On Pressurising Words
Activist, analyst and writer Lara Sheehi reckons with what we ask of Palestinians when we task them with documenting their own ethnic cleansing: what it means to write from a place of coercion, whilst still seeking to undermine and disrupt the violent narratives of the oppressor.
“I’m afraid to write,” one of my Arab patients, a writer and poet, said in one of many sessions in which they wondered about how it must feel for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to document their own ethnic cleansing in real time. “And then I feel the urgency to pressurise the words, make them work for me.”
The violence of tasking Palestinians in Gaza with documenting their ethnic cleansing is a spiraling thought I had agonised over countless times before.
The impossible pressure to make oneself both legible and palatable, accepted as a perfect victim while retaining the specificity of being Palestinian.
But not so Palestinian as to activate the tripwire that would make the would-be sympathiser reject the empathic pull to identify with said Palestinian.
But not so Palestinian that they even bear the responsibility of forfeiting their grievability, because of the would-be sympathiser’s primed racist tropes of terrorism and terror as symptomatic of the “occupied territories.”
The kind of pressure that insists on Palestinians without Palestine as a conditional requirement for full identification with Zionism’s genocidal logic.
A confessional that even individual psychic fantasies must adhere to demands of displacement first.
Like my patient, I have struggled with the act of writing as I contemplate the coercive nature of documentation. Coercion not just because one feels compelled to document, but coercion as in a set of conditions that create the necessity for documentation as a primary driving force. Coercion as in the promise of a later utility to the documentation, one that becomes part of historical record. A deferred reward for those who involve themselves in the painstaking act, asked to accept yet another imposition on life as one of the many necessities of survival, if only to compel us to understand the need to document is itself constructed by the violence that demands it.
In this moment with my patient, I am attuned to another texture of what they are inviting us into. “I feel the urgency to pressurise the words, make them work for me.”
I found myself thinking of the martyred revolutionary, political prisoner and writer, Walid Daqqa. Ghina Abi-Ghannam, Walid’s most recent interlocutor in English, tells us what Walid means by a “searing of consciousness.” She attempts to translate and distill yet another failure of words in the colonial register, to render a precise meaning of the Arabic title, صهر الوعي. She relates to us that in mapping out what a seared consciousness is, “Walid identifies a process where a previously solidified consciousness dissolves into a workable object after being subjected to conditions that surmount its threshold for compactness. After consistently exposing consciousness to this intervening variable beyond its ability to endure it, consciousness is rendered pliable and can then be reconstructed depending on the structure that contains it – or in the Palestinian case, the structures dictated by Zionist occupation.”
My patient and I both invoke Walid Daqqa, even unconsciously.
My patient speaks of pressurising words, transmuting the limitations in which words are bound up when they work for power and for normativity.
Pressurising the words, subjecting them to a searing process in which they move beyond their fixedness and the foreclosures they threaten to uphold, creates the possibility that the words can instead work for them, for Palestine, for the aim of dismantling “the structure that contains” the violence that has been rendered incomprehensible to so many.
I have spent more than a year in clinical sessions listening to, and more importantly, struggling alongside patients who are horrified by a larger-than-life genocide enacted by the apartheid settler colonial state now known as Israel, backed to the tune of 73% of all weapons used by its big brother settler colony, the state now known as the United States.
I work in a profession that largely relies on the practice of having words to distill and describe experience as the supreme indicator of psychic health — the talking cure.
If words are not yet there, the promise is that through the process of therapy, through the practice of decoding affect, organising internal and external messages, sorting out contradictions, they will become available. The ability to commit oneself to this project in earnest, even if one struggles to do so — or perhaps especially if one struggles — is typically treated as an individual triumph over forces (internal and external) that otherwise would suppress, silence, and derail this valiant attempt.
I do not intend to minimise the meaning making that can be entailed in the work of speaking, or speaking anyway, to crib Audre Lorde. Or to detract from how for some people, the experience of finding the words can act as a counterforce to the moments in which those words were forcibly disappeared.
What I am troubling, however, is how this premise — to have words — becomes axiomatic. We are in the business of talk therapy, after all. Dwelling in the axiomatic means that we are consciously or unconsciously committed to maintaining its identifying features as axiom. This practice is not only ableist but can also displace the possibilities of other modes of communication that importantly defy the constrictive nature of speaking, writing, or documenting, in a way that is contingent on being heard or experienced as legible by the listener-practitioner – as is the case in therapy. A listener-practitioner who has most often been subjected to a clinical and technical training which has ideologically oriented them toward the social reproduction of the axiom, and most importantly, away from the life-sustaining act of defiant, willful pressurising.
To have words then, to go through the process of finding words, is to also go through a disciplining process that stands to resist searing. This is the counterinsurgent work of words, therapeutic or otherwise, that are not pressurised and that do not work for us. Rather, they work to stabilize the systems that would allow this version of reality, where people — and here that means Palestinians — would need to document their ethnic cleansing.
