupboards, a sink and a table with laptop. The rest of the house comprised a bedroom and a guestroom furnished with two couches, two chairs, a kite adorning the wall to cover up electricity boxes, and a squawking parrot. The home was a patchwork of stone, cement and brick, and was lit up, lacking windows, entirely by light bulbs. The urban fabric of concrete, steel and flagstones conveyed much about the social life and importance of family ties than met the eye, if you knew where to look. Despite the transient nature of their (physical) circumstances, securing a suitable house for their family was one of the most valuable and time-consuming pursuits for Palestinian women in displacement.

The most important thing for Palestinians is to have a house, because all of them when they are [in] their countries, they have houses. They are not poor [in Palestine]; they have land, trees and everything in their houses. And when they left their countries, they came without anything. That’s why Palestinian people are very related to their land and their house. So the first goal of a Palestinian woman is to make a house, even if it’s one room. So I kept all my gold for this moment, to build a house. So one of my relatives lived in a house, and I buy the roof. And one room with a bathroom, just to keep my family in this place. Because I feel safe when I have a house, because I lost my house. There are no windows, no doors for the room. And nothing to eat, nothing to cover my kids. So the neighbors are giving me food, and give me clothes, and one day I find a small carpet in the garbage. I took it and clean it and use it to cover the floor. I swear to God that I used to put a sheet in front of the windows because there was no windows, only holes. I have very bad memories, and I spend very bad days. More darker than the night back then. (Faryat, interview 22)

Faryat implicated that building a house after exile emanated from the need to evade instability and insecurity due to the loss of a home, both literally and figuratively as the idea of a ‘homeland’. The home for women provided a chance at oversight over the comings and goings and well- being of their family members. Homes in Hussein Camp functioned as a spatial network, facilitating a constant walking in of relatives and neighbors with whom the women of the house maintained relationships or shared household tasks (Shami, 1996). In contrast to the public environment where women were more restrained in their freedom of movement and their agentic abilities, the homes in Hussein camp allowed women influence in their family circle, as well as in their communities. These connections were facilitated by the rickety way in which houses were built; many houses bore remnants of the quintessential identifier of a camp; having no door but only cloth as a front door was alike the tents that once occupied this neighborhood. The built environment of the Palestinian neighborhoods was therefore a stark example of how its past capacity shaped its present outlook. That is not to say that the women of the camp were not desiring of, and continually searching for ways to improve their houses, but that the ramshackle disarray of concrete, brick and the occasional tarpaulin, could not be underestimated as a component of the

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Palestinian community; the exact underdevelopment of the camp facilitated social connections more than any wooden door would;

Everybody in the camp knows each other; they know their stories. I tell you something; in the past when there were no walls between the buildings, when the man came back from his work he wouldn’t recognize if the person in his house was his wife or not. It’s a joke of course, but you can hear the voice of the neighbors. Everything, you know about them. (...) We know all each other’s details. Even if you don’t know you will ask. It’s normal and it’s legal. And this is very difficult to explain; if you need something from another woman or man, he has to give it to you; bamoon. [The word] is not Fusha, it’s a common language; it means that I will answer you. (Nadeemah, Interview 16)

The allusion to Hussein Camp’s past and present circumstances, (re)constructed the present day sense of community as a development created by the collective chronicle of events experienced by its residents. In the dialectic of the Palestinians the past experience of exile is leading for the present experience: the environment and its characteristics like poverty and marginalization in this case have turned the physical world firstly into a relation. More than a place or neighborhood, Hussein Camp is to its residents a social relation where they share a space, but especially their (hi)story (Martin, 2015, p.15). Ironically then, the camp’s marginalization facilitated the social cohesion of the Palestinian community This social connection to the neighborhood tacitly developed amongst the children. “We used to be in the street always. The house is too small. We have some songs about Palestine that our mother taught us and we used to sing it on the street” (Nadeemah, interview 16). Thus from a young age Palestinian children become intimately familiar with their environment, and literally run, jump or crawl in engagement with their surroundings and so simultaneously develop a sense of community. When we arrived at Hussein Camp, Abra leant out of her car window to compliment one of the little girls playing in the dust on her clothes and shoes. “Merhaba habibati, hello darling, what a pretty dress you are wearing.” She turned to me and explained, “I talk with them because otherwise they don’t like me and they throw stones on my car. Usually I park in the alleyway in front of my friend’s house because my friends can watch my car. Because it’s taken now I need to find a spot where it’s safe and they won’t throw stones on it.” The interaction with Hussein Camp as a physical place meant that the children had taken ownership of their environment and therefore acted as gatekeepers as to whom could enter their living space. The social cohesion that flourished from the shared living space became a mutually reinforcing cycle. It was clear to me that different social conventions ruled here: respect and sympathy could be developed through familiarity through time or who-knows-who and kindness or goodwill. The camp’s space thus merited adjusted rhetoric and behaviorisms fitting the context and social idea of the camp. Not only for me as a visitor but also for its residents. There was thus an invisible geographical boundary that ran parallel with a social perimeter that distinguished the residents of Hussein Camp from the surrounding city. The years leading up to the 1970 violent expulsion of Palestinian rebels from refugee camps in Jordan have left their mark on the modern-day outlook of the camps. The decaying and impoverished infrastructure and buildings in the camps mirror the obliteration of Palestinians in today’s society. Many feel that this marginalization was a conscious design to assure the (political) docility of the camp’s population. Indeed, having to secure adequate shelter was a priority for

Heidenrijk/39 women in the early years of their arrival in the camp, as is maintaining their property and having the financial means to do so today. Nevertheless, buildings’ flimsy construction cultivated close social relationships between neighbors. The resulting social cohesion thence facilitated a strong sense of Palestinian union, which was embedded in and politicized by referring (back) to the expulsion from their land from 1948 onwards. Paradoxically, the Palestinian refugee camps’ squalor and marginalization have thus induced a strong sense of Palestinian solidarity, and is reframed by camp inhabitants as a political statement and a form of resistance against Palestinian repression.

5.2 The Camp as Precautionary Punishment In contrast to the Palestinian collective identity, Syrians were far less unified. The social cohesion rife in the Palestinian communities in exile was lacking in the social relations among displaced Syrians. Under Assad’s regime, and especially since the uprising, many Syrians I spoke to had been sensitized to scrutiny from the Syrian regime in all nooks and corners of society. Paul, deputy director of UNHCR Jordan, explained; “People are not just fleeing from war, but they are actually fleeing from forty years of Assad’s rule. They are cautious of who these other Syrians are because there might be representatives from Assad’s regime still” (Paul, UNHCR, interview 34). Many Syrians were wary of their fellow nationals, and the government of Jordan built on this resentment. To the Jordanian authorities it was the Palestinian precedent of 1970 when Jordan was on the brink of a serious civil war with the Palestinian rebels, that led them to estrange and disunify Syrian refugees from each other and from the daily implementation of refugee administration as much as possible. To achieve this effect, Jordan enacted an encampment policy that disassociated Syrians from each other and from the camp politics. The design of refugee governance at once disaggregated identities and made refugees amorphous. Disaggregation meant that a holistic identity was standardized into a categorical identity. Someone’s individual needs and wishes were categorized along formalized categorizations. This implementation of refugee law allowed people to make themselves known (however obligatory) as refugee and earned them access to the resources provided by the refugee intervention (Zetter, 1991). But simultaneously, the disaggregation process individuated people in so far that registration covered a single individual (a manifestation of the bodily corporeality of refugees because individualized aid was guaranteed through the use of iris scanners)17, and prescribed the needs of a person in absolute categorical terms. Hence the identity of a person was standardized along a mold that was identical for everyone, and was based around individual basic human needs. In Jordan, this disaggregation process was initiated as soon as Syrian refugees had crossed the border and needed to register for a refugee card. “Only for this registration card [we waited]. Because every day they have two- to three thousand people arrive to Za’atari. So we couldn’t stay there, it was too crowded. I was in the line since two o’clock in the day until next day four o’clock in the morning, I was standing, and my number [in line] was two hundred. In the moment we got our card from the UNHCR I took my family and went” (Dyab, interview 26). The sheer number of people registering and the duration of the wait was an embodying experience of amorphousness, while the administrative process of registration implemented the disaggregation of personal identity.

17 http://livingonone.org/registration-refugee/

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The process did not allow any diversion from the categorical approach of identifying persons. In practice this often required a large amount of subordination by the Syrians. Something that enhanced a feeling of powerlessness and a loss of self-determination the longer people were exposed to it. Zaada, a mother of two, told me that she had an especially difficult time negotiating relations with those who had an authoritative position in the camp. But she felt like she had little choice when she first arrived; it was either the subjection to the administrative control of the Jordanian government, or being excluded from humanitarian service provision by the Jordanian government and UNHCR. “I can tell you a lot about it because we were the first ones there. We opened Azraq camp”, she smirked.

Many of the staff and Jordanian military working in the camp were disrespectful to me and my family. They called us ‘cows’ because they saw us as cattle being herded in this place. Whenever there was a problem and I went to them for help they would just ignore us. The situation was so tough because the camp is located in the middle of the desert, the circumstances are tough there. If you needed anything it took a long time to wait before anything happened. I hated the people there because we got out from Syria because there was no respect there and the circumstances were really bad. We didn’t go out of Syria to live like this! (Zaada, Interview 14)

Spending a longer time in the camps meant a longer psychological strain in terms of having to deal with being subjected to the institutionalized identity. The camp management operated as such that refugee identity was disassociating a person’s holistic sense of self and their connection to the built camp environment. The disaggregation of identity’s was therefore also institutionalized in the built construction of the camp. In Arab societies, the relational identity of persons extends to family members and other community members, whereby the family home to women was a space with a dual purpose; it functioned not only as a safe haven away from the public space, but as a heart in which the individuals of a family united their lives. To women, it was a direct tangible center around which family life revolved, and a space wherein privacy and family decisions were made. The living arrangements in the camp was to many women a huge contributor to an unhealthy family life. “In the camp you get everything; the gas [for cooking], the food, electricity, everything is available. But it’s not a good atmosphere for a family to live there” (Hamida, interview 26). The privacy of the home was an important issue because, in spite of the Bedouin tradition in Jordan and southern Syria, almost every family had left a nomadic existence behind and built a house, often hanging curtains around the balcony or, in the more luxurious homes, installing tinted windows to permit women to roam around the house without hijab. But in the camps, Syrian women felt the public bathrooms, -with its accompanying problems like queuing, no privacy and exposure to those with malicious (sexual) intent- to be inadequate.

It’s so hard to live there in the camp. (...) It’s public bathrooms, so every time you need to go you have to wait in line. Minimum six or seven people, so by the time you feel like to, you need to go. You can’t wait. It’s a long way to walk, and the women don’t give kids water in the night, so they don’t have to carry the kids during the night to the bathroom. So before they go to sleep they can’t drink. They don’t have water taps, they go to the tanks and fill water bottles. Yesterday I went to Za’atari to do some business and I felt bad for the people there. (Mahreen, interview 6)

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Mahreen deemed it unsafe in the camp to bring her child to the bathroom at night because she was afraid of other people who could harm them. Feeling that she was unable to answer to her child’s thirstiness in a desert where temperatures could rise over forty degrees centigrade in the summer, Mahreen experienced the camp as a space where she could not guarantee the mental and physical health of her family. The disaggregation of refugee’s identities meant that their individual identity was not considered, but that they were individually counted in the camp’s numbers as beneficiaries. This resulted therefore in the fact that camp services were standardized, and that the public bathrooms were the same for everyone. But humanitarian organizations soon experienced the backlash against this categorization because people started to resist standardized bathroom facilities. The camp’s design did not incorporate the relational identity of Arab people, but instead operated along a frame wherein people were primarily distinguished along displacement. The design of the bathrooms was therefore not adapted to fit Arabic norms of family unity, and women’s privacy in the home.

