Sumud: Birth, Oral History, and Persisting in Palestine

Sumud, the Arabic word for “steadfastness,” is an essential characteristic of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation and an inevitable attribute of Palestinian daily life. Sumud: Birth, Oral History, and Persisting in Palestine frames the practice of sumud through stories of Palestinian birth experiences under Israeli military rule. This ethnography calls attention to the ways women carve their space in public discourse by identifying the intersection of birth with the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian movement, state institutions, hospitals, cities, and laws. Livia Wick goes beyond exploring experiences of giving birth and birth stories in correlation to the memory and construction of social movements. Rather, she emphasizes the complexities of oral history as a methodology that challenges normative and superficial constructions of identity. Oral history is therefore identified as a cultural practice and tool for steadfastness in class- and gender-stratified society in Palestine. This book aims to map how everyday working-class people in Palestine tell stories while bringing attention to the forms and genres these stories take.Wick formulates her argument by dividing her book into two parts. This structure articulates a division between storytellers with personal experiences of birth and storytellers who sustain the infrastructure and institutions that encircle birth. The book’s two-part structure offers a subtle reiteration of the intersections of birth with overall factors of Palestinian daily life by situating the topic of birth as pertaining to both private and public spheres.Part 1 of the book deals directly with the stories of mothers, nurses, and midwives residing in villages and refugee camps in the West Bank. The oral histories documented in Sumud were collected during the Second Intifada. Through the narration of birth experiences, Wick traces the cultural and political climate characterizing the context of the oral histories documented in the text. This includes reflections on the effects of Israeli military closure on daily life, which involve how mobility is restricted through physical, military, legal, and bureaucratic barriers impacting mothers in labor and their access to urgent or time-sensitive health care, as well as reflections on the repercussions of colonial dispossession and ethnic cleansing on women’s work and social lives. In part 1 Wick also shares the stories of nurses and midwives who narrate their upward mobility in their villages through details of how they support their children, their ownership of property, and their transition from refugee camps to more expensive neighborhoods of their cities and villages.The practice of sumud is identified not only in the content of these stories but also in the affective embodiment presented within them. Themes of loneliness, loss, and longing are identified through the telling of birth stories shared by the Palestinian women featured in the book. Interestingly, Wick notes that the field of Palestine studies “would probably look skeptically on an analysis based on the concepts of loneliness and loss because they sound depoliticized” (46). Yet the book pushes beyond this rhetoric to suggest that the political imaginary—which functions within capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization—shapes the experiences of loss and loneliness.In part 2 readers are introduced to the infrastructure and institutions that encircle birth as well as their connections to the Palestinian national movement and the occupation. Here the notion of sumud is present in conflicting ways and in accordance with the variety of relationships that form alongside birth and the institutions associated with it. Doctors, for example, experience sumud as a practice related to the management of medical institutions and through their commitment to providing health care. Alternatively, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which observes nation building through institutional development, recognizes sumud as a discourse and a type of funding generated as part of institutionalizing their movement. Stories of midwives contest the perception of both doctors and the PLO, instead showing sumud through stories of unpaid and underrespected labor that they believe must persist despite their exploitation. In part 2 Wick also highlights changes within the health-care movement during the Second Intifada, introducing decentralizing shifts from urban hospital institutions to more community-led health-care models in villages, camps, and other underserved areas in response to the closures.Beyond questions of struggle, persistence, and steadfastness, Wick’s ethnography encourages readers to reconsider the deployment of oral history as a method and genre. In the process of transferring her fieldwork into writing, she deliberates “where to begin, which stories emerge in narrative and which ones never appear” (10). What is made clear in the exploration of these methodological questions is the value of oral histories as a source of data reflective of the “disruptions” and “fissures” of living under occupation (74). Wick adamantly narrates fieldwork that includes displaced dates, times, and events despite their lack of cohesion with historical order of events, and even includes poetic insertions that carry no contextual relevance to the storyteller’s tale, such as “Ottomans killed rebellious hearts” (69). In such cases, Wick identifies these “disruptions” within the pattern of the oral narration as indicators of ruptures and social change.In the sixteen years spent thinking about her fieldwork, Wick recounts the women repeatedly telling her, “We were steadfast” (samadna, in Arabic) when describing their resistance to the Israeli occupation (75). Their steadfastness, as demonstrated in this book, mirrors the genres in which their stories were told. Sumud is notable not only for its contribution to anticolonial literature but also for its raw illustration of the coproduction of oral history between an ethnographer and storytellers. This book intersects the fields of Palestine studies and medical and sociocultural anthropology, as well as gender, culture, and politics in the Middle East. It is an ethnography of birth, struggle, participatory health, and perseverance, made accessible to scholars, students, and activists interested in learning resistance beyond the realm of normative political discourse.