Bodies that walk, bodies that talk, bodies that love. Palestinian women refugees, affectivity and the politics of the ordinary

In this article I interrogate what is lost in war and displacement through the memories of elderly Palestinian refugee women who remember through their body and what their body has endured. I want to suggest that their affective, sensorial, bodily memories excite modes of relating to space and place that shy away from the abstract nostalgia for a lost nation, while bringing to light the closeness and concreteness of things and subjects, reviving bodily vulnerability and grief for the loss of the ordinary and the intimate. I focus on women’s recollection of their bodies walking, swimming, crossing through an unfamiliar territory with unknown people to reach safety. Taken in their metaphor as “social ‘muscles’” (Hardt 2011, 680), as bodily and emotional drives that extend across and blur the boundaries of intimate and social spaces, affective memories can serve as a political horizon that redesigns, in Arendtian terms, the love for the nation as love for the people and for existing in the world (Young- Bruehl 1982).