Mothers gather: the fractured temporalities of Palestinian motherhood

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue ‘Palestinian Futures Anticipation, Imagination, Embodiments’, edited by Mikko Joronen, Helga Tawil-Souri, Merav Amir & Mark Griffiths. ABSTRACT The Arabic saying, ‘al-umm bitlim', literally ‘the mother gathers' speaks to the way mothers are imagined as a centripetal force that brings and holds the family together. For Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, now in their seventh decade of exile, the task of gathering and holding the family together becomes increasingly challenging. Decades of war and internecine fighting have made the destruction of home and its regeneration a way of life; rupture and loss are routine and prepared for; families are displaced yet again; and it is mothers, above all, who are tasked with managing survival and building futures for their children. As an analytic, motherhood affords access to the temporal and gendered imaginaries of family life and futurity. Ambivalently positioned between private and public – the domestic intimacies of child-rearing and larger social worlds – the roles ascribed to mothers reveal a shifting, intersecting set of societal expectations and historical forces. This paper explores what it means to sustain and care for children in and through and against conditions of protracted displacement and crisis, where the future appears foreclosed. It considers the disjunction between the imagined and lived selfhood of Suhaila, a mother from Shatila camp now seeking asylum in Belgium with her family.