Michael Gorkin - Three mothers, three daughters : Palestinian womens stories

Samir Dayal

Three Mothers, Three Daughters offers a glimpse into everyday Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, as the Palestinians see it. It is the product of the collaboration between a Muslim woman, Rafiqa Othman, who lives in an Arab village, and a Jewish male clinical psychologist, Michael Gorkin. This interdisciplinary collaboration itself is of some interest in the field of cultural anthropology, but it also has human interest. A friendship between a Jewish man and an Arab woman is unusual enough, as the authors themselves remark, but their working together as an interviewing team for this book embodies the hope for a shared future for the Israelis and the Palestinians, the hope that the two cultural groups will find it possible to work and live together.

This hope, which informs every page of the book, would surely have been enough to warrant the books republication in the new Cultural Studies series (it was originally published by the University of California Press in 1996). But one could give other reasons. Traditional Muslim rules governing womens participation in public life being what they are, insider accounts of womens daily lives are rare. Yet this book does not stoke the prurient or Orientalist curiosity that has driven many outsiders since the Enlightenment. Rather, the personal accounts of the six women that form the core of the book have a universal appeal. They show, in their unpretentious and modest way, how much Israeli and Palestinian families actually share, vividly recreating the web of small events and intimate family connections that make up the lives of these Palestinians. But they are also shot through with a sense, simultaneously, of the historic significance and the transitional quality of everyday Palestinian reality.

We often hear in Cultural Studies about everyday life. However, it is often precisely the daily experience of ordinary people that is suffocated under the theoretical point or polemic at issue in some expatiation on the meaning of the quotidian. We hear, for instance, about resistance to institutions or to power in the everyday act of insurgent behavior from subaltern groups. We hear about the agonistic process of negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. We hear about the problem of the status of Palestinian citizenship. The attempt in most studies that deal with the issues of Palestinian life and politics today (with the exception of Edward Said and a few other writers of his caliber) is often to present a theoretical framework and illustrate it by a few ethnographic or cultural examples. That is all well and good. But few accounts successfully marry the theoretical or academic discourse with the more unruly and frequently messy testimony of personal life, along with its frustrations and even its inconsequentialities.

From this book, however, we learn something about the significant ordinary things that give experience its materiality and immediacy: dress, food, professional and domestic work done by younger and older women. We are given not only the inert clich (often presented in Cultural Studies circles as a first principle in cross-cultural understandings of gender politics) about sex segregation in Muslim societies, but an intimate, lived perspective on the actual range of social interactions between and among girls and women as contrasted with the barriers to social interaction between the sexes. Moreover, we learn about this sanctioned sexual segregation from the perspective of the girls and women themselves, in first person narrative. We learn about the intimate joys of their home life even in hard times and about the hardship of being separated from their homes before they are destroyed or taken by the occupying forces.