In the Name of Resistance: Not Letting Live, Not Letting Die.

How political violence shapes life into a form of existence and what
happens after it ends?

The effects of political violence are unfathomable. Collectively disturbing, these brutal
social and political conditions turn sites of lived and shared experiences into sites
where the everyday of trying to make sense of what happened predominates. As do
the questions of why did it happen, and how are we going to find space for pain and
suffering that was left behind in the continuity of days to come. It takes a long time to
appreciate, at the level of interpersonal and intersubjective relations, the undying
trust of those who share their testimony of their life histories of violence and allow
them to take forms of ethnographic accounts. These personal histories, full of intimate
detail, spring from exactly the same sources within each individual where the ability
to trust itself had been deliberately frayed.

Are we living in a world inflicted by an epidemic of lovelessness, one may ask? (hooks,
1999: 7) A world where people’s inherent vulnerabilities are lost in a way that pushes
people to do what is ostensibly good for bad unconscious reasons, and inflict harm for
the good ones? (Rechtman, 2021: 43) Where trauma spreads contagiously—without
our being able to trace it consciously—violence takes on the form of a language we
are forced to become fluent in as we collectively narrate its origins, escalations, and
aftermath to one another, whether or not we ourselves been directly subjected to it.

This essay, then, will be an attempt to follow Veena Das’ approach to interrogating
everyday life as “the place where the ordinary and the extraordinary fade into each
other” (2020: 174) and, in so doing, testing the boundaries of ethnographic accounts
that try to make sense of an experience of political violence, as well as the way they
stretch and pull at the meaning of the language the brute forces utilise. I suggest that
violence, even before it is expressed and enacted in the form of extended periods of
brutality, is already present as an embodied history of trauma within the enablers of
cruelty. In the name of care and justice, and borrowing the means of humanitarian
rhetoric to explain their ferocious acts, forceful regimes demoralise and subdue ‘forms
of life’ into becoming a permanent mode of existence. By doing so, I argue that
violence has neither a clear and definitive beginning nor an end. It precedes the
destruction it creates, flowing into mutable form of actions as it runs its course.

Once violence has been brought to an end externally in a space, it becomes

internalised and further manifests itself by disrupting individual bodies and psyches.
This traumatic experience slowly transforms the former, quotidian understandings of
being in the world by making a person witness their previously foregrounding
concepts as love, trust and intimacy split and fracture as they are replaced with a sense
of betrayal and embodied anxieties (Das, 2006, in Rechtman, 2021: 142). The diffusion
of pain, as well as the ways it (re)defines the quotidian that emerges from these
withheld experiences, then, spills back into the world that has become senseless for
an individual in a manner that undermines the ability of the notion of normative
linguistic register to relate one’s experience to the realities of the temporal world
(Pandolfo, 2018: 16).

The embodiment of pain, then, is expressed in less visible transfigurations than public
social and political orders can reveal. To access these transfigurations, Saiba Varma
(whose research ventures in Kashmir are mired in ethical controversies regarding her
background) suggests that we should orient ourselves towards a different “politics of
hearing” (2021: 53). According to Pandolfo, these are sites where words are woven
into the gaps of silences and recollections, of disordered speech, interrupted
narratives, and lamentations through which the voices bear witness to the absences
of others that can no longer testify to the casualties of modern life. Acts of social
suffering continue to rely on vulnerable structures of relatedness, within and through
which the collective memories of violence shape the identity of generations to come
(Pandolfo, 2018: 35).
The Siege as a “Form of Life”

The case of Kashmir and the long-standing regime of violence inflicted by the Indian
state exemplifies the struggle of a population to imagine a form of life that would
allow the means of political self-determination undefined by the perpetual state of
war that the region has been subjected to throughout years of its existence (Varma,
2020). This state, according to the author, represents militarism as a form of care
offered to Kashmiris, although it is experienced as an ongoing occupation enacted
through the systematic use of sieges that forcefully subdue people into condescending
to the ruling power of Indian military troops. This ongoing state of violence has found
its way into the most intrinsic layers of the social fabric, entering and fracturing the
makeup of each person’s individual psychology, disrupting family units, and putting
the whole nation’s collective body into an endless quest for sense of identity and
belonging.

Worrying about life and death is the norm around which daily realities are constructed
in Kashmir. External and internal crises intermingle and give birth to the syndrome of
moral anxiety, which signals profound societal perplexities that render Kashmiris no
longer capable of differentiating between the mechanisms of violence and care (2020:
9). Repression and compassion spatially coexist and are related through the
ontological use of language that justifies atrocities and fosters imagination of the
occupied and besieged region as being actively ‘taken care of.’ In other words, the
tactics employed by the military deliberately imitate feelings of unity, trust and
cooperation amongst the community and the military forces (2020: 14). The tactics
employed generate a simulacra of unity, trust and cooperation between the
community members and military personnel themselves (2020: 14).

“Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites
of nurturance and care” (1999: 11), claims bell hooks, capturing the ill-nature of the
dynamic within which modern life’s order undergoes a social, moral and existential
crisis. What happens then when people continue to live in highly traumatic
environments where two forms of life—of care and of violence—that cannot logically
coexist are forced together by disingenuous discourse? Or when those environments
instead continue living inside us? Social worlds undergo metamorphosis as both
visceral individual pain and the absorption and reflection of exterior conditions spill
back into the realm which prescribed it, deteriorating the continuum of collective
social history and simultaneously willing to liberate from it.

Carrying Within

In her riveting memoir that testifies to the painful reality of life in prison on the one
hand, and the social history of Iran that would otherwise stay inaccessible on the
other, Shahla Talebi’s account offers astounding detail about emotional intensification
she caught herself in at the time she was finally released from prison for the first time
(2011: 4). There is a volatile temporality that is expressed in feeling torn apart
internally as her family communicates their expectation that she leaves everything she
experienced behind her. They hope that taking her to a domestic form of life they have
prepared for her will encourage her to embrace it and move on. They refuse to
acknowledge that she cannot, or shall not, be the person who can support their self-
perceived understanding of who they are.

Shahla’s being pushed to endure extreme violence and witness others go through
gruesome consequences of being tortured and humiliated was all happening in the
same territory that her family’s ordinary lives were taking place in. That means the
territory they consider themselves belonging to is also an incredibly contingent site of
everyday life. At any point in time, for any reason deemed legitimate to fit the
discourse of the controlling forces, any person can be turned into a tortured
subjectivity. Nobody knows whether their bodies would persist through the pain, nor
what the individual aftereffects of enduring such violence would be and how they
would express themselves, nor what would remain of the individual by the time that
experience is over. The presence of Shahla after she has been released from the prison
acts as a reminder that the whole collective body of Shahla will have to find out how
to deal with the damage that was done to her and is continually carried inside her soul
(2011: 110).

Providing her with care and reassurance by saying that her social network is looking
forward to receiving her was not only a vital measure to make sure that Shahla would
not get upset and plunge into unpredictable behaviours in response to the surfacing
of terrifying memories. Choosing not to acknowledge the psychological turmoil that
she embodied, however, amounted to a refusal to accommodate her pain and
experience of affliction within the mutual everyday life, which carried the risk of
unleashing the potential of madness that remains within her. And within that
possibility also rests knowing that, if the “madness” actually does manifest itself, then
the whole structure of how her close kin and other relations perceive themselves, the
meaning of home, and their own relationship towards Shahla and one another would
become redefined in terms they would be no longer certain about (Buch Segal, 2018:
554).

Sites of Resistance

Making space for a family member, or a close connection to testify about their
suffering can be terrifying, as it may determine the course of development for the
whole social network for the (un)foreseeable future. The history of violence, thus,
becomes embedded in the same space and time, further shaping and configuring the
perceptions of reality, understandings of everyday life, and thus shaping and forming
the collective memory. In one case, a form of life that was subject to direct violence is
an individual whose experiences have to find a way “back” into the mundane that has
not necessarily gone through the same as they have. In the other, it is a whole group
of people to whom a type of warfare such as “siege” prescribes an abrupt twist to the
meanings of the space they inhabit, in turn twisting the meanings back again when
the place is no longer under siege. In both cases, though, the question of the continuity
of self, as an individual, as a society, as a form of life as it used to be, persists.
Whichever is the case, according to Rechtman, the continuation of life always remains
possible as people cognitively adapt to the perception “extraordinariness” (2021: 94).
In other words, the longer the violence lasts, in all its forms, the more used to it people
habitually become, the less they are affected by the horror, and the more they are
capable of tolerating it. Violence, whether in its active form of brutalities, or as an
embodied suffering, also cohabitates the everyday spaces and practices through
which meanings are made and circulated amongst the population (2021: 131). With
or without direct intention, forms of communication, be that words or silences, is
where the work of subjugation continues to flow.

On the one hand, this entails a possible explanation of how, even when violence is
etched into the historical consciousness through long episodes of exposure to it, it can
liberate conscience in the face of absolute despair and brutality and allow a strong
sense of resilience to emerge instead of defeating the collective identity. Allowing In
turn, this creates space for a confidence that one is capable of remaining strong and
courageous to emerge. This outcome, in its very nature, can seem strange to the
oppressor because it subverts the rationale behind exposing the (collective or
individual) body exposed to pain and violence. In other words, resisting the impulse
to drown in despair and assent to dehumanisation is what upsets the torturers and
the oppressors. In the face of such an adverse response, the power mechanism of
violence does not recognize itself and is instead pushed into an existential crisis
(Talebi, 2011: 91; Varma, 2020: 65).