Under these conditions, documentation becomes one of the only means by which presence — not just past, but present — is marked to antagonise Zionism’s violent intent. Documentation as a resistance against the encompassing demand to submit to claims of nothingness, prior to initial contact, the myth of a land without a people for a people without a land. A confessional contradictory myth that also justifies extermination because of the over-saturation of disavowed Palestinian life; one that can swiftly transform into the racist claim of “demographic threat.”
From settler-colonial apartheid prison, Walid Daqqa tells us about the transformative nature of documentation when words are pressurised, “where the imaginative mind creates another reality that bypasses the prison walls”— when words are animated into portals to a life and to being otherwise, as black feminist writers and clinicians Gail Lewis and Foluke Taylor also remind us.
Pressurised words that communicate with the urgency of the life that pulses through them — not a faraway life that is only circumscribed by the concrete, the barbed wires, the fence, the apartheid wall, the checkpoints/chokepoints, the magavim, the long list of all the impositions that wish to make themselves organic fixtures of the land and psyche. But a life that insists on “writing as an operation of bypassing, of breaking out of those walls,” in Daqqa’s words. “It is the tunnel that I dug under their walls that moors me to life outside, to what concerns my people in Palestine and the Arab world. This should not imply that my writing is a dissociation from my reality inside the prison. On the contrary, as much as it is a creation of textual reality, writing is a methodological tool to deconstruct and make sense of my reality as a prisoner.”
Coerced documentation does not lose its coercive tint, but rather refuses to dislocate the source of its coercion.
Pressurising words becomes a precision tool, a “methodological tool” of reality testing under conditions that insist on settler colonial reality bending.
On making oneself both legible and palatable, accepted as a perfect victim that retains the specificity of being Palestinian.
On disavowing Palestine and being Palestinian, so as not to activate the tripwire that would make the would-be sympathiser reject the empathic pull to identify with said Palestinian.
On adhering to a typology of Palestinian that even bears responsibility for forfeiting grievability, due to the would-be sympathiser’s primed racist tropes of terrorism and terror as symptomatic of the “occupied territories.”
On demanding a Palestinian without Palestine as a conditional requirement for full identification with Zionism’s genocidal functioning.
On succumbing to individual psychic fantasies that must adhere to demands of displacement first.
I share my spiraling association to Walid Daqqa with my patient. They tell me his body is still being held by the genocidal apartheid state and all they can think about is how his writing smuggled out the voices of so many like him, just like his sperm was smuggled out to make life, his beloved daughter Milad. “Maybe that’s why they have to hold his dead body hostage. A reminder of his words and the assuredness of life they hold. They want it all to remain dead. They want that to disappear.”
They read Ghinna’s piece and re-read Walid’s words in Arabic. They watch Walid’s widow, journalist and writer, Sanaa Daqqa, speak and read Walid’s writing at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit. In our weekly sessions several weeks later, they come with صهر الوعي in hand. “I don’t feel the need to invent a new language anymore. The one I know already — it can’t be left for oppressors, Zionists, prison guards only.”
“They have stolen enough as it is,” I say.
In this interstice is where the force of pressurised words find traction.
To pressurise words, spoken or written, is not to break free of the crushing force of material reality; Walid Daqqa was martyred inside the genocidal apartheid Zionist State’s carceral walls, still held captive after death. Palestinians in Gaza are being exterminated. Palestinians across the so-called West Bank are being terrorized by settlers supported by settler-soldiers supported by the settler State. Pressurising words is also not to live in the liberal binary of silence or speech, where the written or speech act is considered the endpoint. Pressurising words rather acts as a marker, a defiant act to disrupt the ability of a violent narrative to unfold unchecked, to insist that words can and will hold the weight of their responsibility, especially if they must do so under coercion.
I am often asked what it is about Frantz Fanon that renders his insights legible half a century after they were written. My sense now is that he dwelled in the commitment of pressurising words in conditions where they would otherwise be left to be subsumed into the imperious expansionism of colonial violence. I read his work to be an unrelenting militant act of documentation, a truth telling of the most vicious of material realities created by a condition which relies on the documentation to be distorted, lost, threatened with disappearance.
With Fanon in mind, the act of pressurising words emerges as a political commitment. As my patient movingly underscored, an act of assuredness of the life/lives they hold.
On September 6, 2021, six Palestinian political prisoners dug their way out of one of the most notorious carceral torture sites in the Zionist state’s extensive inventory. They used only spoons to dig their نفق الحرية, their “freedom tunnel.” The same tunnel that Walid had imagined and animated a decade prior in his writing, the tunnel he dug, “under their walls that moors me to life outside…”. An “operation of bypassing” a coercive re-writing of history. A bypassing with intention to land in the reality of a Palestine inhabited by Palestinians from the River to the Sea, past, present and future.
Lara Sheehi is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa. She is co-author of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022), and author of the forthcoming book From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press).
