Re-memberance Against Genocide

Razzan QURAN

Walid Daqqa was martyred on April 7th, 2024. Daqqa remains a Palestinian political prisoner, as his body remains in captivity, in accordance with Israel’s “postmortem detention” policy. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2022, one year prior to his scheduled release from a 35-year sentence. The Israeli military alleges Daqqa commanded a unit which killed an Israeli soldier. Daqqa repeatedly refused this accusation, but in a military court system with a 99% conviction rate against Palestinians, truth and justice have no cornerstone in due process.

In light of his cancer diagnosis, his family submitted multiple appeals to the Israeli military court, requesting his urgent release to ensure access to life-saving treatment. All appeals were consistently denied. Daqqa’s 35-year sentence was increased by two additional years for smuggling cell phones to political prisoners in his unit. He was not only denied treatment, but punished for supporting fellow prisoners in their attempts to connect with loved ones.

Walid Daqqa was 24 years old when he was detained. A Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, he was born and raised in Baqa Al-Gharbyeh to a family of modest means. Of his life trajectory, he wrote:

I must confess that I had not planned anything – not to become a fighter, nor to join any faction or party, nor even to engage in politics. Not because I deem all this wrong, nor because politics is undesirable or reprehensible as some perceive it to be, but simply because these were vast and intricate subjects for me. …. Instead, I could have simply carried on with my life as a painter or as a gas station worker, as I had done until I bore witness to the atrocities of the Lebanon War and the subsequent massacres of Sabra and Shatila.[1]

Daqqa’s political and philosophical musings were forged amidst harrowing genocide. It’s difficult to write an obituary for a man who represents a collective cause. There is an individuating tendency in obituaries; testimonies celebrating the life of a loved one or admired colleague. In the request to submit an obituary on Daqqa, a tension arose: how to honor the man while refusing the white supremacist hunger to defang and romanticize the cause?

Walid Daqqa as an individual embodied many virtues: his love of the arts, an insistence on cultivating humanity, an unrelenting faith in love, and an indomitable spirit. What defines him as an “organic psychoanalyst,” to play on Gramcsi’s “organic intellectual,” is his fortitude to study and observe temporalities of being while also engaging in hermeneutics against the brutality of imprisonment, torture, and isolation. In his writing, Daqqa recognized the unconscious and illustrated a capacity for precise insight about enactments, repressions, transferences and resistances within and without:

I want to assert that I only write because I want to remain steadfast and stalwart in captivity. … I think of writing as an operation of bypassing, of breaking out of those walls. … 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.[2]

Daqqa never sought to romanticize political imprisonment. His psycho-sociopolitical work, Searing Consciousness: Or on Redefining Torture (2010)[3], emerged from insights into colonial impasses on language and naming. Although he struggled with these impasses, he astutely identified their preconditions: settler colonialism and imperialism. They were socially constructed to psychically fragment Palestinians from their homeland: the sense that one is not isolated but embedded and reconstituted in the whole.

He incisively discerned fragmentation, dissociation, and splitting as psychological processes produced by settler colonial logics. Palestinians know that the political prisoner is the teacher who transforms imprisonment into a school. Rather than pathologize or criminalize the individual who did not choose resistance in a vacuum, the political prisoner is recognized as one who forges pathways towards emancipation. Daqqa refused to reduce the political prisoner—or the Palestinian cause for that matter—to a romanticized ideal. He wrote about the devastating split from the homeland imposed upon the Palestinian subject. The intention of this psychological torture, he asserted, was to create psychic and material sites of death within Palestinian life. By identifying the underlying intentions of these strategies, Daqqa drew attention to the iterative processes which create and maintain “psychic political econom[ies] of life.”[4]

Representing the organic decolonized psychoanalyst, Daqqa persisted in exploring the realms of the unconscious, trailing signifiers and unearthing impasses meant to maim, confuse and ultimately subjugate the Palestinian subject:

In the jailer’s quest for control, he looks into the prisoner’s mirror to see his hideous self. He is afraid of what he has done, and what the reflections of this mirror may do to his self-perception, and so he seeks to destroy it.[5]

He is not one, but many: thrusted into liberation work, sentenced to a wrongful conviction, harassed under punitive sentence extensions—his life parallels the genocide, delusion, denial and negation enacted upon Palestinian people since the English mandate. Just as Aimé Césaire described another colonial context (quoting Baudelaire), “everything in this world reeks of crime, the newspaper, the wall, the countenance of man,” Daqqa was forced to inhale a repugnant scent. And yet he chose sovereignty over defeat, determination over acquiescence. Daqqa never concealed the contradictions of this world—he wove pain and tenderness, horror and steadfastness.

