8) The abuse of dead bodies as colonial practice.

8).  Domination expressed as power over the fate of dead bodies, and resistance to it.

When we got back to Abu Dis, alighting from the minibus, we met a group of three young girls; one of them, aged about nine, was the daughter of a man who had been shot and killed by an Israeli sniper during a demonstration against the Wall.  As often happens when someone is killed by the army, his body was seized and was kept by the Israelis for a long time, before being suddenly returned with about two hours notice with the instruction that it must be buried that same night, but it had been so deeply frozen that this was very difficult to do.  

This awful story reminded me again of Shalboub-Kevorkian’s chapter on ‘Death and Colonialism’ in her 2015 book, in which she cites Foucault as defining sovereignty as the right to kill, even after death - the power over the dead body establishes the difference, and the inherent inferiority, of the person who is made Other:  she notes that “colonial politics is founded on controlling the space of burial, but simultaneously colonial surveillance cannot completely control the spectres, ghosts of the colonised dead, who, in effect, continue to hold “hostage” and interrogate the very legitimacy of the coloniser.’ (p 117).

A dead body, because of its sacred qualities, in this colonial context, becomes another opportunity for the oppressors to humiliate and to defile, to show their mastery  - and at the same time, inevitably, to provoke a bitter resistance.  This little girl represented for the community in Abu Dis some sort of resistance to the abuse of her dead father’s body, which could not be forgotten; at the sight of her, the story of that abuse had to be told again.  She looked as a child should look, pleased at our encounter, charming, unaware of all that weight.