It is very necessary to stay relevant. Because the design of aid is adjusted to the context. For instance in Za’atari, there were communal bathrooms, but people don’t like these at all. So they started building their own private latrines at their houses. So now we also look at how to build proper private latrines and make sewerage systems equipped for private bathrooms. (Maaike, UNICEF, interview 9)

The (mental) wellbeing of women relied upon the wellbeing of the family as a unit, but this relationality was not taken into account in the construction of the camp. Instead, people were exclusively identified according to their refugee status, and consequently displacement was often framed by humanitarian actors, through their very mandate, as a problem to be solved through their assistance and to satisfy basic human needs first. Syrian’s full identity, including their cultural identity, was therefore neglected in the design of aid. The consequence was that eight out of ten Syrians I spoke to about their time in one of the camps told me they had left –either with or without permission- within two days. These numbers correspond exactly to the percentage of refugees who live outside of the Jordanian refugee camps, a percentage that has been fluctuating around eighty percent for years 18. The disaggregation of refugee identity that is leading in Jordan’s encampment policy is used as a prevention method to discourage Syrians from connecting. The Palestinian precedent of a ‘state-within-a-state’ in the 1970s, when rebels started mobilizing politically to retaliate against the Israeli occupation, using Palestinian refugee camps on Jordanian soil (Michal’ák, 2012), meant that the government of Jordan constructed the daily administration of the present-day camps for Syrian refugees along a design of individualized subjection. The obligatory refugee registration rule disaggregated Syrian’s full identity by reconstructing them as an object of the humanitarian intervention. This was especially felt when dealing with authority figures in the camp, who showed little interest and even outright disdain for the individual needs of the camp inhabitants. By physically building the camps along a design of an amorphous population, with public bathrooms for all camp inhabitants, women could not feel safe within the private space of the bathroom. Despite women feeling unsafe in the public sphere where there was not only a risk of (sexual) harassment, but where Syrians had learned to associate the social environment with

18 http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=107

Heidenrijk/42 risking arrest by Assad’s forces, there was in essence virtually no private space inside the camps. The camps were thus constructed as a precautionary punishment for Syrians to maintain their distrust of the public sphere, and keep them from organizing either socially or politically.

5.3 The Ghost of the Camp The refugee camp, rather than simply being a place for a humanitarian intervention, was actually a performance. The process of encampment, the nationwide policy of managing incoming Syrian refugees in camps, was used as a method to establish a social environment of uncertainty. To discourage Syrian refugees from mobilizing into a militant organization like the Palestinians in 1970, or from forming a permanent presence in Jordan –like the at least two million Palestinians who were granted Jordanian citizenship after the creation of the Israeli state (Chatelard, 2010)- the policy of encampment, and the requirement to spend time in a refugee camp, however brief, enacted a feeling of uncertainty in its subjects. A major element in this construct was the natural environment, because the desert became a symbolic representation of Jordan’s refugee intervention and asylum policy to the hundreds of incoming Syrian refugees.19 Coupled with Jordan’s registration and ‘bail-out’ policy20, and the criminalization of paid work21, the daily life of Syrians who lived outside of the camp was still affected by the government’s refugee management practices. Encampment was therefore a performance of transience affecting life in-, but also outside of the camp. Za’atari in the desert was designed to be associated with impermanence. It, and the later established Azraq camp, were set up in an environment where everyone during the summer languished in the sweltering heat that pressed on the parched earth, while in winter tents came plunging down with heavy snow loads. “In the beginning [UNHCR was] indeed not really doing any activities that made it any easier for people to stay here. The government was really concerned about that, take for example the fact that when we started Za’atari the word ‘village’ was out of the question. They actually banned all concrete from the camp because anything that related to permanency was shunned” (Paul, interview 34). The geography of the refugee camps in the middle of the desert meant that the lurking sensation of heat, cold, or thirst was often poignantly present. Its climate was not agreeable to the lifestyle of most Syrian families, who often had had their homes in Syria in cities or agricultural areas. The scorching sands of the desert were therefore instrumental in experiencing a threatening feeling to the longevity of both Syrian refugee’s health and their determination to find asylum in Jordan. And indeed it could be a real threat; whereas sand storms forbade themselves by daylight through a sudden blackening sky and arrived crashing into walls and windows, during the night they could rasp your throat through dust dense air whirling through open windows while you were sleeping. Refugee’s living

19 By 2015, the Jordanian government had even instrumentalized the desert as a necessary natural obstacle Syrians needed to traverse in order to be able to reach a border crossing that was allowing small numbers of refugees to enter Jordan. (https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syrians-berm-surviving-nightmarish-conditions-and-uncertain-status) 20 Refugees needed a guarantor to leave the camp, which in 2015 was replaced by much stricter policy, and even an outright refusal to obtain refugee registration for those who had initially left the camp without ‘bail-out’, even though the rules had been less stringent prior to 2015. (https://carnegie-mec.org/2018/04/16/policy-framework-for-refugees-in-lebanon-and- jordan-pub-76058) 21 At the time of this research in 2015 Syrians were not allowed to work in Jordan. As of 2016 the ‘Jordan Compact’ development plan allows Jordanian businesses more favorable trade tariffs for exportation to the European market if they hire a minimum of 15% Syrian workers. The plan is a cooperation between the EU, UN, and Jordan to respond to the Syria crisis by issuing more work permits for Syrians in Jordan. Thus stimulating Syrian refugees to seek asylum in host communities surrounding Syria, while simultaneously stimulating the Jordanian economy. See further: http://www.ilo.org/beirut/publications/WCMS_559151/lang--en/index.htm

Heidenrijk/43 in tents had no way of shielding themselves from the dust and at least twelve people deceased in the sand storms during the summer of 2015.22 There is no question that the natural world affected the differing realities of Syrian refugees and Jordanians, who shared the same landscape but engaged with it from within an entirely different social world. The sahra, the desert, was an expanse of beauty frequently praised by my Jordanian host family. They were especially delighted by the sights from their newly built home on a hill, from where they could watch the sun set over the unfolding sand as far as the twinkling lights of Irbid, some thirty-five kilometers away. They related to the desert as an agent in connecting their social community, by being visibly situated in the middle of their communities and by lending them social status in their community through being able to build such a beautiful house on such a stunning location. Syrian women experienced Jordanian nature, which over the summer of 2015 unleashed three dust storms that each left a flimsy layer of molecular sand on the bedding, as if the colors in the homes had dimmed a bit, as intrusive and literally impossible to keep out the door. The invasiveness of the desert was threatening because a sturdy house for many women was the groundwork for a stable home. Yet the often decaying houses and makeshift tents inhabited by Syrians were permeable to the outside world. Dust blew in through every nook and crevice, giving life an ephemeral quality because the sand sometimes literally blew out that what was needed to perpetuate a healthy home life: the baby hairs of a twenty five-day-old twin, the breathing abilities of young children, the tarp used to cover window or door holes 23. Eshaal and her two adult daughters said they were assigned a tent in Za’atari camp, but packed up their tent and left within a day because its canvas proved no match for the winter cold. Regardless, they found that the intrusive frost crept inside their house wherever they went.

We came to a village and asked around for housing. People told us there was an empty house and we could live there. We were told there would be furniture in the house but when we got there, there was nothing. Because it was winter we put the tent on the floor inside the house to stop the cold from going up from the ground and we all cried. The whole family cried because it was so cold and because of what we’d been through. (Eshaal, interview 7)

Besides the natural environment altering the daily activities and social relations of many women, displacement then seemed indissolubly connected with impermanency. To most displaced women, the environment was experienced as uncertain both as a result of their exile as well as through the institutional measures of the host government. The material effect of this transience could take the form of disciplining Syrians by sending them back to the camps. “We have refugee identity, giving us national numbers from Jordanian Ministry of Interior. This is the paper for people who go out of the camp legally; if we get caught by the police, we can show this paper. My mother doesn’t have the same paper because she left illegally. (..) We can’t get this paper if we don’t have some family member who can pay for us or give us guarantee. If we were caught [without this paper] we would be taken either to Syria or to the Azraq camp” (Mahreen, interview 6). The dread with which most Syrians who lived in urban environments in Jordan thought back to the camps was widespread because virtually everyone

22 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2015/09/deadly-sandstorm-continues-blanket-middle-east- 150909103456906.html 23 Examples taken from interviews 5 and 22.

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(except those who arrived in the early days of the crisis when it was not mandatory to transfer through Za’atari) had experienced the atmosphere in the camps. Hamida told me that, “we are afraid from (sic) Za’atari. (..) We are careful. Here in Jordan there is rule and restrictions. If you live here, you are allowed to live here. But if you go work, and they catch you working they will take you to Za’atari” (interview 26). This meant that the camps were, not least intellectually, always interwoven with the daily experience of Syrians. The ghost of the camp was everywhere; a seemingly stable situation could become volatile in moments; because of the apparently marked ‘Syrian’ appearance of Syrian women in the Jordanian streetscape, street harassment was tinged venomous because of the potential for escalation. Blending in with other people in public was not viable for most Syrian women, and when I asked Eshaal how she felt about being called a refugee she immediately associated standing out on the street as explanatory for her general experience of insecurity in Jordan:

We feel really bad about it, netsharshah, which is a Syrian word for really bad. In our country we can do everything, here you feel shy when going out. There’s catcalling, people say that Syrian women are more beautiful than Jordanian women, so we get this a lot. People know the Syrians from the Jordanians. Because of this we feel unsafe going out. We ignore the men shouting at us because we don’t want to get in trouble. We fear that if we make trouble with anyone that the government will send us back to Syria. In fact, we want to say something back to the men but we don’t dare because of this. (Eshaal, interview 7)

Though Eshaal resented the street harassment she endured, she did not resist the slurs and sexual comments made by men on the street, for fear of escalating the situation from a colloquial to a formal confrontation. That is, she considered it viable that a personal social encounter on the street could materialize into a protuberance of state sanctioned action that would leave her on the losing side. Eshaal recognized both the subjectivity and contingency of engaging in public life in displacement; the former because escalation depended on the perspective and actions taken by her antagonist, while the latter because she recognized how intimate confrontations were connected to the greater system of law enforcement and refugee governance. I thought it seemed rather excessive that Eshaal extrapolated personal confrontations into what was in my mind a violation of non-refoulement under international law, but Eshaal had lived in a conflict reality where paper promises, however widely recognized they may be, meant nothing. Transience itself became a real threat to the lives of Syrian families. Hence why the possibility of escalating conflict made women interact differently with their environment to moderate this potential. Elaborate knowledge of the city’s street plan was preeminent among those who left the camps without a permission card. In 2015, Jordan’s streets were only named four years previously and Google Maps deemed any place outside Amman a desolate wasteland, so I, as an alien in the country, was getting my bearings in the maze-like streets by way of an imaginary map that was sustained and elaborated through recollection of the most busy and visibly recognizable streets. Unlike my mind-map, for most newly arrived Syrians the city’s street plan did not unfold along conspicuous shops, cafés, and bus stations, but laid itself out as an arrangement where corners and alleys determined the odds of hiding successfully from the authorities. Mahreen explained, “I can’t go out. If the police comes, I go into an alley. We just can’t get into trouble” (interview 6). The cityscape therefore functioned not so much as a passive backdrop to the life of the displaced,

