Girl talk as a transformative treshold:Balancing ignorance and knowledge among Palestinians in Denmark

Based on sixteen months of fieldwork among Palestinians living in housing projects in Denmark this paper examines how girl talk offer a transformative threshold that allow Palestinian women to become someone else, if only for a moment. The history of the Palestinian women that forms the tapestry for the girl talk is centred on catastrophes or Nakbas, as they are referred to in Arabic. Not only al-Nakba of 1948 when the Palestinians were displaced from their homeland, but also the many recurring wars and the individual catastrophes that involve dead family members, rapes, loss of children and abusive husbands. The plenitude of suffering, however, is only seldom discussed in public. What is discussed in detail is for instance g-strings, boob jobs and facial creams. My first impression of the different women’s clubs in the basement of projects in Denmark was an overwhelming sensory experience. Shrouded in smoke from cigarettes and argilas (water pipes), the women would sing along to the latest Lebanese pop songs, dance and try on different outfits while they commented on each other bottoms, breasts and complexions and exchanged views on men, underwear and creams. These regular occasions of public women intimacy, however, never seemed intimate but rather excessive: the sweets too sweet, the colours too bright, and the laughter too high-pitched. The stark contrast between the light chit-chat and the ongoing suffering of the individual women made these public get together not only pleasant but also exhausting. In this paper I will investigate the girl talk not as opposed to or different from the daily suffering, but as an intrinsic part of the suffering in which a lot of effort is put into trying to ignore the partly shared knowledge of each other lives (Dilley 2010). While the girl talk might be thought of as a way of keeping up appearances I will argue, that it is not simply a superficial phenomenon that covers up the harsh realities of the women’s lives. Rather the girl talk might be thought of as a site of potential transformation that by way of excess and sensory affects (Deleuze 1989) hold the potential for conjuring up new worlds.