A conversation with the preeminent Palestinian feminist: Nadera has coined two incredibly profound concepts to understand Palestinian life today. Ashlaa’—the violent fracturing of Palestinian bodies, and lamlameh—the defiant collecting of a loved one’s parts.

Overview

Nadera Shaloub-Kevorkian is the most influential Palestinian feminist thinker today. She has made some of the most important philosophical contributions to understanding contemporary Palestinian life, which will be explored over two events this evening. Ashlaa’ to Lamlameh: Fragments Made Whole brings together Nadera with the poet, writer and organiser David Lloyd, to think through the subjects of her forthcoming book; her concepts of Ashlaa’ and lamlameh.

Nadera uses the Arabic term Ashlaa’ (meaning ‘severed body parts/fragments’) as a theoretical framework to describe the physical and psychological fragmentation of Palestinians under Israeli settler-colonialism. It highlights the genocidal reduction of Palestinian life into scattered flesh, land, and cultural memory. In the face of this, Nadera offers an understanding of ‘re-membering the dismembered’: a practice of lamlameh (the radical act of collecting the fragments of a loved one’s body, so as to be able to bury them) to refuse the colonial aim of total erasure, linking the dead, the living, and the land.

Context

As David writes in his essay From Ash To Ashlaa’:

…against the Zionist settler colony’s determination to transform Palestinian life into dismembered death, ashlaa’ offers Palestinians—and those who would bear witness—a vital concept for grasping racialized death and overkilling: it makes visible the strategies, policies, and practices of state violence and its management of death to assert sovereignty.

The idea of Ashlaa’ is additionally compelling to us, in that it builds on the critical thinking of friends from past Episodes. Hortense Spillers and Denise Ferreira da Silva unpick ideas of the body and the flesh in relation to blackness. On the one hand: the individuated ‘body’ can be thought of as a protected status, granted or denied by power, and a form of what Fred Moten calls a kind of solitary confinement. And on the other, ‘flesh’ can be understood as ungendered, unracialized collective corporeality; beyond concepts of ownership yet vulnerable to power’s violence. Ashlaa’ builds on this thinking, rooting it in Palestinian life, to further complexify understandings of the individual and social body, and the relationship between the part and the whole, the self and the common.

After my forty-three days working as a surgeon in this genocidal war in Gaza and twenty years as a war surgeon, I came to the following conclusion. The difference between a war and a genocide is that the former destroys the present in order to alter the future whereas a genocide destroys the past and the present in order to prevent the future from happening. Visiting the graves of loved ones is a way of encountering the past that allows people to move forward from a painful present to a more hopeful future. Israel’s dismemberment of the dead Palestinian body into unburyable ashlaa’ is part of preventing such a future.

-Ghassan Abu-Sittah – The Character of Settler-Colonial Violence

Can gathering the dismembered parts of the dead Palestinian body be understood as a radical act of love and care, of life-making and mothering at the end of the world?

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian theorizes this impossibility through the concept of ashlaa’. In its direct translation, ashlaa’ is an Arabic term that refers to scattered body parts, the dismembered flesh and bones left in the wake of Zionist airstrikes and massacres. Yet, opening this further, she considers ashlaa’ as an analytics of gathering the dead, one that grows organically from the praxis of Palestinians in Gaza who collect and (re)member the remains of their loved ones.

-Sarah Ihmoud – (Re)membering the Dead at the End of the World: Ashlaa’ as Critical Feminist Methodology

Content Notes

This conversation will cover subjects including: state crimes, gender-based violence, surveillance, and the impacts of military occupation on Palestinian women and children, including death and dismemberment.