Heidenrijk/45 but acted like an interactive facilitator. Mahreen was not an agent moving along in a rigid city structure that existed outside of herself , but the city’s fabric –it’s buildings, facilities, and infrastructure, was a network that interacted with her movements. The performance of encampment that established these feelings of insecurity turned out to be quite successful, when some women as a reaction to their transitory circumstances began performing the sense of precariousness they were feeling. As a coping mechanism, Eiwa sought to organize her direct environment with the same flexibility she endured in her environs, nonetheless continuing the setting of impermanency:

Seven or eight times I moved with my whole family. I don’t feel stability. I have the sensation that the house I live in now, it’s a big room, it’s home now, but I will never feel stability because maybe I have to leave soon. I’m always thinking ‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving’, so I’m not even fixing the kitchen. I feel like I own nothing here.(..) “Every day you have a new destiny”, my husband keeps telling me. But we have no furniture, and the other day I was thinking about getting a closet to put the clothes for my daughter in it. But then I said to my husband, “Why should I get a closet, maybe tomorrow we will leave? There’s no point in buying things”. I was telling him to maybe save the money for the closet to buy food. I’m always thinking that I have to leave. No way for me to go back to the camp. My husband is telling me, “Let’s go to Syria or go to the camp, Azraq”. And I say, “No way am I going there. At least here I have this tiny room and I have the bathroom inside the room”. When I was living in Za’atari I was waiting the whole day to just use the bathrooms, and the kitchen for fifteen minutes to cook my meal. And it’s unsafe to go to the bathroom so I’d rather stay here in this tiny room than go to the camp. Here when I want a break I just go and walk on the street. There, it’s very limited the choices. (Eiwa, interview 20)

Tamara, my translator, promptly mentioned; “I think, my opinion as a translator is that she’s so traumatized with the instability that they had here that they relate Jordan to instability. Because she moved eight times in two years” (interview 20). Though perhaps the shelters in Jordan’s refugee camps seemed like a support that forestalled the insecurity of living independently in an urban environment in displacement, the camp succeeded in quite the opposite; it internalized a feeling of anxiety and insecurity in Syrian women. Encampment was thus not only an architectural feat to provided refugees with shelter, or indeed a humanitarian project to assist refugees with meeting their basic needs. Instead, encampment was a performance designed to maintain a social and psychological climate of transience for Syrian refugees. In an attempt to avoid their permanent settlement in Jordan, the Jordanian government created a socially constructed environment wherein the harsh desert environment was instrumentalized to establish a loathed precedent for every Syrian refugee who transferred through Za’atari or Azraq but settled in an urban environment. The result was that Syrians were always reminded of the camp in their private spaces, because their home was often permeable to the elements, while public space was experienced as volatile, because conflict escalation could lead to being sent back to the camp. Encampment in Jordan therefore functioned as an effective performance that quelled the confidence and conviction Syrian women longed for to establish a secure home.

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5.5 Conclusion When seeing from an actor-network theory standpoint, encampment is a relation wherein the natural- and social world combine. Its historical development in Jordan –from the first Palestinian camps established after 1948 to the recent construction of Azraq Camp- affects its present-day construct. Encampment can be seen as a performance that is enacted primarily by the Jordanian government, but that through time is also appropriated by its inhabitants. The refugee camp is instrumentalized by the Jordanian government through its potential of unmaking both the Palestinian and Syrian communities. The precedent of Black September, the 1970 event when the Jordanian government attacked and crushed the budding Palestinian rebellion in refugee camps across Jordan, caused the Jordanian government to be wary of social networks arising between inhabitants of camps. From that time onwards, the camps’ infrastructure was built or maintained to disaggregate the identity of its residents, and to disaggregate inhabitants from each other and their environment. The Palestinian refugee camps to that effect were neglected, while the Syrian refugee camps were newly built in the desolate desert, and its designs inhibited assimilation with relatives or a Syrian refugee community at large. Encampment as a process thereby developed into an enactment of transience meant to internalize a lasting anxiety and insecurity into its inhabitants and those that transferred through it. As for Syrian refugees, with their recent arrival in Jordan, the Jordanian government’s performance of segregating the Syrian community was relatively successful. Aided by the historically established rule of Bashar Al-Assad to internally divide the Syrian population, Syrian refugees were mistrustful of each other and of authority. The continued subjection to authoritative rule, and disassociation from a relational (Syrian) identity that encampment enacted, meant that Syrian refugees internalized insecurity into their sense making and behavior. Encampment to Syrian refugees thence had an unmaking capacity that undermined their social relations and connective identity. As for Palestinian refugees, who had lived in Jordan for decennia, the government’s performance of encampment as a disconnective process was futile. The defective infrastructure of the camp facilitated a spatial network of houses that was accessible to all social relations in the camp. The built environment of the camp thereby functioned as a social network, whereby its inhabitants shared a (hi)story and a sense of Palestinian solidarity. The Palestinians living in the camp therefore appropriated the Jordanian governments’ performance of encampment, and made it a feat of their own shared collective identity. To them, encampment very much enacted a making of their community.

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Chapter 6: Manaeesh and the Mortadella Revolution

Plastic water bottles and water cooler tanks cut through the middle, chipped pots, and a pan –all filled with plants– lined the steps and the patio leading down to Abu Yasir’s home. “Only Syrian and Palestinian people need plants”, Abra casually commented while we treaded past bright green basil, fragrant mint, and small thyme plants, and were seated outside under the leaves of a cardamom plant. I looked up and felt as if I was drinking in a respite of green after months of living in Amman’s beige dust. “Qahwah?” the usual first question of my interviews, though always directed at me, was now asked by Abu Yasir. His wife presented me a little porcelain cup containing strong aromatic coffee infused with cardamom seeds. Accepting the cup with my right hand, I sipped before handing it back to Umm Yasir, who refilled the cup and offered it to Abra seated next to me, then passed it round the gathering of five people before making it back to me. Wiggling the cup after sipping again, I signified I had had enough, after which I was offered shei mae nana, a delicate glass of tea with copious amounts of sugar and a tendril of mint picked from one of the plants. Abra meant that Syrians and Palestinians need living, growing organisms to feel invested in the natural and cultural world; that through the scent of cardamom coffee and the taste of mint tea, they provide “...meaning to the gestures performed while eating. So in this way we define food as an exquisitely cultural reality, not only with respect to nutritive sustenance itself but to the ways in which it is consumed, and to everything around it and pertaining to it” (Montanari, 2006, p.93). One of the most fundamental relationships that people have with nature –through food- is enacted in culinary practices. It is through growing, producing, preparing, cooking, eating, and sharing food that people perform their relationship with nature and construct their cultural identities. Food cultures are thence performative, always evolving and with every encounter over nature’s produce, with every garden planted, every dinner cooked, and every recipe shared, culture is created and kept alive. This chapter analyzes how the connection to the natural world through food and cooking is experienced by women in displacement. It shows how the culture and identity of women in war and displacement, through the meaning they attribute to food and practicing their culinary skills, is performed, transformed, and created.

6.1 Hospitality for Refugees For a long time, people were seen as territorialized when theorizing displacement. Refugees have frequently been assigned an essentialized identity because their mobility has been framed in terms pertaining to trees or ‘uprootedness’ (Malkki, 1992). The effect of this sedentary view is that non- western people’s identities are framed as grounded in the natural world. Land and culture were thence conflated to such a degree that refugees were seen as having severed connections to their culture and identity because these were engrained in the soil they came from. This sedentary worldview then enshrines identity in the physical material of the natural world, and contrasts the dispossession and abandonment of displaced people to the ownership of property and material goods that citizens have. This binary frame of the citizen versus the uprooted refugee renders the world a one dimensional space wherein objects from nature, which is thus the category in which refugees have been included, are seen as preserved in their bodily matter. Instead, there is no universally knowable corporeality that falls away like a shell, revealing a now sort of blank person, or terra nullius. Nordstrom aptly explained that “[i]f cultural landscapes are layered on social and

Heidenrijk/48 geographical landscapes to provide meaning to a person’s life-world, a change in the former necessarily refashions the latter” (Nordstrom, 1997, p.185). Situatedness in a geographical and social landscape means that someone’s identity is performed in the way someone interacts and makes sense of their new environment and the people in it. Identity is then malleable, and is of an infinitely creative capacity. No doubt that leaving a home(land) affects someone’s disposition, but this is a resilient kind of change. It is perhaps easier to look at the world in a binary way, because one need not look further than the very objects right in front of their eyes. For example; Eiwa’s understanding of refugee identity seemed to revolve around terms of rootedness, because it was catalyzed by experiencing an attack of the Syrian army who destroyed her property: “When I had to leave my house, we held a big market in front of our house. We have all the goods from the house that we’re selling. But the government came and took all that and destroyed everything –and we had so much goods in that storage. When we saw that we just packed our basic things and left to Jordan. For me that was devastating to see” (Eiwa, interview 20). Although having to relocate due to the aggravation of the Syrian conflict was painful, the experience of forced dispossession was formative for Eiwa, because it shocked her into the realization that she now ‘fit into’ the categorization of a deprived refugee. The dispossession thence abruptly removed her from the defining quality that had always offset her from the refugees she met –that of material ownership. Yet instead of framing people’s identities and culture through trees and rootedness, identity is performative. Every day, identity is therefore made in the social relationships that people engage in, or in the meaning they attribute to objects and the way in which they use them. For Eiwa, this meant that she associated a legion of cultural and social qualities to the very objects she had left behind in Syria:

I used to be a host for refugees in our house, because our house is close by the Jordanian border. Not just Syrian refugees, but from Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Kurdistan, from any country, I was seeing people crossing Syria to go to Jordan as a refugee. Just looking at those people I thought, “Poor them, they’re leaving everything and they’re going to Jordan.” So I opened my door to them, gave them breakfast, lunch, we baked our own bread at home, and we were feeding all those people because we knew they were going through a very difficult situation in Jordan in camps. So I would never expect that one day I would be like them. I was hosting those people and sometimes they were sleeping in our house; [we were] showing hospitality. And when they were leaving to go to Jordan I was crying because I was like, “Poor them, they are refugees”. (...) I was doing good and sympathizing with refugees and then it happened to me. (Eiwa, interview 20)

Eiwa related the making of people into refugees by offsetting them to having ownership of a house and its amenities. In this regard, a home was not simply important as a shelter, but more so as a part of enacting an important element of Arab identity; it allowed Eiwa to be hospitable to visitors, a great virtue in both Islamic and Arabic traditions. Eiwa then constructed refugee identity by necessarily having to accept the hospitality provided by others. Thus, there is an important difference between losing one’s identity and experiencing a feeling of not belonging. Eiwa had lived a ten-minute car drive away from the Jordanian border, and therefore had a life-long connection and understanding to its culture and landscape. Many of the customs in her hometown Dara’a were similar to Jordanian customs, cross-border shopping was at least a weekly occurrence, and families expanded across the border because marriages between

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Jordanians and Syrians were commonplace. Because she now lived practically on the same land, the exile from her homeland was not the source of feeling alien for Eiwa, yet she still felt disconnected from where she now lived.

