Beyond the war? the Lebanese postmemory experience

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Volumn 42, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 615-635

  Larkin, Craig ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CIVIL WAR; MEMORY; VIOLENCE; YOUNG POPULATION;

LEBANON;

EID: 78649514234     PISSN: 00207438     EISSN: 14716380     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S002074381000084X     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. This quote is from a personal interview transcript, part of a series of interviews conducted with Lebanese youth from June 2005 to June 2006. The interview took place on 2 March 2006 in a Bliss Street cafe in the Hamra district of Beirut.
2. Sune Haugbolle, "Memory as Representation and Memory as Idiom," in Breaking the Cycle: Civil Wars in Lebanon, ed. Youssef Choueiri (London: Stacey International, 2007), 121-33.
3. See, for example, Samir Khalaf, Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (London: Saqi, 2006);
4. and Saree Makdisi, "Beirut, a City without History?" in Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Ussama Samir Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006), 201-14.
5. For a selection of such work on Lebanese war memory, see Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010);
6. Oren Barak, "Don'tMention theWar? The Politics of Remembrance and Forgetfulness in Postwar Lebanon," Middle East Journal 61 (2007): 49-70;
7. Caroline Nagel, "Reconstructing Space, Re-creating Memory: Sectarian Politics and Urban Development in Postwar Beirut," Political Geography 21 (2002): 717-25;
8. and Elizabeth Kassab, "The Paramount Reality of the Beirutis: War Literature and the Lebanese Conflict," Beirut Review 4 (1992): 63-84.
9. See also Craig Larkin, Memory and Conflict in Lebanon: Remembering and Forgetting the Past (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
10. For a detailed outline and exploration of the concept of postmemory, seeMarianne Hirsch, "TheGeneration of Postmemory," Poetics Today 29 (2008): 103-28;
11. idem, "Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile," in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 418-46;
12. idem, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
13. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
14. See Toby Butler, "Memoryscape: IntegratingOralHistory,Memory and Landscape on the River Thames," in People and Their Pasts: Public History Today, ed. Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 223-39.
15. Personal interview, 30 November 2005, Luwayzeh.
16. Although the interviews were carried out during a one-year period, many of the contacts, observations, and ethnographic insights come from having spent five years living in the region.
17. These included activists involved with the Centre for Conflict Resolution and Peace-building based in Hamra and Umam Documentation and Research based in Haret Hrayek.
18. Interviews were conducted in Lebanese-dialect Arabic, English, and a mixture of the two, a common trait among urban youth. Phrases such as "An̄a kt̄ir tired" or "Sorry, would you like mus̄a-ada shwāi?" are not unfamiliar hybrid terms used in Beiruti streets, shops, and campuses.
19. Various titles have been given to the political period between February 2005 and May 2005 in which protest, euphoria, and popular mobilization followed the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In Lebanon, among supporters of the emerging loyalist coalition-led by Saad Hariri (the Future Movement), Samir Geagea (the Lebanese Forces), andWalid Jumblatt (the Progressive Socialist Party)-it was commonly known as the Independence Intifada or Uprising (intif̄ad. at al-istiql̄al); in the West it was dubbed the Cedar Revolution or the Beirut Spring.
20. Ousama Safa, "Lebanon Springs Forward," Journal of Democracy 17 (2006): 22-37.
21. Hanna Ziadeh perceptively summarizes the geopolitical shifts: "Syria's control over Lebanonwas abruptly ended by a Lebanese, regional and international alliance: a Druze-Christian-Sunni coalition backed by an anti-Syrian American policy of intervention in the Middle East in alliance with a Saudi-French understanding on ending Syrian monopoly over Lebanon." Sectarianism and Intercommunal Nation-Building in Lebanon (London: Hirst, 2006), 175.
22. Esther Charlesworth, Architects without Frontiers: War, Reconstruction and Design Responsibility (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006),57.
23. For more details on the phases of the war, see Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation (London: The Centre for Lebanese Studies in association with I. B. Tauris, 1993);
24. and Michael Johnson, All Honourable Men: The Social Origins of the War in Lebanon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001).
25. These statistics vary according to different sources. I am relying on Samir Khalaf's analysis of the postwar consequences in his work Civil and Uncivil Violence: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict in Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 3-4.