He wrote of his dual role as elder and prison mate; standing across a child turned political prisoner, his age became an outside artifact, and what remained inside was mutual recognition[6]. He mulled on his relationship with his daughter, a child who came to know that “father was confined” and that prison was a “room without a door.”[7]

The Palestinian—especially the Palestinian political prisoner—has been pummeled into the Western imaginary as a vile, dehumanized, patriarchal villain and terrorist. Walid punctures this fantasy, while never once writing to a Western audience. He inscribed his humanity, not for the gaze of the other, but to claim his own identification(s); the identifications of a people displaced, dispossessed, massacred, and still persevering and refusing to relent. Despite shock waves intended to thrust humanity into stunned infantilization, Walid, locked under inhumane conditions, insisted against dehumanization. Walid refused to let go of his softness, his imagination, or his will to love. He wrote, on the eve of his twentieth year of imprisonment, “the primary target is you as a social being, and the human within you … the target is your relationship with anything outside yourself, any relation you can have with humans and nature.”[8] I urge you to shake off the impulse to romanticize, and rather to hold this man—amongst so many others—as a martyr, extrajudicially killed by a militarized settler colonial regime; one that casted him as subhuman, and unworthy of justice. A man immortalized, despite his body remaining captive post-mortem in Israeli freezers.

A man who is Palestine. Daqqa peered into his own psyche, an observing ego capacity alive with rebelliousness and willful refusal. Driven by insistence on humanity, Daqqa wielded language in the form of allegory, metaphor, and poetry. This desire to speak despite the muted and fragmented horrors represents an ember within the Palestinian political prisoner. It is an ember which is nourished and tended to by integrating the accountability of the accomplices of the genocide.

During her address at the People’s Conference for Palestine, Sana’ Daqqah, Walid’s wife of 23 years, stated:

Walid and I wanted to do what most married couples desire, to have a child, to create a family. Because we are Palestinian, and because he is a political prisoner, our simple normal wish transforms into a revolutionary act.

Sana’ Daqqah is a journalist who met Walid during interviews she was conducting with Palestinian political prisoners. The couple fell in love and chose to marry. Their love, passion, and longing were stoked and tended to through their letters and surveilled visitations.

Milad, their child, is a materialization of Walid and Sana’s defiance of colonial captivity and isolation. Daqqa smuggled his sperm through the prison walls, conceiving possibility through fertile wombs of homeland. In Milad, whose name means “birth,” Walid and Sana’s love bloomed against the brutality of the jailer. Here too, Daqqah represents the unforeclosed potentials of what it means to defy oppressive logics, and to embody the possibility of becoming anew.

Once again we are back to Césaire who noted the colonial world always smells of scum. If there was justice in the Israeli military courts, Daqqa would have been released. However, Daqqa—currently one of over ten thousand Palestinian political prisoners—spent his final moments confined by a system that perceives the Palestinian as a non-being. Daqqa is the personification of love. In his writing, in his love story with Sana’, in his offspring Milad, he defied various forms of dehumanization, fragmentation and terror. It is a remarkable endeavor, to pursue love despite so much insistence on hate and ugliness. Walid’s writing is a luscious forest, abundant in astute observations, reflexive identifications, and demonstrates his capacity to reclaim desire, identifications, and humanity despite the most depraved circumstances.

As of September 5th, 2024, the Israeli supreme court insists they will never return Walid Daqqa’s body. Posthumously, Walid remains a thorn in the throats of his occupiers. Even his funeral ceremony, a gathering in the home of his family, under a tent to coalesce the weeping, longing, and grieving masses, was attacked with tear gas. What is the role of the psychoanalyst, and what fortifies a psychoanalyst? In my opinion, Walid Daqqa’s impact on the collective, and his resounding insistence on the potentials of psychic transformation, imprints the night sky with a northern star, fostering paths towards homeland.

Endnotes

1. Walid Daqqa quote translated by Abi-Ghannam, G. Naming Israel’s Psychological War on the Palestinians: Walid Daqqa’s Searing Consciousness (Or on Redefining Torture) (2004). P.8.

2. Walid Daqqa quote translated by Abi-Ghannam, G. Naming Israel’s Psychological War on the Palestinians: Walid Daqqa’s Searing Consciousness (Or on Redefining Torture) (2004). p.11

3. Walid Daqqa, “Consciousness Molded or the Re-identification of Torture” (2010), the preferred title of the study as it appears in text.

4. Lara Sheehi & Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, (Routledge, 2022)

5. Walid Daqqa, “Control in Time ,” Awan (2021) (tr. Marwa Farag).

6. Referencing Walid Daqqa’s article, titled “Uncle, Give Me a Cigarette” presented in Dalia Taha’s 2023 “A Place Without a Door’ and ‘Uncle Give me a Cigarette’ – Two Essays by Palestinian Political Prisoner, Walid Daqqah.

7. Walid Daqqah, “A Place Without a Door,” Middle East Research and Information Project (2023) (tr. Dalia Taha). https://merip.org/2023/07/a-place-without-a-doorand-uncle-give-me-a-cigarette-two-essays-by-palestinian-political-prisoner-walid-daqqah/

8. Alsheik, A. (2023). Palestine Studies, Vol. 135, (tr. By Razzan Quran).

Contributor

Razzan Quran, Psy.D is a Palestinian researcher and therapeutic practitioner. Razzan obtained her doctoral degree in Professional Psychology from George Washington University (GWU). Razzan completed her pre-doctoral internship at the Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology at Boston Medical Center (CMTP), which is affiliated with Boston University's School of Medicine affiliated program. Her interest in psychoanalysis flourished in 2016, when she entered counseling training at the Palestine Counseling Center (PCC). She engages with liberatory and feminist orientations to psychoanalytic theory and practice.