I’m not happy. I feel socially unaccepted here. But at the same time I’m not blaming the society, but I don’t have the strength even to accept myself here, and that’s affecting the energy of people here accepting me. I really had a good house in Syria, and it’s very strange that we’re from Dara’a, so close to the Jordanian border, we own our house, at night we were sitting at the balcony, drinking tea and looking at Jordan. We should be so close, but I feel we are so different as Jordanians and Syrians. (Eiwa, interview 20)

To Eiwa, displacement did not materialize in a change of territory or land, but it materialized in relations. She felt disconnected from her current living place because she found it hard to relate to others. It was through relations that the identity of women in displacement was performed and maintained. Customs like drinking tea at night differed not on Jordanian or Syrian land. In fact, food practices embodied the networked way in which people spread over a land. The nomadic Bedouin tradition of Syria and Jordan, and their shared history24, meant that its culture and people were interconnected. The idea of rootedness of any person, be it citizen or refugee, is thence always, and in particular in the Levant with its shared heritage and Bedouin tradition, a futile concept. Take, for example, the matter of delineating national boundaries. The quest for roots, when undertaken with a critical methodology, and not screened behind impulsive emotional associations, never succeeds in defining our point of departure (even if distracting us with often outrageous collective imagery). On the contrary, we find instead a web of increasingly denser threads, even broader and more complicated, that recede from us, even as we gradually move ever further away from ourselves. (Montanari, 2006, p.139) Food, with its obvious roots in the natural world, seems a clear enough example of how objects and entities in the outside world are rooted. But exactly their use in culinary practice emphasizes that how people relate to food is where its meaning lies. Places do not make what- or whomever grows there inherently identifiable as from that place. Rather, their meaning or identity is grown out of the practices and performances with which they exist in the world. Hospitality, be it sharing food with strangers or having a cup of tea with relatives, is where the meaning and culture of food is enacted. Food cultures are thence performative, ever evolving and can be determined by war, or can be performed determinedly in spite of war. Fifty minutes down the road from Eiwa’s home in Syria, my host family was also drinking tea on the veranda. The cultural practices were the same. What had changed was that since four years, during lulls in the conversation the stillness of the evening was fractured by the dull blast of bombs detonating in the distant hills over Dara’a.

6.2 Home Made Food was of cultural significance because of its performativity. Meaning that culture, for Syrian women, was a lived experience that materialized in culinary practices like growing vegetables and

24 Modern day Jordan and Syria had until fairly recently never been divided by borders. Only after World War I the land was separated into two countries when the British and French divided up the land, making each into their separate mandates.

Heidenrijk/50 cooking. To them, culture was very much enacted in the private sphere and connected to home and homemaking, something that women traditionally engaged in. The connection women in displacement had with Syrian culture and ‘home’ could be relived and maintained through cooking the dishes they had made in Syria. The practice of growing and preparing food weighed heavily in how food attained its cultural heritage. For Syrian women, nature had been benign, and they used to have a symbiotic attitude towards the environment; they had taken its fruits and flowers to be used for cooking or leisure.

We used to do everything back at our houses. We used to get pickles and jam and make it at home. But now we can’t do that anymore. The families in Syria they don’t buy anything from outside, they make everything at home. The women are busy with these things all day long, we make things for the whole year. Even the juice we do it at our house. We’re very good in cooking. Syria is famous for their cooking: apple jam, fig jam, pickles, everything. Everything in Jordan is canned, it’s not fresh. Even olive, we do olives at our house, make it pickled. (Mahreen, interview 6)

To Syrians, their national kitchen was not just a cultural signifier because of its dishes, but its cultural value lay particularly in that it was home made. Dishes had meaning because they were grown locally, in back yards or around the neighborhood, and were prepared and cooked by women themselves. In displacement, the lack of access to home grown vegetables and fresh produce changed Syrian women’s cultural identity. The environment a few months back had been part of their daily routine of cooking, while in displacement they did not have access to nature in this way. “I used to have a very big house with a yard, trees and water fountains. I used to garden a lot. I used to grow roses and jasmine and a vine. Now I can’t have any of these” (Mahreen, interview 6). The lived experience of sowing, growing and harvesting the land meant that the meaning attributed to the land and ownership over it was embedded in the practice of working the land daily. Mahreen’s reality had been one of producing food for her family; the process of cultivating food from soil to table simultaneously grew with a geographical and social bonding with her environment.

The Jordanians were welcoming but still life is much harder here than in Syria. Having one cow [in Syria] can support the whole family with milk, butter everything. Every time when people heard some area [in Syria] got freed, thousands go back every day because they want to start farming. We used to be in Dara’a, and we started to farm a little land. We were starting to farm tomatoes, onions etcetera. I like to garden and to farm. We used to live in downtown Mafraq, and we had a small land area, and we gardened it. But here we don’t do it. Here is no water, we buy water. We’re inviting you for breakfast, for people who are fasting, after sunset. Do you want to stay here, today? (Mahreen, interview 6)

Cooking from cans instead of with fresh produce thus lost this connection with home. With displacement came a different relation with food. Mahreen’s reality went from producer to that of consumer; the inability to work her own land, and having to obtain food from charity or buying (processed) food –as was customary in urban Jordan- made Mahreen feel like a passive dweller on the land. Her efforts to grow produce was not only an attempt at homemaking, but was, more importantly, the pursuit of growing a sense of belonging to the social and geographical environment and keeping Syrian culture alive.

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6.3 Circadian Struggle in Syria Under influence of the war in Syria, household practices that had been daily routines acquired a political meaning or association. Food was politically-laden depending on who was served. Laundering clothes and cooking fundamentally changed with regard to how they were done as a result of incessant bombing. Before the conflict household tasks were largely automated, but as shelling caused power blackouts, household chores became a physical performance. Had it previously been a matter of filling up the washer and flipping a switch, now electricity needed to be generated by propelling the wheels of a bike through sheer muscle strength. The family home was no longer an impartial space, because even in doing the laundry, war began to be acted out.

If we cannot cook we create things that we need for daily living. For example, like a laundry washer; we don’t have electricity to get it to operate, so we start creating electricity with the bike, in Syria. Because of the war we can’t go out and get the things that we need. We are trapped and we think of new things to get it working. We don’t have gas or kerosene or oil for the heater in winter, so we start to put coals inside in order to get heat. And when the coals were out we start to burn our shoes to get heated. (..) We create our own masks for our skin and for our breathing. And there is some TV channel that’s called ‘Inventions of the Wartime’ that shows these things. And when we wanted to peel garlic, because we don’t have knives, we put it inside cans and start shaking it; because of the movement [the skin] will fall. (Mahreen, interview 6)

The physical enactment of war revealed itself with particular acuteness in the practice of cooking a family meal. Preparing food and eating became a more embodied experience than hitherto, when the quality of cooking and food was only important in terms of its tastiness. Now, cooking required rudimentary methods and physical performance, and food safety was not always certain: “It was quite difficult for us because we had a modern life in Halab; we had a fridge, oven, heating system. And in the suburbs we were cooking coffee and tea on the fire. We were having water from the water truck and we were filtering it using our hijabs. Because we didn’t want to get deceases, because maybe this water is not good. We were coming up with a different way to survive” (Kainat, interview 21). The physical enactment of war in cooking practices became negative consequences of war. The changed practices of cooking were a direct result from the bodily risks that war and displacement caused. Avoiding sickness became comprehensible in the practice of cooking, through practices like filtering water. One woman told me that all of her four children had contracted Hepatitis from drinking contaminated tap water in Za’atari Camp. “Where I come from in Syria we drink tap water, no one told me that you can’t drink tap water in Jordan” (Eiwa, interview 20). Now the everyday practice of cooking carried possible threats to one’s life. The added visibility food had in the public sphere, coupled with the fact that professional cooking was the domain of men, meant that food as a daily cultural practice became politicized in wartime Syria. Professionalized food preparation had moved out of the domestic female realm, into the public (and male) domain of restaurants (Montanari, 2006, p.33), where food was, through its public character, a medium through which social relations were formed and maintained. The social connection of making and sharing food with others during wartime brought dangers with it. For many Syrians, the realization that every aspect of public life, including food, could be politically labeled came in earnest when the conflict began. Dyab and

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Hamida served me and my translator a big plate full of doughy flat bread, filled with cheese and minced meat and sprinkled with za’atar, a herb mixture of dried thyme, oregano, and marjoram. “He made that”, Hamida indicated towards her husband. “You know manaeesh? With za’atar. And this is cheese, white cheese, of course.” Dyab, like all Syrians, took pride in his food and had made his culinary and entrepreneurial skills into a business in his hometown. While in their living room in Amman there was no peril in serving me manaeesh, in Homs however, the exposure of Dyab’s restaurant in the public sphere brought him and his family in a menacing position.

I made a small restaurant, in the same building that I was living in, in Syria, before I left. (..) Because I have this small restaurant in the building I was living in, the army, the Syrian army, they came to eat in the restaurant. Although they pay me for the food, the people around me become to think that I am like a spy. So I get scared. At the same time, there is an area, Baba Amr, it was the battle of Baba Amr25, so the people are going out of Baba Amr, they will move close to my restaurant; so we can see the army. And this become a difficult situation. (Dyab, interview 26)

As the war was progressing, neutral space became an impossibility, and it became infeasible not to be part of a ‘side’. This was particularly true for men. Often, the male body is seen by its aggressors as inhabiting the national political agency that resists aggression and opposes political invasion, and must therefore be destroyed (Peteet, 1994). In Dyab’s case, having transferred cooking from the private to the public sphere by managing a restaurant meant also that he moved a formerly feminine task into the masculine realm. His cooking thence became politicized because the ideal masculine identity was always seen as having the potentiality to fight (Achilli, 2015), and gendered norms were expected to be lived up to by its individual adherents. In Syria, the war began to seep through in every mundane aspect of life. Sometimes it is said that people were surviving in war torn Syria, but this is a vantage point that prioritizes war as exemplary of life in Syria. It was quite the other way around; people were living and practicing their everyday routines and conflict happened upon them (or in Dutch; leven instead of overleven). Everyday routines changed shape as a consequence of war; household tasks were during the Syrian conflict often felt as an embodied experience; disruptions in the workings of technology were intercepted by carrying out household tasks in a physical and labor-intensive manner. And exemplary of the normalization of war was that a threat to life was not always caused by the direct impact of airstrikes, but by the risk of illness from practicing household tasks inadequately. Other everyday practices never changed in form, but gained a new meaning in the context of war. Especially those practices carried out in the public sphere acquired a politicized meaning. Yet in order to understand life during war, one must first and foremost understand the everyday life and chores people maintain, because in the circadian rhythm of households, in between the biological processes of dawn, hunger pangs, the urge for physical exercise, work, sweet cravings, household tasks, appetite for dinner, nightfall, and tiredness, the consequences of war became normalized.