26. Civil and Uncivil Violence: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict in Lebanon, 2002, Ibid., 1.
27. Ahmad Beydoun, "Movements of the Past and Deadlocks of the Present," in Choueiri, Breaking the Cycle, 15.
28. See Choueiri, Breaking the Cycle;
29. Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000);
30. Farid El-Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000);
31. Raghid El- Solh, Lebanon and Arabism: National Identity and State Formation (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies in association with I. B. Tauris, 1996);
32. Salim Nasr, "The New Social Map," in Lebanon in Limbo, ed. T. Hanf and N. Salam (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2003), 143-58;
33. and Michael Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996).
34. This phrase was first coined by Lebanese journalist and civil activist Samir Kassir in "Ahwal al-Dhakira fi Lubnan" (The Situation of Memory in Lebanon), in Memory for the Future: Actes du colloque tenu a la maison des nations unies, ed. Amal Makarem (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2002), 195-200.
35. This narrative was popularized by Ghassan Tueni in his work Une guerre pour les autres (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1985), which examines the role of non-Lebanese factions (Syria, Palestinians, Israel, the United States) and Cold War dynamics in the civil violence that consumed Lebanon from 1975 to 1990.
36. The dominant text on the "politics of memory" perspective remains Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), in which they argue that traditions and rituals are deliberately created or invented to support changing political realities, legitimate state power, define nations, and "inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past."
37. Hobsbawm, Introduction: Inventing Traditions, 1.
38. Michael Schudson, "Lives, Laws and Language: Commemorative versus Non-commemorative Forms of Effective Public Memory," The Communication Review 2 (1997): 15.
39. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994), 118.
40. Samir Khalaf, "Culture, Collective Memory, and the Restoration of Civility," in Peace for Lebanon?, ed. Deirdre Collings (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 273-85;
41. andMichael Young, "The Sneer of Memory: Lebanon's Disappeared and Postwar Culture," Middle East Report 217 (2000): 42-45.
42. The titles of two events run by the Umam and Documentation Unit and Research are Confronting Memories" (9-11 October 2008) and "Rethinking Memory" (27-30 November 2007), which presented a series of film screenings challenging the psychological effects of disappearance in Lebanon and exploring how other postwar societies have initiated local processes of truth, justice, and reconciliation.
43. Jens Hanssen and Daniel Genberg, "Beirut in Memoriam: A Kaleidoscopic Space out of Focus," in Crisis and Memory: Dimensions of Their Relationship in Islam and Adjacent Cultures, ed. Andreas Pflitsch and Angelika Neuwirth (Beirut: Orient Institut, 2002), 233.
44. Khalaf, Heart of Beirut, 35.
45. See Sune Haugbolle's discussion of war memory as an idiom for political change in Memory as Representation 121-33.
46. Hirsch, Family Frames, 2.
47. Hirsch, Family Frames ,Ibid., 22, 24.
48. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 106.
49. Personal interview, 2 November 2005, Hamra.
50. See "Poverty, Growth and Income Distribution in Lebanon," Country Study, International Poverty Centre, United Nations Development Programme, No. 13, January 2008, http://www.undppovertycentre.org/pub/ IPCCountryStudy13.pdf (accessed 1 July 2009).
51. For deeper statistical analysis, see the Lebanese Republic's Central Administration for Statistics, http://www.cas.gov.lb (accessed 1 July 2009).
52. E. G. Karam, Z. N. Mneimneh, H. Dimassi, J. A. Fayyad, A. N. Karam, et al., "Lifetime Prevalence of Mental Disorders in Lebanon: First Onset, Treatment, and Exposure to War," in Public Library of Science Medicine 5 (2008): 61.
53. T. Sibai, R. A. Tohme, H. A. Beydoun, N. Kanaan, and A. M. Sibai, "Violent Behavior among Adolescents in Post-war Lebanon: The Role of Personal Factors and Correlation with Other Problem Behaviors," Journal of Public Health Medicine 31 (2009): 39-46.
54. See Munir Bashshur's account of the process of finding a Lebanese history curriculum: "The Deepening of Social and Communal Cleavages in the Lebanese Educational System," in Hanf and Salam, Lebanon in Limbo, 159-79.
55. Makdisi, Beirut, a City without History, 201.
56. Antoine Messara, "Madha Yata-llam al-Talamidha fi Kutub Tarikh Lubnan al-Madrasiyya" (What Do the Students Learn in School Textbooks on Lebanese History?), al-Difa- al-Watani al-Lubnani 13, 1995): 78.
57. Personal interview, 22 February 2006, Mansourieh.
58. For a deeper analysis of the concept of emplacement, see Donna K. Flynn, "We Are the Border: Identity, Exchange, and the State along the Benin-Nigeria Border," American Ethnologist 24 (1997): 311-30.
59. Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006).
60. Solid̀ere is a Lebanese development company founded by Rafik Hariri in 1994 in charge of planning and redeveloping Beirut's city center after the devastation of war. Its thirty-year master plan (1994-2024) focuses on reconstructing Beirut as a global tourist commercial center, replete with beautifully restored churches and mosques, gardens, and Roman ruins.
61. For more details on Tel al-Za-tar, see Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 73;
62. and William Harris, Faces of Lebanon: Sects, Wars, and Global Extensions (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996), 165.
63. These themes, while the concern of the three interviewees, are primarily Christian anxieties.
64. Personal interview, 12 September 2005, American University of Beirut.
65. Personal interview, 19 September 2005, Moseitybe, West Beirut.
66. Theses quotes are directly transcribed from recorded video footage of the project, which Umam Documentation and Research generously allowed me to view at their Beirut center.
67. Formore details, see Manal Sarrouf's journalist account, "Rage in Ain al-Remmaneh after TuesdayNight's Violence," Now Lebanon, 7 October 2009, http://nowlebanon.com/NewsArchiveDetails.aspx?ID=118492 (accessed 11 November 2009).
68. The exact number of deaths remains somewhat disputed, with Israel Defense Forces sources suggesting 700 to 800 were killed, while the Palestinian Red Crescent gives figures closer to 2,000. I am opting for the figure of 1,300 based on Bayan Nuwayhed Al-Hout's detailed analysis of victim lists in her book Sabra and Shatila, September 1982 (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
69. The political manifesto of the Lebanese opposition (al-mu-̄arad. a) was first delivered at the Bristol hotel in December 2004 and later published as the "Beirut declaration." It proclaims: "We have a common responsibility, Christians and Moslems, for the war which devastated our country; we believe that recognizing this responsibility is the essential condition for learning the lessons of the war so we will not be condemned indefinitely to repeating our past errors . . ." For more details, see http://www.beirutletter.com (accessed 4 July 2006).
70. Personal interview, 13 October 2005, Verdun.
71. Subsequent to the interview, the Wimpy café has been refurnished and taken over by the Costa Coffee chain.
72. The shelling of Qana, a village in southern Lebanon, took place on 18 April 1996 as part of Israel's Grapes of Wrath operation, targeting Hizbullah fighters. The air strike hit a United Nations compound sheltering local residents and killed 106 civilians. A subsequent United Nations report concluded that it was "unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors." United Nations Security Council Document S-1996-337.
73. Personal interview, 1 November 2005, Zgharta.
74. The most notable incident was the violent confrontation between Bashir Gemayel's Kataib and Suleiman Franjieh's Marada militias, which resulted in the death of Franjieh's eldest son Tony and his family in the summer resort of Ehden, just above Zgharta, on 14 June 1978. As a consequence the Christians in the northern mountains broke permanently from the Lebanese Front, and a family feud developed between the Franjieh and Gemayel clans. For a more detailed account see Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon, 235-37.
75. Steven Seidman, "Streets of Beirut: Self and the Encounter with the 'Other,'" Idafat: Arab Journal of Sociology (2009): 7-8.
76. Elias Khoury, The Kingdom of Strangers (Mamlakat al-Ghuraba), trans. Paula Haydar (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1996), 5-7.
77. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67-68.
78. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991), 9.
79. Personal interview, 10 December 2005, Luwayzeh.
80. Geagea was arrested in April 1994 and subsequently convicted of instigating acts of violence and assassinating former Prime Minister Rashid Karami and National Liberal Party leader Danny Chamoun. He served eleven years in solitary confinement before his sudden release in July 2005.
81. Personal interview, 19 December 2005, Dahiyya.
82. Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon, 305.
83. All of these sources of victimization were mentioned by students during the course of my interviews.
84. Personal interview, 11 December 2005, Hamra.
85. Personal interview, 11 February 2006, Hamra.
86. Robert Fisk is the ubiquitous war correspondent and Beirut-based journalist who has devoted much of his life to covering politics and violence in the region.
87. Seidman, Streets of Beirut, 17.
88. Pamela Chabrieh, "Breaking the Vicious Circle! Contributions of the 25-35 Lebanese Age Group," in Choueiri, Breaking the Cycle, 70.
89. Personal interview, 13 October 2005, Beirut Downtown, Nijmeh Square.
90. See Patrick Galey and Josie Ensor, "Thousands to Join Laique Pride March in Name of Secularism," Daily Star, 23 April 2010.