On the other hand, when violence persists, when it survives through resistance and
seemingly erases it, a “feeling of being besieged” (Varma, 2020: 41) forms, or— as
Talebi describes in the case of Iran—the whole atmosphere is filled with deadly
pressure (2011: 18). The anxiety entangles all that constitutes “the ordinary” but no
one seemingly dares to address it, as if the collective body has succumbed to the fact
that the violence is ‘present’, thus subconsciously debilitating not only individual
bodies, but also the intimate ties and the body politic of the place (Talebi, 2011:
47). The fight for dignity and freedom appears as a stranger who abruptly breaches
the veils of subconsciously accepted silences. Those who dare address the collective
numbness use a form of expression no longer fits into the ‘accepted’ language, as
language has slowly become a tool for the violent mundanity to reconfigure the
meanings otherwise lost in the “repetitive metamorphoses of trauma” (Pandolfo,
2018: 42). These individuals point where it hurts—to the gaps where the possibility of
resistance as a form of defending the collective identity is at risk of being taken over
by the plague of forgetting. Those who are deemed mad because of their forms of
acknowledging this plague provide evidence of a resilient hope that refuses to give in
and continues to ask whether we really are overcome by violence.

The anthropological studies discussed in this essay grapple with a level of catastrophe
in which both the immediate effects and embodied experiences of violence
accumulate within regions where the violence is still ongoing. In the case of Shahla
Talebi’s writings, anthropology itself becomes a primary source and a testimony of the
effects of violence. However, it is also important to consider modes of expression that
the memory of political violence causes can only be addressed and attended to in
hindsight. It would be wrong to assume that every person who endured and survived
being subjected to violence has to be willing to talk about it. That refusal to speak
might, in itself, also be a chosen way to deal with what happened in a manner that is
perceived to be secure with what still remains after, to retain a sense of dignity, or to
preserve strong family ties.

For those who were not there (yet) to directly experience torture and pain, and
especially to whom the environment of social suffering is where they are born into
and feel they belong (such as the children of the survivors), the need to know and to
understand in the realm of consciousness that they nevertheless continue to carry
through their lives fundamentally establishes their identity and (in)ability to make
sense of these experiences (Han & Brandel, 2020: 629). Although sieges and prisons
are designed to seize the flow of time, to confine and isolate areas and populations,
the effects of trauma are the opposite (Varma, 2020: 36). Feelings and emotions
soaked from the environment that defines the collective identity permeate all
intimate relations, leaving only the possibility for people’s bodies to become sites of
resistance. War and atrocities devastate people as they’re experienced, and may
continue to do so as experiences of mental illness (Hand & Brandel, 2020: 640).
Maintaining that these can also be a symptom of resilience, we are invited to be aware
of how we lay fundamental understandings of violence and social suffering for
generations to come. How that memory will express itself in the future and what forms
of life it will generate is going to define the collective ability to liberate our
consciousness from the ills of social history that were once enacted upon us.

Political violence disrupts and distorts people’s sense of belonging—to themselves, to

their kin, to their collectivity, as the meanings of each of those terms has been brutally
shifted. The possibility of resistance and transformation take place within the sociality
that has been redefined by violence. The collective personality is forced to mutate by
finding ways to live with the fact that the violence is, or has, been present in the realm
of their existence, and also finding ways to resist and maintain the foundations of
agency that prevent them from becoming numb to its effects. The process is painful,
as the basic understandings of what life entails have been reversed. Uncertainty and
hope intermingle, each putting ideas of identity and continuity to the test of time and
the endurance of their persistence. This essay considered how long can one live with
experiences that were tailored to dehumanise and demoralise them, and what forms
of life are appraised as socially acceptable ways of expressing frustration and a
yearning for a world in which one did not have to testify to the existence of violence
with the whole of their bodies and the social histories that define them. To come to
terms that violence also recovers a form of sociality that does not deny the human
ability of resilience and protest, intimately in a robust silence, or in a maddening show
of despair, that will slowly abduct force and thereby extinguish the remaining order of
violence. And, as everyday life continues, with an embodied, constant struggle to
redefine what it means to live, sometimes failing to do so, sometimes succeeding. In
opposition and in contradiction to the fact of existence itself, through the means of
words and language, amongst an entirety of other forms to manifest the will to
continue onwards. The will to refuse to stay embedded in the violent ways in which
memories of loss and torture were first visited upon them has to permeate those hold
onto hope and resistance.
References

Buch Segal, L., 2018. Tattered Textures of Kinship: The Effects of Torture Among Iraqi
Families in Denmark. Medical Anthropology, 37(7), pp.553-567.
Das, V., 2020. Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein. 1st
ed. Fordham University Press.
Han, C. and Brandel, A., 2019. Genres of Witnessing: Narrative, Violence,
Generations. Ethnos, 85(4), pp.629-646.
hooks, b., 1999. All About Love: New Visions. 1st ed. William Morrow.
Pandolfo, S., 2018. Knot of the Soul. Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam. 1st ed. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Rechtman, R., Turner, L. and Das, V., 2021. Living in Death. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Talebi, S., 2011. Ghosts of Revolution. Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran.
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Talebi, S., 2011. Who is Behind the Name? A Story of Violence, Loss, and Melancholic
Survival in Post- Revolutionary Iran. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies,
7(1), pp.39-69.
Varma, S., 2020. The Occupied Clinic. Militarism and Care in Kashmir. 1st ed. Duke
University Press.