6.4 Changing food practices in displacement Food was, in Jordanian cities where Syrians in exile and Jordanians shared public space, a contentious issue. Food conveyed a message, but its meaning was interpreted different across

25 See further: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/01/battle-baba-amr-timeline-syria http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-15625642

Heidenrijk/53 cultural contexts. More so than dinners shared in private living rooms, leftovers, or more specifically garbage that had to be brought outside, provoked disagreement in the community: “Once I went out to get the garbage out and there was an old man saying, “Oh my god, what a fat whopper!” He says, “You have all that kind of stuff, you have all the cans, your garbage is big!” I said, “Give me back my country, I give you my coupons26!” (Mahreen, interview 6) Garbage was so prevalent that it was on itself not even a sign of poverty, but a natural part of the street scene. A well-known joke goes; what is the national bird of Jordan? A plastic bag flying in the wind. But garbage moved out of its ‘natural’ state once people interacted with it. Then it became an issue of food security and poverty; those that ‘have’ throw the trash out, while those that ‘have not’ are scrambling for scraps in the garbage on the streets. Poverty was visible as people rummaged through the garbage on the street, and the sight induced a universal fear of hunger (Montanari, 2006, p.115). It was a sight that saddened everyone. After I had asked Mahreen’s niece Mehvish, a girl in her early twenties, to photograph something that saddened her, she handed me a photo of a little girl rummaging in trash alongside the street. But to Jordanians, the reverse had to be true as well; those with a lot of garbage looked well-off compared to those scavenging in the street. It was especially hard to stomach that fellow Jordanians were searching through trash, while Syrians appeared to be well fed.

Mehvish’s photo of a girl rummaging through garbage.

26 World Food Program food vouchers.

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Mahreen’s rebuttal spoke of another perspective altogether; the cans, irrelevant of their quantity, spoke of a loss of cultural identity. She would happily exchange her food coupons for fresh produce, or better yet, her home. Her reaction indicated that food aid was appreciated, but while in displacement, surviving and having access to food were inadequate. In the long run, cultural identity and a sense of self could only come with access to non-processed food and culinary practices from seed to table. The strong national identity of Syrian dishes made Syrians notable and distinctly Other and provided Mahreen’s neighbors with another target to intimidate her. The meaning of Syrian food also spoke strongly to Jordanians. Food itself was an identity signifier. Jordanians recognized Syrians by their food, and looked upon Syrian dishes as distinctly ‘Other’. Apparently Mahreen’s neighbors had prying eyes, surveying the windows of her building, looking for gossip. The social meaning of food eroded further in Jordan under influence of the foreign social environment.

Because it’s all women in the building, every time someone looks up the window, they tell the charity that’s responsible for us, who got us here, and say, “Look they are doing inappropriate acts”, so our neighbors here they would go and start complaining. And the janitor of the building, we sometimes give him food and he thought it was very delicious, so people start to hear stories about this and the neighbors got jealous. Especially kibbeh, that’s the main dish in Syria. It’s stuffed vines. [The neighbours] like monitoring us, they watch a lot, so it’s hard for us. (Mahreen, interview 6)

The ability to share food was seen by Jordanians as a social status indicator. “[W]hat did matter was no longer consuming more food than one’s fellow diners, but having at one’s disposal more food on the table (so as to distribute it to companions, guests, servants, and dogs)” (Montanari, 2006, p.117) To Syrians, it was simply a cultural practice to share food with others outside the family circle. Mahreen immediately noticed the different social meaning of food in Jordan through the practice of eating with one’s hands. Syrian women thought it remarkable that Jordanian custom was to gather round a dish served on a large platter where every person scooped the food with their right hand, only aided by a piece of gobez, bread. Only in Dara’a, a city near the southern Syrian border, did people eat with their hands. Normally in Syria, “If you eat the dish, you’re saving the whole amount for the next day or give it to your neighbor because it won’t be touched by other people. (...) Sometimes when I walk on the street [in Jordan] I see people throwing away the whole dish because it was touched by people. Even restaurants throw food away”(Mahreen, Interview 6). The social aspect of sharing food with the greater community was fundamental to Syrian culture.

Something that shocked me in Jordan was that people don’t have these social connections, even among families. This is something of Syrian culture. For me, it was difficult for me to mingle. Because I feel like I have to do this. We are accustomed to do [zupeiah] in Syria; wake up in the morning, and then we have to have the coffee together in the morning. Have a cup of coffee and talk, not just with the family but also with the neighbors. This social aspect of the society is important to keep in our bones. But I cannot see this in Jordan. We have two scenarios; I am encouraged to do something, to change it, but my sister, she wants to stay in her world. It’s giving her less motive to socialize. (...) I want to do zupeiah. (...) I have a Syrian neighbor and I am doing that with her. But I’m not doing that with Jordanians because they are not used to it. I’m not brave enough to do that. I

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think; I mind my own business. (...) But I heard a conversation between a Jordanian wife and a Jordanian man. And she was telling him –it was ten o’clock: “I wanna wait [for] my Syrian neighbors until they wake up to have coffee with them.” And her husband said to her, “Do you think they are like you? They wake up at seven and they already had their coffee. Go, go!” Because that’s Syrian culture. We wake up early, we finish everything, like cleaning the house and cooking. By eleven everything’s ready! [ After that, we] meet more friends, have lunch with the family, free time. It’s basically about socializing, the Syrian culture. (Nadia, interview 24)

Syrian women noticed the commoditization of food in Jordan and experienced Jordanian culture as more individualized. In Syrian culture, the performativity of preparing and sharing food is what (un)made communities. The Syrian relational identity was formed and enacted in food culture. Syrian women felt that under influence of their changed (social) environment, this culture was eroding. Practices of farming, preparing or eating food were thus far more entwined with identity and a sense of self than just as a basic need necessary to be fulfilled by the humanitarian intervention. Food had cultural meaning; its preparation and consumption could be performed to gain or maintain social bonds, and its outlook could be performed to gain social status. But food was in refugee governance solely seen as a biopolitical matter; a basic human need necessary for survival. In the refugee camps, especially in Azraq camp, which was more regulated than Za’atari camp, access to food was seen as a staple toward managing the population of Syrian refugees successfully. In order to survive, this was of obvious importance to the displaced, but the lack of any recognition for the surrounding cultural identity of food meant that had this food not been available, no one would come to Azraq camp.

In Azraq there is more food available than in the urban host community. That’s actually the only reason why people come and stay in Azraq. There is not even electricity there, it’s just desert, but there are WFP (World Food Programme] food vouchers. Actually, WFP did a quick survey and 25 to 35% people, said they would go to Syria if the food vouchers were cut, instead of going to Azraq. Of course, this was hypothetical, so we don’t know what they will actually do. (Brenna, interview 10, MercyCorps)

6.5 The Mortadella Revolution The relation Palestinian women had with food had changed along their time spent in exile. Consumer items for Palestinians grew into a status symbol. Abra told me how the meaning of food transformed over the duration of displacement. Food, being one of the few basic necessities that Palestinian refugees had access to in the camps, meant that the kind of food someone could buy became an indicator of status. The access to consumer goods, to connecting to the consumer economy and modernity meant that you would be recognized as a person. The marginalized reality of living in a refugee camp could be renegotiated through processed foods and land you in the middle of mainstream culture. Consumerism implied that identity became a commodity, which meant that status, personhood, and freedom, if not received in the first place by political decree, became a transaction and could be acquired.

The people in the [Palestinian refugee] camps are poor; they always have been. But somewhere in the sixties or seventies things started to change. There was the mortadella: It’s readymade meat from a can. It was truly a revolution because at first everything was made at home, cheese, yoghurt etcetera. So having readymade food meant that you were

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rich. People started to buy this food because they wanted to show their neighbors that they were rich, when actually they weren’t. I call it the mortadella revolution. They were still poor but technology has always been the thing that all people want to have. Their house can be unbelievably poor but everyone has a TV. This is the reason why all Jordanians have a smart phone. They need to have it because they feel better and they are totally addicted to their phone. Another reason is that there is an illusion of freedom from having a smart phone. You might not be able to speak freely with people face-to-face, but on your phone you can talk with anyone. Girls can talk with boys freely and they can say anything without anyone ever finding out. So people think they have a lot of friends, and they have a thousand Facebook friends, but actually, in real life there is no one. I don’t have a smart phone and I am being looked at and questioned why I don’t have a smart phone. People look down on me because of this, I need to have a smart phone in order to be someone. (Abra, fieldnotes, 21-8-15)

The relation with food changed for Palestinians as they spent longer in exile. The performativity of food culture was now valued in economic terms. Hence why processed food became the new cultural signifier. Commoditization also in another way led to more freedom; economic freedom. In part, the poverty in the camp and the few economic opportunities caused Palestinians to commoditize their food because cooking was time-consuming and some dishes were logistically nearly impossible in Hussein Camp due to a water shortage (most neighborhoods in Amman received running water only one night per week, storing this water in large tanks for the remainder of the week). The performativity of preparing complicated dishes therefore became synonymous with physical exertion and cooking them needed to be rewarded monetarily in order for it to be truly valuable. Ironically then, the Palestinian dishes with a large cultural value were rewarded in their economic monetary equivalent by others not living in Hussein Camp:

Nadeemah’s a good cooker with the traditional meals, which is difficult and hard to prepare. (..) Like the things inside the goat, the stomach of a goat. This is very complicated and it takes hours for cleaning and cooking. So sometimes the rich families ask her to prepare it. Usually because she doesn’t have a place for it in her house because it needs a lot of water to prepare it so she goes to the houses and prepares it there. For example I send her to my sister, she is very rich. They cook this two or three times a year, especially in winter. (Abra, interview 16)

The value of certain Palestinian dishes therefore moved from a cultural worth to an economic worth, in a sense thus commoditizing Palestinian culture. Food is often an expression of a cultural identity. The development that food had seen in Hussein Camp therefore showed the changing identity of the Palestinian community in displacement. Most notable was the change from dishes as possessing an inherent cultural worth to having to ‘earn’ their worth back to their chefs. These dishes had always had, simply by their homemade preparation, accredited cultural value. Today however, there was a loss of cultural meaning that their beneficiaries attached to them, and as a result, these dishes were no longer made for personal use. Instead, they were only prepared if they had consumer value, and chefs were paid for them to be made. Food for personal use now ideally was highly processed, which lent social status to their buyers, by implying that they had they money to buy these goods. The

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Palestinian community in Hussein Camp thence identified with different types of food; rather than cultural value, its economic value was now of primary importance.

6.6 Conclusion This chapter seeks to show that rather than representing refugee women as uprooted, their relation with land is a dynamic performance. Food, being a characteristic product of the land, was a medium through which Syrian women enacted their relationship with nature and with home. Their investment in the environment was practiced through activities like farming, cooking, or eating. Cultural heritage, tradition, but also the social bonding with family and friends was through these practices embedded in the environment. More so than it solely being a sustenance, food was thus preeminently a cultural reality that was enacted in Syrian women’s every usage of it. The necessary quality of food to be performative in Syrian culture is why the physical exertion of household chores, including cooking, was not experienced as an intolerable outlandish consequence of the war in Syria. In fact, Syrian women felt that losing the lived experience of food in displacement in Jordan meant that they struggled to make a home, and gain a sense of belonging to their new environment. They often felt distanced and experienced a loss of home because they had no access to cultivation or fresh produce. They felt, quite literally, unable to produce their relationship with nature and with others; the readymade food they had access to, in combination with the lack of a proper guestroom, forced upon them a consumer mentality because the performative qualities of food –its cultivation, harvesting, cooking, the hosting of guests- were omitted from the creative process in Jordan. Food and cooking were thus important in enabling Syrian women to maintain or evolve their cultural identity in war and displacement. It showed that regardless of where Syrian refugee women end up in the world, their access to produce, cultivating abilities and the abilities to cook for, eat and share food with others is what made their cultural identities and sense of self. For Palestinian women, it was precisely the performativity of traditional Palestinian cooking that disassociated them from it. The time-consuming and labor intensive production of Palestinian national dishes meant that Palestinian women rather sought to establish their identity through food by way of a consumer mentality. The cultural identity of Palestinian cuisine was commoditized in order to fulfill the most important feat in Palestinian communities; being well connected. Social relations were actively created through seeking social stature, and one way of establishing this was through economic prestige. Palestinian cuisine was thence a method to acquire money by cooking for others, while consumer goods became another method to show off economic gain. Food was seen as sustenance in the humanitarian intervention, and was at most employed as a performance of biopolitical management of refugees. But food was actually a cultural and social reality for Syrian and Palestinian women. Through their relation with food and cooking, women elevate their position in their communities and in society at large; through cooking they became, one way or another, the cultural or social backbone of a community in exile.

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Left: Photo by Mevish of a Syrian platter. Right: photo of collectively shared Jordanian platter.

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Chapter 7: Violence

Coates (2015) writes how constant violent threats to the body result in circumstances where “the greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment” (p.12). This detached manner ringed true to me when I listened to the many stories of violence from the women and men I interviewed; they discussed violence rather than in shock and abhorrence, in terms of its cultural disparity. “We are trying to compare between our culture and European culture. I said that when describing someone who died, we say there is blood on the street. It’s very hard. But for European countries, it’s very hard for them to say ‘he died’. Even when you hear about a person who died, who passed away, you feel sad. But for us it’s ok because everything has stories. We get used to them” (Abu Ahmed, interview 31). Abu Ahmed acknowledged the historicity of death; that death belonged to the way in which Palestinian and Syrian communities were socially constructed. Death was not necessarily a private matter, perhaps because at this moment in the conflicted history of their countries it was often a political matter; its public character in (in)ternational news made it more exposed and contingent than it would in western culture, where death and violence was obscured from plain sight and everyday life. To Syrians and Palestinians it was part of what made something or someone into being and what could or could not happen at any moment in time. Nordstrom argued that it was in the willfulness of violence (as opposed to the accidental harm caused by an accident) wherein its political and cultural attack on the body lays. Its effect comes because people are inherently cultural beings through our ability to produce and give meaning to society. “Violence is culturally constitutive. Its enactment forges, in fact forces, new constructs of identity, new socio-cultural relationships, new threats and injustices that reconfigure people’s life-worlds, new patterns of survival and resistance” (Nordstrom, 1997, p.141). The impact of violence comes not solely from the direct pain it afflicts, but from the feeling it establishes. The emotional response that follows is at once cultural –to make sense of aggression–, and political –the realization that violence is meant to create submission and resignation in the face of a suppressive political system (Nordstrom, 2004). This chapter is then an inquiry into how violence reshapes, performs, and maintains the Palestinian and Syrian communities; and how it is experienced differently by men and by women.

7.1 Women as Shock Absorbers To me it became particularly apparent through violent encounters how society and war were gendered. Men received the brunt of violent encounters, while women presumed the role of mending communal connectivity after violence. Violence has an un/making capacity. It was striking to see that for Syrians, violence was unmaking their community and sense of self, while for Palestinians, violence was making and strengthening their community. Either way, women were always the ‘defusers’ of violence, and the agents who could maintained the connective social network after violent events. I sometimes overlooked how personal stories of violence related to societal norms and the systemic forces operating in it; but the length of experience Palestinian women had in exile had taught them to be acutely aware of how systemic violence was done to their people. Abra related an evening to me wherein she found her daughters being assaulted in front of their house. I

Heidenrijk/60 interpreted the event as individual crime, but Abra corrected me and explained how the political system had purposely failed her. The night her daughters were harassed in front of their house, Abra interfered, and the perpetrator drew a knife and tried to stab all three of them. “So I called the police and they didn’t come. So this guy hears me when I call the police and he disappears. He bring a small knife and cut himself and went to the hospital. Then he went to the police and made a claim against us.” Upon my outcry of, “This man is sick!”, Abra immediately silenced me exclaiming:

He’s not sick, the system is sick! He was in prison for forty-two times, he killed someone and he raped two girls, and he had a lot of guns, and the court and the judge didn’t look at the C.V. of this guy. When my daughter said to the judge, “This is not fair”, they got the police, put her arms together and cuffed her and sent her to prison. So at this moment there was a big mess in the court and the same guy, the bad guy, he got into the office of the judge and said: “Please mister don’t do this, she’s just a kid. Forgive her!” So me and my husband and my daughter, we signed a contract that if we do anything later to him we would have to pay a thousand JD27. (Abra, interview 32)

Abra’s indignation over the political system that allowed bodily harm to her daughter to be met with impunity, showed how the justice system was systematically organized to marginalize women’s bodies. Men’s bodies were valued over women’s; the perpetrator’s wounded body and his voice resonated louder than the threat to the life of a woman. Authority and credibility were institutionalized as a man’s (and elder’s) prerogative. Therefore men’s words had higher standing on the societal and judicial hierarchical ladder than that of women.28 Not only that, but Abra’s daughter was reframed as the culprit of the crime. Convicting the victim framed the violence as incidental, thereby isolating violence against women from its emblematic nature in Jordanian society. Formal institutions are, in general, a reflection of social mores and values, and legal systems and laws in particular replicate the social hierarchy prevalent in the community (Warrick, 2005). In Arab social hierarchy it befalls women especially to actively maintain the connective relationships among the nuclear and extended family. Women have been characterized as “shock- absorbers of the family and the community” (Naber et al., 2004, p.167) for any kind of conflict or crisis. Women are expected to handle crises without any kind of support from other family members because this is coping behavior for the collective family, which is an area of life that women are expected to manage (Kuttab, 2004). This because women perform the tasks whereby family bonds are forged and bolstered, like raising children or caring for the house(hold), and it is therefore women especially who must take an interest in the connectivity of social networks from the ground up. Women are therefore harnessed to preserve the connective relationships upon which Arabic societies are built. Courtrooms are not an exception to institutionalizing such a (gendered) organization of society. The stability of social networks are enforced through arbitration that leaves women ultimately responsible for maintaining social cohesion. In Abra’s case, social and consequently institutional stability were settled over the legal rights of her daughter. This was done by reducing the case of her daughter to an incidental event, by expressly

27 In comparison: The average monthly salary in Jordan is 637 JD. (http://www.jordantimes.com/news/local/kingdom%E2%80%99s-average-monthly-salary-stands-637-%E2%80%94-report) 28 Sharia law in Jordan (not used in criminal law cases) counts a woman’s testimony half as heavy as that of a man. (https://www.unicef.org/gender/files/Jordan-Gender-Eqaulity-Profile-2011.pdf)

Heidenrijk/61 not looking at the perpetrator’s criminal record, thus reducing the event to a case of individual crime instead of multiple assault cases against women. By extension the stability of social life and institutional society is not put at stake in the justice system, but the result is that women’s rights are systematically suppressed in the justice system (Warrick, 2005). During the same interview, Abra related another story to me wherein the gendered organization of Syria’s penal system was illuminated:

You know my aunt she has five boys, and she used to live in Tartous in Syria. One day they took her kid, he was 16 years old. He was a student, they took him from the street, we don’t know why, and he disappeared until he was 36 years old. Then the last two years his mother discovered he was in jail and he had a lot of deceases. Then one of our relatives he had a daughter and he asked her, “Can you marry him?”. Because he’s totally destroyed this guy. He can’t talk normally, he can’t move normally, and he has a lot of mental problems. She said, “Yes I will marry him.” (Abra, interview 32)

Abra read my shocked facial expression and continued, “They just put them in prison and they leave. They forget them. No court.” But Abra misread my astonishment, because what had upset me was that a woman who had lead a perfectly good life, was now dragged into the brutal afflictions of the Syrian regime. She was now burdened by the care for a man whom she owed nothing, while he was rehabilitated into society through marrying. He was brought out of the isolation of victimhood, and into the community’s network of connective kinship through marriage. Abra condemned the social injustice of imprisonment without trial, but her conviction did not extend to the predicament of the woman. In her understanding, women were to remedy social injustice and reconcile ruptured communal connective relations. Having a spouse was one of the most important indicators of social status and connectivity. In this case, an eligible woman resembled the moral backbone of society who could ameliorate violence and position themselves as patrons of the community (Peteet, 1994). To Abra therefore, it spoke of the woman’s virtue to accept marriage; both because the woman took pity on the ex-prisoner, and because she fulfilled her father’s request by marrying the man. By accepting the marriage, the woman had given the victim of Syria’s regime a chance at reconnecting with the social network of the community and had given her own family a more connected stature in the communal network by showing her morality. But why did Abra recognize the subjectification of women when it concerned the justice system, but not when it concerned informal practices? Perhaps because the former experience concerned her direct kin, while the latter involved extended family members. But Abra’s reprimand on overlooking the state’s role in the assault of her daughter, and the manner in which she heralded the decision of the woman who married the man tells me otherwise; as a Palestinian, she was aware of how state apparatuses subjectify people and she was very attuned to daily enactments of repression of individuals by the state. However, she was never outraged, and never explicitly mentioned the fact that the perpetrator who had never been indicted for the attack on her daughter was a man, whilst his victim was a woman. It was as if in Abra’s mind, gender was not at issue. She seemed gender blind with regard to women’s inherent inequality in society. Women’s role and position in society, even, as it turned out, within their own minds, is ambiguous.

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7.2 Torture The gendered organization of Syrian society was reason for the regime to strategize the male body as a political instrument before the war had broken out, and it was easily morphed into an instrument of war after the uprising. The torture of men had become somewhat of a staple method for the regime. In virtually every family I had spoken at least one male family member had been imprisoned and/or tortured. The penal system was gendered, as men, not women, were at risk of being penalized and tortured. But torture undermined the whole social structure of everyday society by instigating and preserving shock and abhorrence in order to demolish people’s inherent trust in each other and the world as a safe place in general (Nordstrom, 2004). But in Syria, men’s lengthy retraction from everyday society meant that the structure of Syrian social networks became dislocated both practically and emotionally. The functional role men occupied in households meant that they ensured a family’s livelihood through paid work. The gap caused by imprisoning men was often intercepted by other male (extended) family members. As they mostly already had a family to sustain, this doubled their monetary responsibilities. In addition, male imprisonment caused the relational nature of Arabic families and communities much harm. Men especially had a privileged stature in family and community circles, as they were entitled to influence and outline the lives of their minors (Joseph, 1996). Men were therefore intrinsic to their family members’ identity and sense of self, and their protracted absence dismantled a family of their most influential member, and of their unity. The hardship male imprisonment created for family members became palpable for me when I spoke Nadia, a good-natured, talkative woman from Damascus, for the second time with her sister Rania by her side. When we resumed on a topic we had touched upon during our first meeting –that Nadia’s son was wanted by the Syrian army, Nadia was bolstered by her sister’s presence and explained what had happened to her son and how it influenced her family:

[My son] was arrested, he was wearing a white sneaker, and it was new, he just bought it, and he was so happy. So they thought that he was against the army because of his white sneakers. They just judge him politically because of his white sneakers. So they took him, they interrogate him and they realized through his identity, through his ID, that he’s not. But still, the pride of army men usually, they just took him and they tortured him for a month. He was in a meter by meter room sleeping. And he was badly tortured. When he left, he’s not the same person. So until now he has very short temper, and he’s violent as well. He’s traumatized. (..) He’s very harsh with his sisters; he’s mistreating my daughters. But now, he’s never done that before. He sometimes is being very aggressive, very violent, and if they don’t ignore him… They have to ignore him! Not ignoring him actually, more like, “Go to your room and don’t go out!”; they just do that. They have to do whatever he wants because they understand. They have the mentality of understanding what happened to him. They’re trying to understand him. He was meeting a specialist here, at this organization. And he was talking to torture victims, it’s an organization with torture victims. And they were talking to him. And there was an improvement, because in the beginning, he was peeing in his bed. He was not controlling his pee. And he was all the time waking up with shouting and screaming. Now it’s better, but he’s still getting angry, beating things, breaking things at home, and after a few hours he just sits and he feels sorry about it, and he apologizes. So everyone’s staying away from him. And we don’t talk to him, we don’t disagree, we don’t shout. Because we understand what he’s going through. The thing is that we talk to him, and he’s said some things, that’s why we try to imagine what happened to him. But I’m sure that he didn’t say everything. He was..., he

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was having wounds outside his body. He was having holes in his body. He was massively tortured, and I saw different torture tools on his body. I could see the bottom of the gun, I could see ropes, whips, I could see nails. He was tortured for many hours, with four people taking shifts. (Nadia, interview 24)

The Syrian regime’s exercise of torture and incarceration damaged not only the individual subjected to it, but infiltrated the private and community sphere. It changed the dynamic at home from a place wherein family members live together in a cohesive manner, to a fragmented assemblage. The close-knit connection in Arabic families means that the seniority of men comes with the practice to protect (female) minors from harm. In Nadia’s case, it meant her son’s dignity, and by extension that of his family, was preserved with safeguarding the wellbeing of his sisters, even though they may be older than he is. Yet his experiences of torture caused anger outbursts that affected his sisters directly, if not physical than surely emotional. It thus undermined the family’s unity. A man’s dignity is taken from him when he treats his family members wrongly. Fortunately, Nadia’s son was able to access therapy to process his experiences in prison. But the fact that Nadia’s son could not talk with his mother and sisters about his experiences disrupted his sense of self because his inability to talk with his siblings and mother cut off a part of his relational self that was elemental to making him a whole person. Though Nadia’s son had participated in the torture victim program, he was individually put through this therapy. The fact that his family members were not included, meant that his relational identity was not cared for, which undermined the effectiveness of the therapy. Nadia’s efforts to talk with her son, and his sisters’ efforts to understand him speaks of their urgency to connect as a family. The fact that Nadia’s son closed off his personal perimeters meant that it disrupted not only his, but also their collective relational selves as family members. Men in particular were allowed to structure the Self and relationships of their minors (Joseph, 1999). Nadia’s daughters did not dispute their brother because they made it known that he was still privileged to guide their behavior. Perhaps more importantly; their response signified that their brother still needed their engagement and understanding in shaping his sense of self. By accepting him and his disposition with an open attitude, they acknowledged that he was still intrinsic to their family network. Nadia’s daughters defused their brother’s aggression, thereby reconstructing his moral self (Peteet, 1994). Any behavior he might have displayed that did not fit the ‘good brother paradigm’ was thereby redressed by his sisters’ benevolence and compassion. Because Nadia’s son’s angry behavior was countered by the peaceful behavior of his sisters, he, like Abra’s niece who married the ex-prisoner, can be reconstructed into a moral person. Nadia’s daughters could therefore “defuse rites of violence” (Peteet, 1994, p.42) of the Syrian regime’s systematic imprisonment and torture of Syria’s men.

7.3 Violence in Hussein Camp It is the effect on others that violence and torture aim to establish: It disrupts Syrian home life in the heart. These effects extend also outside the direct family circle, because torture was meant as a method to undermine the community of Syrians as a whole. But in Palestinian communities, violence is less disruptive and has a social making capacity. Among Camp Hussein residents there was a clear sense of the camp as a self-contained community. Growing up in the camp meant being raised into its social meshwork as a resident; a

Heidenrijk/64 relational person with the responsibility towards maintaining the social relations of the camp’s community. An important part of this was based in conflict mitigation, which was first taught in the direct family circle, and later expanded as children grew older and learned to balance extended family members and those family members who married into their families. In fact, balancing and maintaining a harmonious network of connective relationships signified having grown into adulthood (Joseph, 1999). Teaching conflict management was a matter for mothers in Arabic societies. Nadeemah explained how the connective network in Hussein Camp necessitated supporting your family network. Upon my asking, “But what happens when there is a conflict in the family?”, she elaborated how conflict management is intrinsic to the connective family network in the camp:

I must be very wise and have a good balance to solve problems. I raise [my children] to teach them how to be together. If they face any problem let us talk, don’t fight, let’s talk and find a solution. And after they get married, their sons they tell them; if you have a problem with one of our wives, don’t come back to us. Try to solve it between you and her. And don’t tell my wife about my brother’s wife. (Interview 16)

“So no gossiping”, I confirmed. Abra, who visited Nadeemah often, supported this explanation: “Yes, and these women they love her too much. Because she’s always supporting them. Even sometimes when I’m here, [Nadeemah]’s shouting at them, and they are laughing; they treat her as a mother. Really, I find this in this house. [Nadeemah] agrees with what I’m saying.” Nadeemah’s animosity was experienced as unthreatening by the other women and served not as a direct affront to them, but as a reminder of what moral behavior and interaction with others entailed. More so than in Syrian or Jordanian communities, the moral role of Palestinian mothers is practiced, besides in the private family, also overtly in communities (Peteet, 1994). The identity marker of ‘mother’ involved a position in the community of Hussein Camp whereby conflict moderation was among the expectations and tasks. Mothers in the camp assumed a moral performance that set the example to their minors. By enacting her moral role in her daily life, Nadeemah reinstated her duties as a citizen of Hussein Camp; to avoid disassociation with other camp citizens, and to conciliate after quarrels. When I asked Nadeemah, “What if you’re fighting with your neighbor?”, she stated, “We have the fight, sometimes we beat each other. And at the end of the day it’s fine: It’s a kind of taking out the bad feelings. This morning I had a fight with my neighbor and after ten minutes she came to my house with the coffee and we had coffee together.” “But you need to be quick to forgive right? Because you’re working and living together”, I asked. “You have no choice. Because if you don’t, you can’t live together.” (Nadeemah, Interview 16) Nadeemah propagated to her minors, both by nurture and through setting her own example of a moral performance, what it was like to care for Hussein Camp’s social dynamics. Violence amongst citizens of Hussein Camp was not disruptive for the social fabric of the camp, but rather a social construct that defused tension and opened up space for reconciliation. If issues could not be resolved with words, violence functioned as a last possibility, and one that had to provide a solution. With a physical fight came the unwritten rule that contention needed to be forced out. Lingering discord, or worse, feuds, would present an intolerable obstacle for the social network of the camp’s inhabitants. In the daily reality of Hussein Camp, with societal

Heidenrijk/65 problems like poverty, low economical opportunities and bad living circumstances, social cohesion was important as a coping method. A violent fight functioned as a conflict resolution practice; its performance ousted bad feelings from the community. Fights therefore must not undermine the social network of Hussein Camp as a self-supported community. One way its residents respected the camp’s social cohesion was to care for opponents’ injuries without intervention from formal state authorities. A fight literally brought the community together to mediate, which simultaneously developed the awareness of the camp’s citizens of Hussein Camp as a cultural and political community. When I engaged further into the conversation with Nadeemah on violence, she told me how her neighbors and friends reacted to a fight: “When we have a big fight we have a lot of people to help.” “Doesn’t it get bigger then?” “Sometimes it gets bigger. Sometimes people who don’t know the people fighting come to the fight and help solve it. It’s usual that when between young men there is a fight -and it happens a lot of course-, that when someone is hurt or injured they don’t wait for the police or ambulance to come, but take him to the hospital themselves. Despite the result.” “The party they were fighting against? Does it take a long time for the police and ambulance to come?” “The ambulance not. But if there’s a big fight in the street and you call [the police] by phone they will never come. You have to go by foot to the police and take them. Because mostly they don’t believe that there’s a problem in the camp. The ambulance you call them three, four times and they come in the end, not too fast but they come. But the police they won’t come if you call them. You have to go to the police station and bring them. Because they don’t believe you. Here in the camp sometimes when they have a big fight they have guns and knives and very serious weapons. They hurt each other. So the police if they come they don’t accept…” “The police are scared?” “Yes.” (…) “So if the police won’t come, you have to solve your problems yourselves?” “Even if they come; when they arrive everything will be ok. In the beginning they [the fighters] are very upset and nervous, but in a few minutes they will calm down. If they arrive to the police station; khalas. [done] They shake hands and finish. It’s a funny life. (..) It’s because the situation was very difficult here. We had no money, we lost our houses, we lost our land, we came only by clothes. So we had to fight for our lives. We had to work, and we must be good to each other to support each other.” (Nadeemah, interview 16) Nadeemah was very aware of the fact that Palestinians received little from state authorities when inhabiting Hussein Camp; the Israeli state was seen as an invader and the Jordanian state was inconsequential in helping to regain their homes and livelihood. The makeshift camp- community that Hussein Camp started as, had grown into a powerful social and political community; one that now sought as little state interference as possible. There was a sense that Palestinians could and must resolve their own issues; they distanced themselves from formal authority. Violence in Hussein Camp was not just an impromptu event resulting from escalating tension, but its structural dynamic in the long term shaped the Palestinian identity as a self-reliant, politically independent people. Violence was therefore a social construct that, when practiced in Hussein Camp, resisted the influence of the state and established a distinct Palestinian political community.

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7.4 Conclusion In the Syrian war and the Palestinian occupation, violence is gendered. The pre-state organization of Arab civilization meant that its society is structured along kinship lines. This structure is inherently relational; family- and tribe members form a symbiosis that is intersected by patriarchal rules. These trends developed and reinforced each other over time, leading to a society wherein men enjoyed a privileged social position that allowed them more space and influence in the public sphere. It was this visible space men occupied in modern society that lead them to feel the impact of the state directly through state sanctioned violence; because of men’s relative greater influence in public life and state matters, they were targeted by state violence and incarceration. Yet the relational basis inherent in Arab social networks meant that the shock one man experienced ripples through communities. Violence thus had an un/making capacity at communal level. More so than in western societies, the enactment of violence upon the Syrians and Palestinians I spoke with influenced the community around them. Violence therefore affected the connective nature of both Syrian and Palestinian communities, but its repercussions were felt in a different way in both communities. The impact of state sanctioned violence by the Syrian regime fractured social networks. It was a disruptive force in families and the community. The men who experienced violence by the regime were often detained for lengthy periods of time, leaving their family stripped of one of their most influential members. The psychological effects of torture, often practiced alongside detainment, lingered when they returned to their homes. The impact of torture distanced family members from each other because they could not relate to each other’s experiences. To the Palestinian community in exile who lived in Hussein Camp, violence was not disruptive, but rather a shaping force. The violence Palestinian men in the camp experienced was not state-sanctioned, but performed amongst their peers. Here, violence was a social practice engaged in to manage the tension between camp residents. Instead of distancing community members, it brought them together in an effort to solve the conflict, thereby strengthening the community’s conflict management skills. While men were individually exposed and subjected to violence, women experienced violence moderated through their communities. As a result, they experienced violence often indirectly as intermediaries who defused the impact of violence on their families or community. Gender roles that characterized Arab communities were with the establishment of the state reproduced on the institutional level. The private sphere thus remained appropriated for women, and even when they stretched this domain into the public realm, they were still seen as fulfilling a domestic role because they were managing the interests of their family members (Kuttab, 2004). Women’s interest therefore ought to be with the family and community, and whether violence was state- sanctioned or performed between peers, women fulfilled a moral role within their communities. Their presence defused violence, be it intentionally or not, because women fostered social networks. Women performed the closeness of their network in their daily lives, as mothers teaching their children conflict management skills or as citizens who kept close relations to their neighbors. The performance of women in the social and relational sphere was a source of pride for themselves and a social status indicator in Arab society. The state did not protect women when they themselves experienced violence in the private sphere, but instead institutionalized women’s role as social brokers. This became abundantly clear in the justice system, where women stayed unrecognized as survivors of violence, and were reframed as culprit.

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I saw the women I interviewed internalizing violence and its human impact in different ways, but always through enactments that fell within their gendered roles; by marrying a victim of detention; by accommodating the predisposition of their male family members; or by obeying the wishes of their elders. In their quest for defusing violence, women took the personal toll at heart, and did not acknowledge the subjectification that came with internalizing the impact of violence. I saw inequality in the way women deescalate violence, but most women themselves did not recognize this inequality because it was part of ‘doing’ their gender.

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Chapter 8: Conclusion

8.1 The Engine of Refugee Production The role that the historically contingent development of the Westphalia system played in the construction of the political category refugees is often erased in public and political discourse. The isolation of refugees from the developments that caused them are caused by a paradigmatic “Human/Nature binary that can proceed only by converting the living, multi-species connections of humanity-in-nature and the web of life into dead abstractions – abstractions that connect to each other as cascades of consequences rather than constitutive relations” (Moore, 2017, p.598). The assumed separation between refugees and the nation state system is then promoted by the sedentary terms used to identify refugees, quite literally, as grounded in the natural land they were born in (Malkki, 1992). The idea of rootedness of refugees lead to the ensuing conviction that their identities were lost with their departure of their homeland (Malkki, 1992). This had major implications: Firstly, refugees were, discursively and eventually emphatically, brought back to their materially indivisible presence. A corporeal, tangible state representative of the natural world, manifested in a “biological corporeality” (Rajaram, 2002). Refugee’s bodies, and particular women’s bodies, were then objectified in essentialist terms of universal humanness. Secondly, if manifestations of displacement like homelessness, or indeed refugees themselves, are externalized as an extraneous object of the global organization of states instead of symptomatic of it (thus when their relation is denied in political discourse), refugees become problematized and in need of reorganization into the “national order of things” (Malkki, 1995), or in international jargon; in need of intervention. It is this premise that brought forward the problem statement of this research; that because refugees were categorized as natural phenomena, their identity was rarefied as essential to their gender and their experience of flight. I did not want to replicate essentializing women’s identity by defining sex and femininity as the distinctive quality that explained women’s experiences29. Therefore, in an attempt to normalize women refugees as constitutive of the global nation state system and as gendered agents, I excluded these categorizations analytically (not methodologically, for I only interviewed women) as explanatory. Yet, throughout this research I found that women experience reality from within a gendered and connective framework. The complexity of refugee women’s identity as institutional category, taxonomic classification, and lived experience thence proved indivisible, and normalizing these categorizations denied the historically contingent reality of formal refugee categorization, gender, and the female vulnerability framework. Going around cursory definitions of gender and refugee identity, and theorizing these notions from an approach of culturally relativity and performativity, situates circadian temporalities as propulsive of social, cultural and political processes of identification. Recognizing displaced women’s identity as a perpetual state of becoming, helps political and public discourse to abandon the idea that refugee, or female refugee, is a static category with accompanying needs and interest. This will land the idea that identity can rather be seen as multitude –a dynamic and culturally subjective engagement with real-world encounters with people and administrative

29 As often happens in humanitarian discourse where “women experience violence because they are women” (p.10) is used plentiful. (See: Ren, Elisabeth, and Johnson Sirleaf, Ellen. (2002). Women, War, Peace: The Independent Experts’ Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peace-Building. UN Women.)

Heidenrijk/69 systems. More importantly, it will show the everyday effects and affect of these confrontations that can, among others, discriminate, assault, bureaucratize, and manage refugee’s everyday life. The collage of different aspects that I have studied in this research was therefore not coincidental; this was an assemblage of the social context wherein women resided, and a collection of the aspects of life that were most profound in their particular experiences.

8.2 The Un/Making of Women’s Identity The debate on veiling is symptomatic of the focus on and misunderstanding of women’s (bodies) in the Middle East. Women are often framed in need of saving from repressive social and cultural mores and oppressive patriarchal societies (Bilge, 2010). Yet the veil, the fabric shawl, is not innately moral, religious, or oppressive for that matter. Instead, veiling is practiced as an exercise in morality, religiosity, and more than anything else, as an exercise in belonging to a family and tending to home and community (Abu-Lughod, 2002). Veiling is a performance that is central to a relational way of life where family, home-making and community are prioritized. The connectivity of Arab communities where social life is ordered through kinship (Al-Ramahi, 2008) and personal identity includes family members (Joseph, 1999), means that veiling as a performance is reciprocal; it demonstrates as much about the morality and identity of the women who wear the veil as it says about her family and community. The performativity and relational aspects of veiling are echoed in the understanding that women refugees in Jordan are not essentially oppressed, vulnerable, or in need of intervention. In fact, the un/making of women refugee’s identity and communities depends in large on the ability to form connective relations with others. The most central understanding of this research is then that connectivity is a woman’s entitlement.

8.3 Women as Home Makers A large part of women’s making of community and identity was acquired through their importance in the family. This materialized in the importance of a comfortable house, the significance of domestic life in families, and the practice of home making in women’s daily life. The unmaking of Syrian communities happened because the Jordanian government instrumentalized the quality of houses and domestic life in their policy of encampment. Encampment was, rather than a humanitarian exercise, a performance of maintaining a ‘biological corporeal’ climate. This climate prevailed in Syrian camps via subjecting refugees to a disaggregating and individualizing experience of categorization for bureaucratic measures and management; subpar circumstances in any of these aspects could unravel the wellbeing of a family. Inadequate shelters were therefore among the main reasons why encampment was experienced as an infringement upon the family sanctity. The design of modern humanitarianism for incoming Syrians in Jordan was based on the western understanding of the individual as equivalent to the person. The omission of the Arabic sense of self, as the direct involvement, moral guidance, and emotional incorporation of other family members onto the self (Joseph, 1994), and the focus on individualized aid undermined the integrity of personal identity and family identity. The Syrian refugee camps’ built environment was organized along the most effective biopolitical management of groups and individuals, with public bathrooms and kitchens, rather than that they were designed centered around women as pivotal member of the household. The precedent given to the nuclear family as made up of individuals thence lead to an erosion of connective family life in general.

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The performance of encampment by the Jordanian government entrenched a feeling of insecurity, because the desert-placement of Syrian camps, and the decaying infrastructure of Palestinian camps, damaged the inviolable qualities of the home. This permeability served as a precautionary punishment and warning to Syrian refugees who left the camp. Registration and bail-out measured further ensured the maintenance of women’s relation of anxiety with the camp. Navigating public spaces added tension to women’s experiences because of the need to defuse street harassment, with a possible return to the camp if conflict escalated, became extra pressing. The Jordanian government attempted to instrumentalize the deteriorating infrastructure and circumstances of Palestinian camps as well, in order to induce docility by filling resident’s daily existence with survival and coping mechanisms. Nevertheless, this was counterproductive, as the camp’s marginality gave rise to a shared narrative of Palestinian exclusion and oppression. Instead of discouraging it, the dilapidated homes of the camp thence facilitated connectivity among its residents. Women’s ability to connect to home-making, in particular by cooking and through their culinary skills, also facilitated the making of communities. As they prepared home-made, non- processed dishes, they were able to connect to their cultural heritage, therewith strengthening community and cultural identity.

8.4 Women as Shock Absorbers Women thence always functioned as a sort of shock absorbers; be it for themselves of for their families, their task was to deal with emotions and intimacy, and therefore the need to cope with pressures and tension befell women. This was culturally constructive, as they performed a collective service by mitigating, absorbing, managing, and even mending various causes of aggravation. But in refugee management, women’s position of shock absorbers was undermined by the western understanding of the individual as the target of aid and by the underestimation of the significance of emotional intimacy in refugee families. This was problematic –for example in the individualized torture victim therapy-, because women’s position in the family and community as guardians of the collective emotional wellbeing was undermined, which slowed the healing process of potential conflict. The role of defuser thence not only conducted stress to or through women, it also exalted women positively as moral arbitor of their communities, and gave them more prominence in their communities as brokers of conflict. But, women’s service of shock retention was simultaneously institutionalized in legislation, which poignantly clarified the personal toll women sometimes made in their role as shock absorbers. The impact of shocks was shifted all too easily to individual women, reframing them as culprit for crimes (Warrick, 2005), or placing the responsibility of collective and systemic violence on them as individual burden to carry.

8.3 Women are Culture-Creators Refugee women’s identities are often, -sometimes out of a necessity for taxonomy, sometimes out of ignorance or willful design-, discursively and analytically shrunk to a concrete essentialist object of intervention. Easy to know and understand because they only exist like a black box – familiar from the outside, complex but insignificant from the inside. I found instead, again and again, that woman were culture-creators. Their ability to form connective relations enabled them to relate with and invigorate their cultural heritage, their families, and their communities. Understanding the way in which women relate to their everyday reality of displacement,

Heidenrijk/71 categorization, and to others, will provide us with a broader understanding of how women’s identity in displacement is un/made. Syrian and Palestinian women’s ability to connect is culturally constitutive, and though connectivity is a woman’s privilege, in the Arab world it is also her unconditional responsibility.

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Acknowledgement

I owe much gratitude to the women and men who invited me into their lives and homes unquestionably, who shared their stories wholeheartedly, and who poured their qahwah and shei generously. I hope I have done your stories justice. Thank you Abdel Karim, Maaike, Brenna, Kelly, Samar, Paul and Paul, who have shared their professional knowledge and gave me an understanding of the workings of their organization. To all my translators, Mariana, Kotaiba, Rasha, Mei, and in particular Tamara, Shahed and Alia, I owe my deepest gratitude. Without you my research would have been wholly impossible. Many, many thanks to Yazan and his family, for receiving me into their family and home with open arms and hearts. Hassan and the entire staff and volunteers from Afaq Center, thank you for giving me a base in Mafraq to start from and to turn back to. Thank you Kotaiba, Hashem and Dirar, for helping me along in Jordan. Nizar, thank you for providing me with context to a strange environment, for the shisha’s we shared, but mostly for being a friend in a faraway place. Liza and Linda, thanks for keeping me sane on a daily basis in Jordan. Anne, thank you for doing the same, but mostly long distance. Judith, thank you for never failing to believe in me throughout this process. Nalini, thanks for your tough-love and endless patience. Thanks to all my friends who have supported me emotionally and analytically during this process. Bram, thank you for your guidance throughout this process.

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Photo plates

During my fieldwork I provided two Syrian respondents with disposable cameras and asked them to photograph things that made them happy.

Mehvish’s photos. Above: Mehvish’s niece Hanin sleeping piecefully, Under: Her outfit for the day.

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Mohannad’s photo’s of coffee, his friend, and an ice cream parlor.

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Fieldwork in progress. (photo above by Matt Moss, photos below by author)

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